“A lot of them, but only a few are mine. They came with the place. The ones on Kangra and Pahari painting are really cool.”
Really cool is the first connection between the Eric Joan knew and the one preparing a tea tray. She thinks of telling him about Camille Nagy, how for years she has studied the Kangra Valley School of Painting here. That an upright Englishwoman studies those paintings whose focal theme is largely erotic sentiment—Shringar—which Joan thinks Camille has probably lacked in her life. Camille has taken Joan to the Museum of Kangra Art to see some of those paintings. Lyrical and naturalistic, colors extracted from minerals and vegetables, and although they were painted more than four centuries ago, they have lost none of their enamel-like luster. Faces with porcelain delicacy, soft and refined, female charms on display, their bodies exceptionally beautiful. Standing in front of one such painting, Joan had said, “Our bodies were that lovely at Dal Lake,” and Camille blushed and said, “Well, yours was.” When Joan saw Rama and Sita in the Forest, painted in 1780, with the Kangra landscape of verdant greenery, trees, creepers, flowering plants on fields of hilled grass, brooks and rivulets and springs running through, Joan thought Devata looked exactly that way, the painting so similar to how she described her own arcadia in Words. Though they have grown close in these last weeks, sojourns to Kareri Lake, the Tattwani Hot Springs, the tea gardens in Chilgari and Dari, the daily meditation practice led by Ela that Joan has committed to attending three times a week, Camille still refuses to show Joan her own paintings using the Kangra techniques. Joan would like to share all of this with Eric, but it’s not why she is here in his cottage with him, and she has been here in Dharamshala for far longer than he assumes.
Eric adds the teapot to a wooden tray, where porcelain teacups already rest. “We’re ready,” he says and she follows him out into the garden, an enclave surrounded by those tall, tapered trees, their leaves like lace, the perimeter lined with a variety of greens in all different shades, filled with haphazard beds from which spring all sorts of flowers, indigenous, Joan thinks, because she recognizes none of them, except for the blowsy, splashy rhododendrons in bright pink and red. There is a wooden bench, small chairs, and the sculptured trunk of a tree cut down long ago. A short distance away is a shallow pond, over which a wooden bridge leaps, snapdragons hovering at the edges. It is very much like the landscapes in the Kangra paintings, until she sees, near the pond, two white canvas slung-back chairs. This is where Eric has acquired his golden tan. She wonders if he has met a girl that he likes, if a young Dharamshalan woman arranges her own bared limbs on that second chair. She hopes so. It’s time. After all, he turns twenty-two at the end of the month. She looks up and there is an immaculate view of the Himalayas, nearly within reach.
Eric sets the tray on the tree trunk and points to the small chairs, perfect for one of Fancy’s tea parties. “They’re very comfortable,” he says, and the low height makes Joan feel she is emerging from the earth, that she is her very own flower, the way Ela seems to be when she arranges herself on a red silk pillow, her saris in abundant pastels around her.
Eric pulls the other chair closer to Joan, seats himself, lifts the teapot lid to check on the brewing. “I’ve grown to like tea, but it has to be strong. I hope that’s okay.”
She nods. “I like it dark too,” she says.
He fills the two cups. “I have no sugar. I’ve given that up, given everything up. Absolutely nothing toxic since back then.”
“I’m so glad,” she says. “I don’t need any sugar,” although really she does, even just a few packets of the fake stuff.
The birds in the trees chitter, insects lightly buzz, a wisp of a breeze tickles the blades of grass. It is Edenic here, she thinks, sipping the pungent tea, rough with something soft at its base.
“Delicious,” she says, and then the words fall away.
In the past, in their past, she would have filled up the empty space, spoken, inquired, felt responsible for their conversational interactions, and when she wasn’t policing him, or yelling at him, then trying to encourage him to—well, who knows what she wanted to encourage him to do, or to be like. Perhaps more like Daniel, normal in some way, though Daniel has blown that concept away. But she had wished back then for Eric’s normalcy, such a hard wish when his genius was so extraordinary. It had been like hoping a prima ballerina’s legs were chopped off, or a sculptor’s hands mangled, or a photographer’s eyesight lost to an unprovoked acid attack, and when she was thinking those thoughts at the start of the seven-year cycle, she knew if her wish for Eric’s normalcy were granted, she would be the one wielding the instrument of his death, directly responsible for the nuclear fallout. She had made that promise when she put her novel in the box, that he would not die on her watch, and not much later, that he would not die by her thoughts.
She lets the quiet grow around them, settles into it, into this nascent Joan, a runaway woman who is also, still, a mother to this son. She has worked hard since arriving in Dharamshala to banish mother from her thoughts, to not consider the sons that she birthed, to stay cushioned within the fantasy that she never gave anything up, never married Martin, never left New York, never experienced pregnancy and motherhood, or the sporadic friendships with the Pregnant Six, that she never stepped down from the heights of her powers, that she climbed from peak to peak, each one higher than the one before, and with each leap, from mountain to mountain, realizing more of her dreams, those she had dreamt about and those she had never thought to imagine, never relegating Joan Ashby to a closet, a drawer, a trash bin, a box in a garage.
When she looks at Eric, there is a bliss to him, not superimposed over his original nature, but altering his nature entirely, fundamentally.
This is another lesson for Joan to heed.
Vita would say, “It’s all part of the reason why you’re here.”
Ela would say, “This awareness means you are concentrating well during your meditation practice.”
Camille Nagy would say, “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Pay attention.”
*
At last, Eric tugs quietly at the silence. “Do you remember what I said I wanted to do when I go out of rehab?”
“I do remember,” Joan says. “You said you wanted to sell Solve and take yourself to a sacred place where you could discover who you might truly be.”
He looks pleased that she has recalled his words so easily, and exactly.
“So, I’ve accomplished two out of three so far. I’m here in this sacred place, and I sold Solve.”