“That’s very kind of you. But don’t I need to take a bus to Dharamshala?”
She lifts Eric’s itinerary and it whisks in the slight breeze. The itinerary was never meant for Joan to figure out how to get where she is going, and no matter how often she read Eric’s confusing margin notes on the chhotey train, she is not sure what combination of transportation—grabbing a bus or hailing a taxi or finding a rickshaw or walking—is required now that she has reached Kangra, in order to end up in Dharamshala.
“I think it says here that I’m supposed to take a bus eighteen kilometers to Dharamshala.”
“I can take you there. I can tell you have traveled far. Better now to be outside in the fresh air. But so you know, it’s McLeod Ganj you are wanting, not Dharamshala.”
“Oh,” says Joan. “Are you sure?”
“You do not know me, but you can trust me on this. Everyone coming here for the first time says they are wanting Dharamshala, but it is the hill station of McLeod Ganj that they are meaning. That is where the life you are seeking will unfold.”
Joan looks down at Eric’s itinerary and locates the name McLeod Ganj, but there is no marginalia about McLeod Ganj versus Dharamshala.
“You’re sure?” she asks.
“I am. Dharamshala is shorthand for the whole area.”
“All right. So it’s McLeod Ganj I want. Is it also eighteen kilometers from here?”
“Maybe four kilometers more. But a mere pittance along the earth comprised of so many miles. A total of thirteen miles or so, give or take. I cycle it many times a day.”
He pats his thin thighs, stringy and sharp. When he flexes his calves, Joan sees the strip of his muscles, the lack of any fat.
“See. I am strong and the cycling is easy. Come. I am a good and harmless man who seeks only to be of service.”
It is late afternoon, the sun is high and warm, birds are twittering in the trees lining the dusty road, and the rickshaw driver looks fine and respectable. She decides it is unlikely he will leave her for dead, and steps up into the purple carriage of the three-wheeled rickshaw, places her bags at her feet. The man turns around and smiles. “I am Natwar.”
Just two days ago, Joan thought she might never smile again. But she has—at Vita Brodkey on the plane, at the stationmaster at Chakki Bank—and she thinks her younger self was right about wanting to come here, there is something particular about India that makes it easier for her to smile.
She smiles back at Natwar. “I’m Joan,” she says.
“So good to meet you, Joan,” Natwar says, gripping the handlebars of his bike, his legs starting to pump steadily, taking her and her bags and her sundered life away from the small train station and toward Dharamshala.
When Martin joined Men on Bikes, he researched bikes and tested bikes and talked about gears and weight and torque and handling, debating the merits of every single model, until Joan thought she might scream. And after taking his new sleek black bike for a test ride around their neighborhood, he returned saying, “It’s kind of scary having your feet locked in. I keep thinking, what if I fall and my feet are attached, and what might have been just a tumble turns into something much worse because I’m falling with a bike attached to me?” Joan had thought that locked-in feet was an interesting metaphor for a long-term marriage. “I think you should be in control of the bike, not the other way around,” she had said, and Martin agreed, swapping the locked-in pedals for flat ones. And then there were the cycling shoes Martin needed to purchase, each with its own merits and issues, and when Martin opted for the pair with double Velcro straps and a semiflexible sole, Joan watched him clip-clopping around the house, testing them out, and she said, “They’re pretty snazzy,” which they were.
She is recalling Martin’s conundrums about his expensive bike and pedals and shoes because Natwar is wearing rubber sandals, his pedals are flat, and his bike is painted a cheery turquoise, but is clearly old, passed down perhaps through generations, and attached to the bike is Natwar’s purple rickshaw that carries the weight of his human cargo. Natwar probably has never had a choice about the bike he might want to ride, or the footwear he might want to wear, or the pedals he might want to spin through the beautiful landscape.
Trees and flowers grow wild in pastures just off the road. Llamas are munching on grass. Kangri villagers and their children are industriously collecting firewood. Traveling thirteen miles or so in a rickshaw takes time, and it feels as if she and Natwar might well travel this way for hours and hours.
*
Suddenly Natwar rises up off his seat, cycling hard up a steeper road, bumpy and rock-strewn. At the top, he lets out his breath, and then they’re moving fast on the flats until eventually a square opens up before them, as if they have stumbled onto a foreign movie set. Monks in crimson robes and nuns in saffron robes strolling everywhere, and people who must be locals, with their bamboo baskets, and others who are clearly foreigners, but at home in this unusual place, and tourists with short socks and sneakers and cameras slung around their necks.
Joan hears chanting, and the sound of lapping water, and singing bowls being struck, the pure sound of their gongs traveling through the air, across the square. In one of Eric’s emails, he said the singing bowls emitted sine waves, and she wishes now she had bothered to find out what those are.
“Joan,” Natwar calls over his shoulder. “This is McLeod Ganj. We will drive around until we find you suitable accommodation. No pressure because it takes time to look. Like life right? Lots of looking,” and Natwar laughs a happy laugh.
He points out various hotels to Joan, bowed or topsy-turvy or built into the outcrops of rock. Joan shakes her head at each.
Natwar comes to a stop at one hotel. “Take a look,” he says to her. “But I will say right now that I am not so sure about this place for you.”
Joan steps out of the rickshaw and enters the hotel. When she returns, she is shaking her head. “You’re right. Not the right one.”
The second hotel she enters at Natwar’s nod is too large and there is too much gold glinting on the railings, on the tabletops in the lobby, an elevator with a golden door. She might as well be in Las Vegas or Atlantic City.
Natwar shows her three other hotels, but none feels right.
“I’m sorry,” Joan says, when she climbs back into the rickshaw for the fifth time.
“No worries, my friend. We will find that which is home for you. I can promise you that.”