“Sit anywhere you want,” she says. Joan takes a seat at a window table.
“Good timing,” the girl tells Joan, bringing her a menu. “Our busy lunch hour is from one to three, so you’re ahead of the huge crowd we always get. Just so you know, we have good omelets and our pancakes are breathtaking.”
Joan didn’t expect a café in Dharamshala to serve the same things as a coffee shop back home. In one of his emails, Eric had written Dharamshala was a melting pot of cuisines, dishes spiced with turmeric, Tibetan noodles, and something called momo that looked like dim sum. It is the first time Joan has thought of Eric since settling in at Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise.
“What is the sweetest thing you serve?” Joan asks, surprised she is again craving sugar after Martin’s Butterfinger yesterday. At home, she avoids sugar and fats. In her younger years, when she wrote every day, then wandered the streets of New York at night, she ate whatever she wanted, pizza, ice-cream cones, French fries, smelly cheeses and French breads, and when she took a break on weekend days and traversed Chinatown, she always ended up buying a box of almond cookies she ate one after the other on the walk home, and a fish fillet she wasn’t sure how to prepare and ended up tossing out a few days later. Once she put Words into its box, she found herself obeying an incomprehensible, self-imposed code that resulted in an entire year during which she ate no meat, chicken, or fish, a year of giving up the flesh.
“Creamy banana cake,” says the girl. “Made here every single day from scratch. It’s pretty scrumptious.”
Soon Joan is spooning the confection into her mouth, feeling the sugar hit her bloodstream, waking her up. She wants another piece, maybe three or four more, but she orders a latte instead, wonders if there is such a thing as Indian coffee. When the sea anemone girl delivers the cup, Joan looks at the design etched in the frothy milk. It is the face of a lion on the prowl for prey to snap up, jaw unhinged, sharp teeth on display.
She drinks it slowly, then pays her bill.
“Please come again soon,” the anemone girl far from the sea says. “You’re from America, right? I have so many questions to ask you.”
“I’ll come back, and you can ask me whatever you’d like,” Joan tells her.
* * *
Joan window-shops through the marketplace until a large tent rises up in front of her. Kartar’s guidebook says this is Tsug Lakhang, the complex that houses the Dalai Lama’s residence, a temple, a monastery, a museum, a library, and archives. Eric probably wrote her and Martin about it, and Natwar must have driven past it and pointed. The white tent, she reads, is designed to shelter the devotees who congregate here daily. She looks up from the book and a woman is circling the main enclosure with a sick dog in her arms, apparently praying for its recovery. People are hunched like turtles in the open air, chests and knees on small patterned carpets lined up in a row. Joan hears them chanting.
Old and young—Dharamshalans, youthful backpackers, those wearing the look of the permanently transplanted—sit on benches under the shirred sun. There is a current running through everything, an intrinsic collectivity.
At the main entrance of the temple, two idols seated in meditation postures flank a large stone Buddha. According to the guidebook, the idols are Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is considered to be the current emanation, and Padmasambhava, the Indian yogi who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century. The Buddha is Shakyamuni, the true Buddha, the Awakened Buddha.
Early in the young prince’s life, he was profoundly troubled by the inherent human suffering he witnessed. As soon as he was able, he renounced his princely status and set off on a spiritual quest with a single purpose: to determine how such suffering might be overcome. He tried all manner of ascetic disciplines, but nothing, including self-mortification, had the ability to emancipate his mind and soul. He continued on his way, until he reached the city of Gaya. There, exhausted from his journey, he sat down under a Bodhi tree and began his usual meditation. But something was different this time. The nature of his meditation grew deeper, and deeper still. And then, suddenly, he attained what he had been seeking for so long: an awakening, an enlightenment, an understanding about the true nature of life and all things. From that day forth, he traveled throughout the Indian subcontinent, sharing what he had learned, tirelessly teaching people how to unravel themselves from the suffering that life always brings, how to unleash the great potential they carried within.
Joan would welcome an awakening, an enlightenment, the unleashing of her own great potential here in Dharamshala.
* * *
She enters the temple. The first room is lit by small lamps, smells of lamp oil and smoke. Writings and pictures cover the walls. The guidebook says these are the sacred hymns and mantras of Buddhism and pictorial representations of its teachings. Did Eric read up on the history of Dharamshala, this temple, its adherents, the monks and nuns who are in abundance, its pilgrims, before he arrived?
“Aren’t you going to complete a kora?” a thin older woman says to Joan in a crisp British accent. Her full-throated voice is jarring in the silence where people are meditating and contemplating.
“Akora?”
“No, dear, not akora, but a kora. I’ve been watching you. Before you take all of this in, it’s best if you go back outside, down the path, past the monks’ quarters, which is the Namgyal Monastery, all the way to the start of the trailhead. Then you circumambulate clockwise and turn all the prayer wheels clockwise to send prayers out in all directions.”
“Does it matter that I’m not a Buddhist, that I don’t believe?” Joan asks.
“Everyone believes, even if they don’t know it,” the woman says. “Do you believe in goodness?”
“Yes,” Joan says.
“Do you believe in evil?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe we can make our way past our own suffering while we are in this world?”
Joan isn’t sure about that, but isn’t this why she’s here?
“I hope that’s true,” Joan says.
“So make your first kora,” the woman says.
There must be a question in Joan’s eyes because the Englishwoman takes her hand, the way Fancy used to do with the boys, and leads Joan out of the anteroom, through the entrance, beneath the tent, down the path, past the monastery, to the very start of the trailhead.
Joan sees red and gold prayer wheels evenly fanned out all the way back up the path.
“That’s the first one,” the Englishwoman says. “Go over and turn it clockwise, only clockwise. It is literally an exercise in faith.”
The prayer wheels are heavy. They do not turn easily. They require force of body and purpose of will, and after Joan turns the first prayer wheel clockwise, she and the Englishwoman walk to the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, and on and on, and when they finish circumambulating around the entire temple complex, turning every one of the prayer wheels, Joan’s arms ache and she is sweating. But the devastation, the desolation, the heartache, whatever she might call it, has shifted. The burden inside is still weighty, but there has been the slightest of movements.
At the temple entrance, the Englishwoman says, “I am Camille Nagy. You don’t know anything, do you dear?”
“I don’t,” Joan says. “I’ve only been here since yesterday.”
“Did you not study up?”
Joan shakes her head. “I had no time. But I will.”
“I certainly hope so. There is much you can gain from being in this place, but you must know what you’re doing.”
Camille Nagy pats her neat flinty bun at her neck, flattens out the nonexistent wrinkles in her practical brown tweed skirt. She must be hot in those clothes, Joan thinks.
“If you plan on staying, perhaps we’ll see one another again. I take Ela’s meditation class every afternoon at two, right out in the Tsug Lakhang courtyard, on the mountain side of the complex. It would be good for you to join in.”
&nbs
p; The older woman takes a few steps. “Wait,” she says, though Joan has not moved from her spot.
“What is your name?”
It was easier to identify herself with Kartar, but with this woman it feels more like a declaration.
“Ashby,” Joan eventually says. “Ashby.”
Camille Nagy studies Joan with her coal black eyes, as beaded as a bird’s.
“The first thing you need to figure out is exactly who you are, only then can you become who you want to be,” and then Camille Nagy walks briskly away, in the manner of the spry and purposeful Englishwoman that she is.
Camille Nagy is right, Joan thinks, she does need to figure out exactly who she is, and then she is walking back into the monastery and climbing the temple staircase. At the top, a guard stops her.
“Before you enter this room, know that if you plan to circumambulate, you must do so in a clockwise direction.”
Does everyone in India refer to walking as circumambulation, or does circumambulation mean the kind of walking one does only in places like this? Joan would like to know the answer to that, but at least she knows what she is to do.
The room is dim, years of layered paint peeling from the walls. Fifty or more monks are fluttering around, their red habits piped in blue. Their heads bald, their faces tranquil and composed, their mouths ascetic, even as they engage in animated debate. Not animated debate, Joan realizes, but animated prayer, their voices mingling and melding into a solid sound. She lets the voices wash over her, locates a single one, follows its elevation, its dips, until it disappears and is replaced by another.
An hour later, she is in the temple courtyard. People are sitting in a circle on red pillows, with their eyes closed, chanting away. This must be where the meditation class Camille Nagy attends is held, and there is Camille Nagy on a stack of red pillows, her body perfectly still, her stern mouth no longer stern, her lips turned up in a smile as she chants along with the others.
There are twelve different voices at twelve different registers, but somehow they come together, a unified sound, and when Joan feels she is intruding, seeing bared so many hearts, she walks on, to the back of the courtyard, until the chanting trickles away. Small pine trees in a row, and beyond them, the hills appear so close, a trick of vision, of perspective that encourages Joan to reach out her hands, to touch the toothy edges of the landscape, but reality is something different, and far away.
When the exhaustion of jet lag pulls at her, she makes her way back to the marketplace. The hotel provides its morning breakfast tray, but she did not ask whether there is a restaurant on-site, if she can order room service when she returns. She suspects not. She needs to be horizontal soon, on her comfortable bed, under the red coverlet, but if she wakes in the middle of the night, she will want something to eat. She sees a small store, its windows displaying children’s toys, a tower of bottled water, an assortment of intricate kites. She buys a bag of potato chips, another Butterfinger bar, an icy Dr Pepper, which she has not drunk since she was a teenager, and starts up the hill to the hotel. She does not need to decide anything more about Daniel, not at this time. She does not need to consider when she should find Eric. She does not need to talk to Martin. She need only put one beautiful golden crystalled sandal in front of another, recall the creamy banana cake, the lion in the latte, the girl with her stubbed braids, the monks praying, the Buddha, Camille Nagy and the meditators, and everything else she has seen so far.
From the balcony of her pine suite, she watches the flaming sun impale itself on the Himalayas. Can prayers sent out in a single kora do the trick, correct the wrongs in one human life? Would her people in Devata believe in such a miracle? They might, Joan knows, but she’s not there yet, for her the answer is still no.
34
She is in the tub nestled within its pine box, her cell phone on the ledge, when it rings. It is nine in the evening, Dharamshala time.
“Hi, Joan, this is Sherri Angell. I gather you know who I am. Your lawyer in Los Angeles dealing with the movie rights to the books.”
“I do,” Joan says. “Hello.”
“Hi,” and Sherri Angell gets down to business. “So the last two days have been very productive. We’ve got a final agreement, pending your approval. I’ve sent it to the email address Dr. Manning provided for you. It would be great if you could read it right away. If you’re on board, then sign the signature page, and fax it back to me. I think we ought to lock this down right now. You’re going to be very pleased.”
“I will,” Joan says. “Give me a couple of hours.”
“Of course. Call me with any questions or issues.”
In the fogged mirror, Joan’s face is gauzy, her limbs wrapped in white steam. She looks like a ghost who may soon disappear for good.
* * *
Even at this hour, Kartar is still at the reception desk. “I have a favor to ask,” Joan says to him, and explains what she needs.
“Of course, Ashby, with all of my pleasure. Come this way.”
He leads her around the teak reception desk to a small alcove. Desk, computer, printer, fax machine. Next to a small stone Buddha, serene and contemplative, a stick of incense releases delicate smoky curls. He fills the printer tray with paper, shows Joan how to log onto her email, and the button she needs to press to print.
“I’ll be out there. Just call when you require me for the faxing.”
Soon she hears him on the telephone speaking in his native language, a musical lilt to his words, a songbird at work.
The printer is slow and the contract Sherri Angell has sent is long, and Joan sits in the cozy alcove listening to the shush of the pages. Then she begins to read.
The film options for both books total a million dollars, against a purchase price for each of three million, with more due Joan if the production budgets go over thirty-five million, forty, forty-five, sixty. She is entitled to five percent of any net profits.
She puts her hand to her forehead and stares at all of the figures, huge figures written out in words, in numbers with dollar signs between parentheses. Although the books do not carry her name, between the publishing and movie monies, she will be wealthy in her own right, and stands to become much more than that.
She balls up her right hand into a fist to stop its trembling before she can sign her name below the other signature, the signature of an international American movie star who, Angell told her, has started his own production company, wants these books to be his first major cinematic splash as a producer.
“I’m ready,” Joan calls out quietly, and then Kartar is next to her, taking the slip of paper with the West Coast lawyer’s information out of Joan’s hand. Joan watches the stick of incense burn itself out, a last plume fading in the air.
Within moments, the fax machine whirs and delivers a confirmation page. The extraordinary contract she never could have imagined has been received on the other end.
* * *
Back in her room, there is a message on her phone. It is the East Coast lawyer, named Spellman, who says, “Hello, Ms. Ashby. Liz Spellman here. I’m calling to confirm that the funds from Daniel Manning have been transferred into your account, details supplied by Dr. Manning.” Joan saves the message and the phone beeps in her hand. A text from Sherri Angell: “Thx. Got it. We’re good to go.”
Joan stands out on her balcony in the dark night, the lit stars looking close enough to swallow. Publishing advance, movie option money, Joan will have no need to ask for anything, not for her equity share of their renovated house, the land still in her name, Martin’s successful practice, what they have in investments.
Is she really thinking about this?
About cutting ties, leaving the past behind, moving fully unencumbered into her future? Does she want to leave behind the man she does still love in some way, the good life that is theirs, the remnants of family, her position in the town where they are known and liked and admired? She would miss the grand architectural house, the lap pool in the bucolic
glen, the Croatian limestone island in the kitchen, the shed hiding behind the weeping willow tree where she thought she would return to her writing.
Was her oft-desired flight from home, to India, her escape? Her son who went rogue and eviscerated his mother merely the excuse to do what she considered doing so many times? Well, his duplicity can’t be designated as her excuse. But how convoluted it is: because of Daniel, and Martin’s insistence on the lawyers, Joan can choose to live as she pleases, a life focused on her own work, if she desires, without any demands on her time, temporal roadblocks, emotional fastballs. She wonders if Martin understands that in helping her to negotiate this travesty, he has insured her freedom.
35
At dawn, Joan carries in the Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise breakfast tray from outside her door. The flower is an orange lily in an orange vase. She sits at the desk and eats the delicious hot lentils, drinks the hot barley tea, considers Camille Nagy’s instructions about educating herself.
She should find a bookstore down in the marketplace, spend some hours reading about where she is. Instead, she stretches out on the bed and thumbs through Kartar’s guidebook. The entry about Bhagsu Falls intrigues. There is a temple nearby and a pool of natural spring water where one can take a “holy dip,” before climbing to the top.
She did not bring a bathing suit or hiking boots, but in the pine closet are the sneakers she wears on the pressure walks Martin researches, when they drive to a starting point, sometimes an hour away, and take strenuous, speedy walks Joan finds bullet-pointed in a way she finds hard to interpret. The soles are thickly ribbed and should be sufficient for her to climb half a mountain.
By nine, she is outside the hotel on the dirt path, checking the hand-drawn map Kartar drew for her. Fields of flowers span both sides of the road that leads to the mountain she will climb to the falls. She climbs and climbs, passing a few cafés, shops selling tea and snacks and trinkets, and then, at the base of the mountain, a Shiva temple appears, caught in shade. Beyond, a lemon sun beckons.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 39
