“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.”