The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  She expected to find a lot of people preparing to ascend, but Joan is on her own. The trail is well marked, a gradual rise that grows steeper the farther she walks. There are straightaways and hairpin turns, and then the trail hugs the edge of the cliff. Far below, in the valley, there are black boulders and white boulders, huge as sun-drenched whales. The valley must be a riverbed, filling up when the rains come and the winter snow melts.

  Unearthly silence, except for the quiet thresh of small insects she can’t see at all and leave her alone. Her hair is damp from sweat, her legs sore, despite all her years of yoga. The air smells of crushed flowers.

  A murmuring, then a thundering roar, and the Bhagsu Falls appear, powerful, picturesque, water gnashing against rocks, arching from its high point into a gorgeous aerial display. The sun folding into geysers sparks rainbows that remind her of the old lady in the blue sari on the chhotey who was still smiling when Joan disembarked.

  She sits cross-legged on the ground for an hour, until her body is beating in time to the crashing falls. Then a second hour, fighting the jet lag she feels, amidst the deafening noise. Then a third hour, when the pounding reverberations of water against rock are humming through her, as if she, too, is a natural wonder, awake in a way that is wholly different and new.

  Her muscles are tight from sitting on the ground for so long. She pushes herself up from the dirt, stretches her arms high, moves into the force of the sun, feels its tight grip.

  She thinks that it is only her second day here, too soon to expect answers of any kind. She needs to engage in another kora or two, or ten, or twenty, perhaps give meditation a chance, sit on those red pillows and chant. Her people in Devata did not do that, but maybe she will.

  She stares down the mountain, and begins the long walk back.

  36

  “Is this Vita Brodkey?”

  “I know your voice. Such a lovely voice I thought, during our long trip together. How are you enjoying Dharamshala?”

  This is Joan’s seventh day in Dharamshala, and while the jet lag is mostly gone, each night, her dreams are terrible. She is a child breaking a window in her parents’ house to escape their malevolent clutches. She is wearing a wedding gown and Martin is holding her hand, but instead of speaking her vows, black words big as ravens fly from her mouth, hang in the air, in the space between them, then start flapping their wings, sending the wedding guests running. She is newly pregnant with Daniel and taking a long knife to her belly. She is watching Eric leap into the darkness of space and does not pull him back. Horrendous dreams when she is in them, but so simplistic that no psychological interpretation is needed. She won’t tell Vita her dreams, but Vita’s advice, when she was in the car with Abhay at the wheel about to commence the ten-hour trip to Udaipur, has stayed in Joan’s mind since that day. And it is nice to hear Vita’s springy voice again.

  “Everything is well here. How is Udaipur. Is it as you recall?”

  “Nothing stays the same, of course. I was once young and beautiful, and now I am old and not nearly as beautiful, but I am staying at the Taj Lake Palace in the middle of Lake Pichola and it is gorgeous.”

  “The hotel is in the lake?”

  “Right in the middle of the lake. It is a dream come true. I’ve taken some of the heritage walks offered by the hotel, to reacquaint myself with places from my childhood, and I have given in to my secret indulgence, sessions with the astrologer on the hotel’s staff. Isn’t that marvelous, an astrologer on staff! It seems only right to know what my future has in store for me.”

  Joan laughs. “And what have you learned, Vita?”

  “Well, Biju says I am far from being done with love. A handsome man will sweep me off my feet. Love is waiting for me right around the corner.”

  “Love is around the corner in this life?”

  “Yes, darling, in this life. Not the next. I asked Biju the same thing. What do I care about love in another realm? It’s here-and-now love I’m interested in. Biju says her name means great, powerful, and awesome, and she never fools around with predictions of the heart or the wallet, that really she has nothing to do with any of it, she is just reading my life in my stars.”

  “Is the house where you grew up still there?”

  “It is, darling, and someone has maintained it beautifully. I am meeting with an estate agent tomorrow who is going to take me around my wonderful old neighborhood. He says there may be an available house for me to rent, while he looks for a place I might buy. I must remember to ask Biju about that, if she can read my stars to tell me the address I should be watching for.”

  “Have you started painting your watercolors yet?”

  “Not yet, soon though, I have promised myself that. But enough of me, tell me how you are spending your days.”

  “I have my breakfast at dawn here at the hotel, and then coffee midmorning at the Namgyal Café, a half-hour walk from where I’m staying, and the young waitress at the café, Lakshmi, asks me to explain how Boston differs from Dallas, Maine from Missouri, Los Angeles from Detroit, if cowboy boots are still in style, ripped jeans, the Japanese way of doing makeup. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the Japanese way of doing makeup. She wants to know if she’ll be seen as American if she dyes her hair pink or green. I can’t figure out how she comes up with these various comparisons, or what she needs the information for, but I try my best, and the way she puts these ideas together is funny.

  “And I’ve gathered my courage and eat dinners at the food stalls along Temple and Bhagsu Roads. The chefs nod and smile and hand me my order of momo. Scrumptious, as Lakshmi says. I’ve been to Bhagsu Falls twice, and to the Norbulingka Institute, and to Dalhousie. I’ve explored several temples, and the meditation rooms at the Dalai Lama’s complex, watching the monks turning prayer wheels in that unhurried way they have. An exercise of faith I find impossible to grasp, even though I’ve done a few koras myself.”

  Vita does not know Joan’s reason for being here in Dharamshala, and so Joan does not say that in these seven days, despite all that she has seen, it is a very slow process, this regaining of internal stability. Still, she finds herself breathing a little easier each morning in the buoyant air, and when Kartar says, “Good morning, Ashby,” “Good afternoon, Ashby,” “Good evening, Ashby,” her name is beginning again to reflect something worthwhile.

  “Sounds marvelous, darling. Please do not be insulted by what I say now. You sound like you believe you must prove what you’ve seen. That you’re experiencing everything. But what you’re experiencing is outside of yourself. Do you remember what I said to you—that you are meant to reclaim the young girl you were? I think you need a break from the sightseeing, or at least something more than sightseeing. You need to commune, not with nature at large, or the history of where you are, but with your own nature and your own history.”

  Before Joan can respond, Vita Brodkey says, “I do not need to know what ails you, but I know you came here to rediscover yourself and it is critical you do so. It would be a shame were you to return home without accomplishing that.… Oh darling, I must go. Biju has arrived for my third session. I do want to know what my next love will look like. Whitson was not very tall, and it would be nice if this one was. Call anytime!”

  * * *

  Vita is right. Joan has been alone, keeping to herself, walking everywhere, engaging only with Lakshmi at the café, with Kartar at the desk, nodding at those visiting the places she visits, but it is not the same as communing with herself. Indeed, her dreams are substantive evidence that she is avoiding that kind of communion.

  She made one decision several days ago. She will not seek Eric out until she is ready.

  Two decisions. Starting today, she will take a break from Iger’s and Martin’s phone calls. Her contract with AIB is now signed, so really, what is there to talk about with Iger, especially since Joan has taken off the table any discussion about Daniel’s actions. And when she speaks with Martin, she finds herself gritting her teeth in resp
onse to his deliberately light and loving words. Last night, the words were not as deliberately light or loving. “When are you coming home?” She reminded him she planned to stay three weeks, but that her return ticket was open-ended, and she might not rush back. When he said, “Joan, nothing will get resolved with Daniel while you’re so far away,” she had needed to take a deep breath before saying, “Martin. I’m not interested right now in resolving anything with Daniel.” For a long time, he was silent, transmitting over all the thousands of miles between them the cool current he meant for her to hear, the knowledge, too, that he was deliberately refraining from the fight he was yearning to start. He finally said, “Right. You’re right. Stay as long as you need.” From now on, she will no longer listen to their voicemails, she will send them travelogue emails of what she sees when she feels like it, but she will excise their voices, the way they insist on ushering in the faraway world.

  Three decisions. Tomorrow she will go to that afternoon meditation class in the Dalai Lama’s courtyard, and perhaps Camille Nagy will be there. How difficult it all is. She has what she has long wanted: an unfastened life. And she is starting to recapture the solitude and independence she forfeited with marriage and motherhood. She is free as a bird, beholden to neither person nor clock, coming and going as she wants, eating and drinking only when the urge strikes, not worrying about anyone’s needs or desires or threats to their existence, but now that time is all hers, her mind no longer belongs to her alone, her heart pumps steadily, but when it thumps out of alignment, beats irregularly, she knows which hard beats belong to Daniel, which to Martin. Perhaps meditation will help.

  Four decisions. She will give up expecting any apology from Daniel. His silence should tell her that he is aware the English language lacks sufficient words to explain his actions, that however she might have failed him, she did not deserve such devastation.

  Five decisions. She will stop beating herself up for not yet contemplating the idea of writing. She is still a heartsick writer with stolen work, riven and given titles she hates. The fury has not cooled much. Perhaps the meditation can help with that too.

  Six decisions. She will print out the letter she wrote to the Dalai Lama at Dulles waiting for her plane to Delhi. She will ask Kartar if there is a special mailbox for letters written to him. She will ask if sending her letter to the Dalai Lama, with the hope that she might meet him, is like believing she can win the lottery.

  Well, she has won a kind of lottery, hasn’t she? But money doesn’t solve everything: all the new dollars in her separate account won’t alter the fact that Daniel has expunged so many years of her life, wiped out the motherhood she had never wanted but fully embraced, crushed the illusions she had about herself as a mother, and those dollars won’t help her determine what her next steps ought to be, or return to her the grace she found writing all those words he stole.

  The lottery she’s thinking of, it’s the spiritual one. How does she win that one?

  37

  In the courtyard of Tsug Lakhang, the Dalai Lama’s complex, the red silk pillows are already set out, twelve of them in a circle, like numbers on a clock.

  Three young men sporting weedy beards stand together, at pillows one, two, and three, hands deep in the pockets of their jeans, talking in whispers.

  A young woman with cropped peroxided hair is trying to settle herself on the nine pillow. She is round as a ball, dressed in a white sort of muumuu, and the silk pillow disappears beneath her bulk.

  A striking woman of indefinable age is behind the pillow at twelve. Her hair is an umber braid, thick as rope, a vermillion stripe down her middle part, a vermillion bindi between her eyebrows. She wears a green sari and radiates calm. She nods at Joan, puts her palms together, and bows. This must be the teacher, Joan thinks, and feels silly when she puts her own palms together and bows in return greeting.

  Joan debates which pillow to choose and decides on the one at six. Turned away from the courtyard vista, she will give herself every chance to avoid distraction. Why does this feel so foreign to her, as if she is nearly a fraud? She has done yoga for years, thousands of classes that concluded with Shavasna, a silent pose that encourages the stilling of the mind. It doesn’t last long, but for those five minutes in Shavasna, wasn’t she meditating?

  A hand on her shoulder. “You’ve come, Ashby,” Camille Nagy says. “Good for you. I wondered if you would show up.”

  Camille is still wearing her Englishwoman’s clothing, tweed slacks this time, in the same brown pattern as the skirt she was wearing when Joan met her, a cream blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She might be in her mid-sixties, but her clothing reminds Joan of the uniforms worn by private-school children.

  “I’ll sit next to you. I’ll introduce you to Ela after,” Camille Nagy says.

  Her hair is in the tight bun Joan remembers. There is a funny incongruity between her buttoned-up appearance and her sweet “Namaste” to the teacher.

  “Namaste,” Ela says in return, sweeping Camille into an embrace, and Joan sees how the older woman stiffens, an Englishwoman through and through. Joan wonders if this is Camille’s first time in Dharamshala as well and somehow she figured out more quickly how to experience this place more deeply than Joan.

  Camille bends down, removes her low-heeled practical shoes, and places them off to the side. She makes her way onto the seven pillow and closes her eyes.

  A middle-aged couple arrives. They look to Joan like twins, their features so similar, white hair, sharp and straight, falling to their shoulders, prominent noses. It seems odd to her that their hands are locked together.

  “Namaste,” they call out to everyone, the man plopping himself down next to Joan, at five, his twin—partner, wife, or sister—at four.

  The last to arrive is a couple in their thirties with a young boy, not more than eight. The child runs to Ela, throws his arms around her slim middle, hugs her tight, then jumps away like a baby frog, jumping and jumping until he lands, with his legs already crossed, on the pillow next to the teacher’s. The parents take the pillows at ten and at eight, separated by the peroxided muumuu’d young woman.

  Ela takes her own seat, the folds of her green sari spread out around her, a flower rising up from green grass, and strikes the gong, once, twice, three times, until the sound hangs in the air, binds them all together under its tonal embrace.

  “Moola Mantra,” Ela says, and everyone’s eyes, except Joan’s, snap closed, and the chanting begins immediately.

  She tries to parse out the words. She hears: om.

  She hears sat and chit, together—sat chit—then long words, then sri, then more long words, sri again, then more long words, and then om again.

  Om is the start of the chant.

  It goes om sat chit.

  Then she figures out it goes om sat chit ananda, then all those long words, then sri, long words, sri, long words, back to om.

  She will never learn the mantra simply by listening, the long words are convoluted, impossible to decipher.

  She tries to keep her eyes closed, to chant what she has uncovered, but she stares around during the incomprehensible middle sections. Even the little boy who looks Midwestern milk-fed knows the chant by heart. She watches the words spill from his mouth perfectly, rapidly, as if he knew this language in the womb, as if he is one of her rare babies, a fetus imbued with instinctive knowledge of mantras that he carried beyond the canal and into childhood.

  When the gong strikes again and everyone goes silent, Joan’s eyes are closed.

  She opens her eyes and looks around.

  Everyone sits peacefully, relaxed, their eyes still closed, but not gripped tightly, as hers have been.

  The chanting is over and Joan realizes the silent meditation has begun. She can do this part, she thinks. This shouldn’t be too difficult.

  Thoughts and images scud across her brain until she sees a brackish stream, her hand disappearing into the water, her fingers splayed, seeking the bottom. How far down
must she go to touch the silky dirt. Silky dirt, she thinks. Silt. The silt upon which she will build her new existence. Can you build on silt? she wonders, she doesn’t think so.

  And then Daniel is in her mind, and the calm that was inching over her is gone. She feels the angry energy, recognizes it as a fight-or-flight response. She forces herself to stay on her red pillow, despite the urge to flee, sudden phantom itches attacking her arms, neck, head, the middle of her back, until all she wants to do is scratch and scratch.

  This is what they call monkey brain, Joan knows. The disquieted mind that can’t settle, hopping, jumping, leaping through fast-moving pictures, through rapid cycling thoughts, branching off into illogical tangents. Joan’s thoughts are not going round and round, she is not stuck in an infinite loop, but she can’t keep up with the way her mind is pulling off into every direction.

  She tries again. Listens to her breathing, tries to become one with herself, but she is aware of Camille breathing next to her, and the man’s deep breaths on her other side, and then she is thinking about them, the identical couple, wondering what their story really is—she can see them as twins separated at birth, adopted by two different families, finding each other at a bar, flirting and drinking and kissing, telling each other the stories of their lives, amazed that they are both adopted, pulling at the threads, discovering they were born in the same hospital on the same day, but they love each other, they say, when they are naked together, once more, on a bed in a cold room—

  Then Joan tries again. Listens to her own breathing, tries to keep her mind blank, a perfect blank, just black behind her eyes, but shouldn’t it be white?—

  The gong sounds and she opens her eyes, hopes the silent meditation is finished. She has no sense of how much time has passed.

  “For the benefit of our newest member, who would like to repeat the mantra we used today?” Ela says.

  The heavy girl in the muumuu raises her hand and looks at Joan.