He has found insights into himself that she wants to protect. In so little time, in this garden for only a few hours, they are finding a new way of being together, perhaps a way of being together for the first time ever. She wants to keep this afternoon intact, enjoy its unexpected preciousness.
“I think it is a wonderful place for solace,” is what Joan decides to say.
“I’m glad you agree,” Eric says. “There is one thing we ought to talk about. What would you like me to call you?”
She knows instantly what he is asking, and is surprised. To both sons, she has only ever been Mom, or some rendition of that title. In Rhome, everyone calls her Mrs. Manning or Joan, but here in Dharamshala, those names have fallen away, she is never called anything other than Ashby. Never before has Eric cared about anyone’s needs or wants, and the two of them have never been symbiotically entwined, as she thought she and Daniel were. And yet, Eric senses something so essential about her, about who she once was, who she became, who she is becoming again, and has thought to inquire. Somehow, he understands.
She is trying to figure out how to tell him she no longer wants to be called by that universal name, that she wants only to be known as herself, when Eric smiles.
“I’ve figured out a few things and that’s one of them. Joan or Ashby?”
“Ashby,” she says.
“Ashby it is.” Then Eric says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me you used to be a famous writer?”
39
Sirens are blaring beneath the salted rim of Joan’s dream, an ominous whoop-whooping, and she is running through the Rhome house with its smooth mocking walls, the old nooks and cubbyholes and crannies gone, Words of New Beginnings tight to her chest, searching for a safe place to hide her manuscript. Violent pounding at the front doors and she freezes, knows the enemy will soon be upon her. She crests the surface and everything evaporates into an aqueous atmosphere.
She peers around her pine suite confused. The atmosphere in her room is aqueous, the air is misty, and there is clearly a billowy cloud floating up at the ceiling. The sheets are damp. A breeze blows through the room, riffling the curtains, scattering water on her skin.
It takes a few seconds before she realizes she left the windows open last night, the curtains pulled back, and the rowdy noise on the roof is rain. A loud thunderclap scares her upright. Then waves of water are hitting the windows, sending up huge swirls of foam. She’s out of bed and looking at a world underwater. The rain quiets suddenly and Joan leans out into hot air so humid she could scoop up a chunk of it, roll it into a ball. Within seconds, she is soaked straight through.
The sky is cloaked in the darkness of night, but her watch on the nightstand says it’s morning, nearly seven. Angry black clouds encase the far mountains, sit heavily upon the treetops of the forest. The bright-green leaves are bent into open palms, wide-mouthed bowls. The entire shape of the forest has altered to capture the hard splattering drops. There is a sweetness in the air, in the smell of the rain.
No one in Dharamshala seems to pay much attention to the actual calendar, but Joan knows it’s the middle of August. The monsoon season, due in July and everyone said was late, seems suddenly to have arrived.
Joan pulls back from the window, strips off her soaked pajamas, and tosses them into the pine-slatted tub. Lakshmi, Kartar, Ela, and Camille have warned her that when the monsoons begin, the world turns upside down, sheets of water the only thing to see. More days with rain than without, and nothing ever fully dries out. That Dharamshala is the second wettest place in India. Joan forgot to ask what the first one is.
She did not pack for the monsoon season, although Eric had written her and Martin about it, telling them he was looking forward to a world washed clean. When she read that email back in Rhome, she had not thought of herself here. She does not have galoshes, or a slicker, not even an umbrella. She wonders whether, along the hill station’s steep roads, men will spring up, hawking umbrellas, as they magically materialized on New York street corners when she lived there.
Dressed in dry slacks and a shirt, she brings in her morning tray from outside the door. Today’s flower is a tall white aster in a thin red vase. She eats her lentils and drinks her barley tea at the desk, watches the forest bow to the onslaught.
Meditating three times a week with Ela and Camille, in the group whose membership frequently changes, has staved off the weight of her earliest days here, the strangling embrace of pain, the surprise she experienced daily about Daniel’s failure to beg her forgiveness. But if the rains have arrived, and sightseeing will be a waterlogged experience, perhaps she should do what Ela and Camille say she needs to do: meditate every single day of the week.
The meditation has been helping. She has actually learned the Moola mantra by heart, and a second one as well, the Hanuman mantra, just four words in all—Om Shri Hanuamte Namaha—which translates easily as “Om and Salutations to Lord Hanuman.” And although Joan does not know who Lord Hanuman is, Ela has explained that Hanuman invokes unbounded love, gives strength, grants success in devotional activities, and reveals the soul’s power to triumph over adversities blocking the attainment of one’s highest realizations. And sometimes it works; there are spans of two or three days when Joan is simply living this new Dharamshalan life. But the truth, never far away, can suddenly narrow her vision, reduce the world she’s inhabiting to a dot, force her to question Daniel’s reasons for shredding the fabric of her life, those answers still so elusive, and when she can see clearly again, she knows her recovery is like some sweet little newborn creature finding its legs.
In the last month, she and Eric have spent tranquil hours talking in his lovely backyard under the Himalayas, or exploring the archives, hearing lectures by the Dalai Lama’s disciples. With Camille, she has visited shops and art museums, and taken trips to other sacred lakes farther afield, sometimes Ela joins them, sometimes not. On her own, Joan has met global travelers of every ilk: those who have left behind their grown children, disinclined to experience a new generational iteration of family life; those most interested in seeking out the newest thrill, the most exotic places; and those who spin her head when they speak of finding silence, opening their minds, connecting themselves to the great and the good on the pilgrimages they make to the shrines and temples in the mountains. Whenever she is in one of the local temples, she wonders what the great and the good means to her.
But she has been in this colorful setting long enough that her bearings are mostly gathered, and despite the brutality of the atrocious act that has given her what she wants, she has used her new laptop for nothing substantial.
If the rainy season is upon Dharamshala, and solitary hikes and walks and wandering through the sights can no longer hide what is coiled in the shadows, isn’t this the time to start writing again, to hope that by returning to work she will puzzle through the disaster, figure out the future she wants?
The rain is solidly thrumming and Joan feels enveloped in the sacred space Eric talks about. She feels safe here in her pine room, her barley tea within reach, her laptop on her desk, now open, a clean screen before her, her fingers lingering over the keys. Where should she start? She is not a writer of nonfiction, or of autobiography, but should she write her own recent story to remove it from her mind, to shovel out the hurt still in her heart that manifests in her dreams? Or should she leave all of it behind: son, theft, the title Words of New Beginnings, and move on, move forward?
Before she can answer a single one of her questions, a golden light streams through the windows and blinds her. The sun has lit up her pine suite. The rain has stopped. The heavy fog has lifted. The sky is freshly washed. The peaks in the distance are bright and sharply defined in the sudden blue. The forest is soaked through, branches left askew, pulled back, a shy invitation to enter that clandestine place. Birds dart from treetops to branches, down to the forest floor, and back up again. She has no idea what kinds of birds these are, but they are nothing like the birds at home. At ho
me, she can’t identify any birds either, except for the blue jays and robins that alight in the gardens.
No morning bath today, the time without rain could be very brief. Face and teeth and lipstick and Joan is out the door, walking the hallway from her pine suite. In the lobby, she sees rain is falling again, but lightly, and here is Kartar handing her a bright-red umbrella.
“Thank you, Kartar.”
“Of course, Ashby. Your first time experiencing the true miracle of water. It is the beginning of a whole new season.”
* * *
The umbrella stem is long and solid as a walking stick, the unexpected words Lucky Star show through the material when she steps outside and opens the umbrella over her head. The clouds are high now, and finely wrought, and if she walks very fast down the steep hill to the marketplace, she might reach the dry environs of a bookstore before the next deluge drops from the sky. If the rain is here to stay, she would like some new books to read. She’s not made much headway in those she brought from home. Since she learned to read, this might be the longest she has ever gone without being sucked up into other lives and worlds.
The ground, cracked and parched yesterday, is already a sea of mud. Her tennis shoes sink and slurp with each step she takes.
* * *
The exterior of the bookstore on Bhagsu Road is a faded lilac. A wooden board hanging at an angle must once have spelled out the name, the letters long bleached away. A chime tinkles gently when Joan walks into the quiet.
A young man is on a stool at the register, the spine of an open paperback crushed in his fine-boned hands. He is hunched over the book, his brown T-shirt caught in the vertical hollow of his slender chest. When he stands, the shirt spreads opens and Joan reads the green words emblazoned across it. BE THE BUDDHA. Serious directive or plea, who can tell? In her time here, she has seen that Dharamshala offers much, both to the trained and untrained questing for spiritual renewal and harmony, but very little deliberate irony. He releases his hold on the book and the tortured pages slowly relax, return to their home position, the front and back covers no longer perfectly aligned. He has cat eyes, irises like yellow quartz gemstones, and she is aware he is studying her. Then he smiles.
“Welcome. I’m Darpan. You can leave your umbrella in that corner. What can I do for you?”
“I’m just going to browse for a while and see what catches my eye.”
“Yes, yes, of course. New fiction is in the second aisle, in both English and Hindi. And all the aisles are marked clearly. Let me know if I can help in any way.”
The opaque drizzly light turns the tight aisles into bars of silver. The store’s stock reaches the ceiling. She wanders slowly. There are glossy photography books of India’s temples in full color, thick guides to each of India’s states, books on farming, tea cultivation, flower growing, Indian wildlife, the birds of India, poetry books written by modern-day poets. There are geography books, political books, critical literary theory books in English, all of Shakespeare’s plays, entire sets of Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, Icelandic, Finnish, and Swedish detective writers she recognizes because Martin has read many of them, fiction by India’s major writers, in English and in Hindi, as Darpan said, books on Buddhism and Hinduism, a few on Sikhism, the collected sayings of the Buddha, of various Buddhas, of the Dalai Lama, and other philosophers who lived here thousands of years ago, books on art and sculpture, the making of traditional garb. How-to books on using Google, a computer, designing a Web site, learning acupressure and reflexology, becoming a personal trainer, a beekeeper, the fine art of antiquing.
She extracts whatever catches her eye until a tall pile rises from the floor in the fourth aisle. There is a low stool at the end of the row, and she brings it back to her stack, starts making her way through. She is deep into a collection of short stories by various Indian writers, reading one by a female writer, about a young girl who wins a writing competition and must learn what it means to give a story to the world, when Joan hears the door chime ring again, for the first time since she entered the shop, the sound of a friendly slap on the back, a few minutes of distant quiet whispering. Then a hand is holding a book in front of her eyes, and her heart jumps in surprise.
“This is the book for you. Kalpit Parvarik Jivan. Written by my most favorite writer.”
Joan looks up at a man who might be forty or fifty or sixty; his face has the permanent browning of a pale man whose original skin has regretfully, but finally, adjusted itself to latitudes and longitudes for which it was never intended. There are carved lines around his eyes, caused by squinting into the sun, by smiling, or by both. Joan registers these facts in an instant, and then the book, thick and perfectly square, that he has said is the book for her, tumbles into her hands, and she is aware that her finger is bare, her platinum wedding band at home in her jewelry box.
“Will M,” he says, and Joan has no idea what he has said.
Will M means Willem. Willem Ackerman is his name, a Dutchman long living on the subcontinent of India. A longtime photographer for National Geographic. A lifelong birder, a shorter-time widower, the father of two married daughters with children of their own, an erstwhile poet. This is the order in which he describes himself to Joan in the bookstore, and then he says, “And I am a consumptive reader, or should that be an all-consuming reader, or an uncontrollable reader, or a man whose reading is uncontrolled?”
Joan laughs. “I like them all. You can’t go wrong with any of those choices. Well, maybe the consumptive reader. That might mean you’re wasting away from consumption and doing so while you read. But that could be a nice way to go.”
It is Willem’s turn to laugh.
Joan looks at the book he has given her. The cover reminds her of the Kangra paintings, slopes of green grass, pastel flowers, but there is something of Chagall on the cover, in the shaggy dog on the ground and the boy floating up in the sky.
Inside, the pages are filled with sentences in beautiful Hindi script.
“So tell me about this book. You know I can’t read a word of it.”
“Join me for lunch at the café down the street and I’ll tell you why it’s an important book.”
Willem has hazel eyes and unruly dark hair marbling into white, and when he shakes his head he is distinctly boyish. His face is craggy from a life spent outdoors, and his lashes are thick. He is long-limbed, broad-shouldered, and attractive. More than attractive, handsome, very handsome, and Joan thinks, why not, and says, “I’d enjoy that.” Aside from the time she spends with Eric, she is either alone or in the company of Ela and Camille. When once her life was lived in the midst of the opposite sex, now it is primarily women. Willem might be a nice change of pace.
* * *
He orders them a Punjabi feast: lamb kheema, meat biryani, tandoori chicken, punj ratani dal made of five kinds of lentils, panjiri that has almonds, walnuts, pistachios, cashew nuts, dates, poppy and fennel seeds, in some kind of flour, puri bread deep-fried and puffy, naan bread served hot from the tandoor oven, three kinds of chutney.
She can’t stop spooning more and more onto her plate, ripping off pieces of naan, dragging it through the bowl of spicy green chutney. It’s as if she’s been starving and only now realized it. She’s embarrassed when Willem says to the waiter, “I think she’d like more of the good green stuff.” Aside from her latte with Lakshmi at the Namgyal Café, she usually eats standing up at the stalls in the marketplace, in a hurry to make room for someone else. The last time she was in a restaurant with white-clothed tables was in Rhome, the night she told Martin about writing Words, her happy plans for her future.
“So what sort of poetry do you write?” she asks Willem.
“Two different kinds. Poems I write when I’m out waiting to photograph birds, and those I write alone with a bottle of wine. The first kind makes a sort of sense, the second nearly none at all. In either case, I do try not to write the gooey stuff.” There is a foreign inflection to his English words that she likes quite a
lot.
“Gooey stuff?”
“The sappy, the sentimental, the corny, the hackneyed.”
She smiles and Willem looks at his watch. She wonders if he has somewhere to be, if he feels in over his head, if he had not quite anticipated how much she could eat. She wasn’t aware either.
“So,” Willem says. “It’s nearly two. We are eating a fine lunch, I, at least, am enjoying the company. Could I persuade you to share a bottle of wine with me?”
Since the vodka on the flight to Delhi, when she toasted with Vita Brodkey, Joan hasn’t had a drop.
“Absolutely,” she says, and Willem nods to a man sitting on a stool at the back door. Then a bottle of red wine is on their table, and Willem has his Swiss Army set out, a small corkscrew pulling out the cork, and with one taste of the aromatic blood-red wine, Joan wonders how she has done without.
“That was Tikka Yashvir, the café owner,” Willem says. “A fine and wonderful man. Once royalty when that mattered here. A former mayor of a nearby town. A close friend now, and he safeguards the cases of Montepulciano that I ship here. My own private stock that Yashvir keeps under lock and key, though he’s always free to drink as he desires.”
Kartar has told her that although Dharamshala is not dry, alcohol is hard to come by.
Willem fills their glasses, lifts his, and Joan lifts hers, and they touch, a small ting that rings out in the restaurant that has emptied of everyone but the two of them. He sets down his glass, and from his wallet he slides out a wrinkled, well-creased piece of paper, which he unfolds, and unfolds, and unfolds, and then smooths out, his palm running across a paragraph of typed words.
“May I read something to you?”
Joan nods. “Of course,” she says, and sips again at her wine.
Willem shifts his chair back, switches his crossed knee, drinks from his glass, clears his throat, and begins to read.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 43
