“Hello, missus. I hope you had a good night of sleeping,” Kartar says, when she finds him at his post at the low teak reception desk.
“I did,” Joan says. “Thank you. But please, you don’t need to call me missus. If you could, just call me Ashby.”
The simple act of claiming her original last name loosens one of the tight knots that has been lodged in her heart since she sat in the parking lot of the Tell-Tale Bookstore, her stolen work in her lap.
“Of course,” he says, nodding. “I will endeavor to remember.”
“Where shall I go for something to eat? I’m starving. I’m so sorry, by the time I brought in the lovely tray, everything had gone cold.”
“No problem at all. Sleep is better than all the lentils and barley tea in the world.” Then he is rummaging beneath the reception desk, and when he rises up, he hands her a thick guidebook.
“Take this with you so that you will always know where you are. Keep it as long as you are here. For now, you should head down the hill. After a while, you will come to the marketplace.”
*
Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise is a mile from the center of McLeod Ganj. The steep dirt road is rocky under her sparkly sandals. In the distance, Joan sees the multicolored prayer flags that Kartar said mark the beginning of the marketplace. There is no breeze, and the flags, raised on high sticks, hang down, as if taking noon naps. It seems she may never reach the marketplace, but then she is within it, walking past shops displaying Kashmiri scarves, harem pants, hand-knit woolens, prayer bells, tuning forks, singing bowls and mallets, glass jars of pickles and chutneys, jewelry presented to passersby on rough cloth or black velvet.
Along the main street, in front of the shops, are the food stalls she saw yesterday, their pungent offerings wafting into the air. There is the popcorn seller popping his corn, and the baker baking his Tibetan bread, and aproned chefs sporting white toques sautéing buckets of green vegetables, and other chefs doing other things to other kinds of ingredients. The delectable aromas harshened by the scent of frying red pepper. Joan considers dipping in, but it feels too soon, this is only her first outing, and Dr. Abram’s admonitions are loud in her head. She has gone through too much to arrive here, on this street, in Dharamshala, in India. She does not want to be felled because she braved the fare at the stalls.
On Temple Road, she spots the Namgyal Café. The outdoor dining patio with its picnic-style tables is empty, though the air is warm, the sun centered in the sky. Inside, she is the only customer. A girl with a smooth brown face, a small nose, and stubby pigtails sprouting all over her head that makes Joan think of a sea anemone, waves her hand.
“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.