40
“You feeling okay now?” Joan nods at him from the café floor. She doesn’t think it was a reaction to anything she ate, but to Fictional Family Life in Hindi, in a Dharamshala bookstore, in the hands of Willem Ackerman, hearing him read a paragraph of her own work written so long ago, before the choices she made affected the rest of her life.
“Why do you carry an EpiPen?” she asks as he helps her back into her chair.
“Because I’m usually far from civilization, and who knows when I might need a shot of adrenaline, or need to give one. You’re really okay?” and Joan nods.
“Really,” she says.
“I would hate to have killed you during our first meal. Let me walk you home. Buddhists, you know, can be a dangerous lot.”
*
It is just before six when they are huddled under Kartar’s red umbrella walking up the rocky-sloped road to Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise. Willem is tall, but not as tall as Martin, and Joan finds it easy walking next to him, fully protected by the umbrella, sharing a bright patch of nylon. When she and Martin share an umbrella, she is left scurrying to reduce the space between the umbrella and the top of her head.
The rain is falling lazily, and when the clouds skid away, the early moon casts its silvery light over the road.
At Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, he insists on walking her up the stairs and into the lobby.
Kartar, as always, is at the low teak reception desk. Camille has been here, Ela too, but not Eric, and now she is walking into the hotel with Willem Ackerman, feeling scandalous for no good reason.
“Ashby, good evening,” Kartar says, his voice rising half an octave as he bounces on the balls of his feet. “And I know you, good sir. Ashby, this is Mr. Willem Ackerman. I have never met you, but you are my hero, sir. Ashby, do you know who Mr. Willem Ackerman is? He is the photographer who has made famous the birds of the Kangra valley. Because of him, tourist trade to our region has increased. He is greatly responsible for the birding expeditions that have become an international attraction. And an all-around good guy. Never does he ask for a percentage, even though it is because of him that our locals are earning the serious kind of money.” Kartar raises a hand and rushes into his hidden alcove, returns with a battered National Geographic.
“Do you think you might sign this for me? To Kartar would be sufficient, along with your name, of course, Mr. Willem Ackerman.”
Willem laughs and signs the magazine for Kartar, who holds it carefully on his open palms, and says, “Excuse me, I must put this treasure safely away.”
“So, now that I have his seal of approval, and you know who I am, how about coming with me to the Pong Wetland. Repayment for saving your life. It’s really something to see, a huge sanctuary and reservoir nearly three hundred square miles, that attracts more than a million migratory birds. At least five hundred and fifty-five species of birds have been identified. For a long time, I was the only one out there. I’ve got a National Geographic commission and it would be fun to have company.”
Why not, Joan thinks. “Sure. What do I need to bring?”
She is thinking a sweater in case it gets cold, shoes she might not care about throwing away afterward, a slicker and a rain hat of some sort. Tomorrow, she will buy what she needs in the marketplace, or at the Kotwali Bazaar farther down the road. When Willem rattles off items she doesn’t expect, like several pairs of socks, changes of clothes, she wonders what she’s agreed to, and learns, too late, that they will be out in the Pong Wetland Reservoir for three days, cooking their meals over a campfire, doing their business behind trees.
“You’ll have your own tent and my assistant will be there as well. He helps me in my work and he’ll make our meals. All you need to bring is your good eyesight, your imagination, and your open heart. Nature will take it from there.”
*
In her pine suite, stretched out on her bed, she thinks about engaging for three days in birding, something she’s never thought about, with a man she does not know, has only just met, a stranger with whom she drank a bottle of good red wine, who used as a reference for his honesty and solidity, the copy of Kalpit Parvarik Jivan, which she inscribed to him at his request, his love of her work, her paragraph in his pocket, the ownership of camera lenses and binoculars that he showed her in the hotel lobby.
Suddenly, she is thinking about the old man she and Martin saw when they began taking their meandering neighborhood walks in late January, observing details they had missed somehow over the years—that certain streets were confusingly named Peachtree Street, Peach Drive, and Peaches Court; that three houses on one block had full-grown apple trees out front, thick trunks, twisted boughs, wizened apples in the snow that hung red and heavy months before—and the old man in the apartment addition over a two-car garage was always staring out from behind the panes.
Their walks shifted days and hours, but there he stood, dressed in a shirt and tie, his nose pressed to the glass, binoculars gripped in his fingers, ready to be raised to his eyes. Someone’s father, perhaps with early-stage dementia, was what Joan thought the first time she spotted him and pointed him out to Martin. He seemed prepared to search for approaching enemy aircraft, but unless their local paper had failed to report it, small-town Rhome, in northern Virginia, was not under imminent attack.
Watching him from the street, Joan had remembered the phrase ineluctably sad, a phrase that made her sob when she was young and read it in a novel. In her own writing, she had never found a place where those words might belong, but the old man in the window with the binoculars, he struck her as ineluctably sad, and Joan found herself down on the sidewalk, her head to her knees, trying to catch her breath, which seemed suddenly to have disappeared. Martin, kneeling at her side, asked what was wrong, and she hadn’t known. He had waited until she held out her hand, then lifted her to her feet, and they walked on, to the halfway mark of their walk, a lamplight at the end of a cul-de-sac piled high with snow.