“Do you think they experience emotions the way we do, like disappointment or loss?”
“Sure. Not so easy to identify, but love is apparent when they preen together or share food. Anger, when they wing slap, lunge, or outright attack. Happiness in the way they sometimes hum. Fear with the same fight-or-flight response we have. Even grief shows up when a bird is listless or drooping, or searching for a lost mate or a chick. Spend enough time with birds and you’ll notice they mirror our human behaviors when we feel love or anger or any of the other emotions we experience with frequency.”
Thirty minutes later, they reach the edge of the shrunken reservoir. Willem unfolds his collapsible tripod, readies his camera, lifts the binoculars to his eyes.
“They’ll come soon,” he says. And they do.
He is a beacon for the birds; they sail in gracefully and land, or dive-bomb the ground, but no matter how they arrive, they all wade into the shallow water, stand still, fetchingly turning their heads and opening their beaks, as if they know they are posing for their close-ups.
Willem shoots and shoots, switching lenses, removing the camera from the tripod, walking, stalking, or tiptoeing toward his subjects. Sometimes he ululates funny sounds, or sends out into the air low whistles. The birds circle and dart and allow Willem to do his work.
It is late afternoon when he packs up his photography equipment and they begin the long trek across the wrinkled reservoir floor to the far shoreline. It is strange walking on ground that will soon be underwater. Joan can feel the earth waiting to be fed by the monsoons, by snow that will fall in a few months, by the melting of that snow come next spring. She feels elementally attuned, miniature in the universe, nonessential to the ebb and flow of time. In this cratered landscape, with its sinkholes and its pecking flocks, she and Willem could be the last two people on the planet.
At the reservoir’s border, a muddy fen rides the shoreline. Willem loads Joan down with his equipment, photography bag around her neck, tripod in her arms, and he lifts her up and over the black slop, his boots squelching in the muddy terrain, even though just behind them the land is dry and hard-packed. When he sets her down, she feels the tiniest bit of loss. It was lovely being in his arms.
The lodge seems deserted when they return, and Joan wonders if they are the only guests. The reception area is a barely decorated space, an elevated stone desk, a stone floor, a small chandelier hung on too short a rope from the ceiling. When she looks up at the wooden staircase, its hard angles seem like a solvable mathematical problem.
They climb the stairs together. On the fourth floor, Willem says, “Meet up on the roof in an hour or so?” Joan nods and walks up the next flight. She hears Willem walking down the corridor, the key in the lock of his door.
She pushes open the door to her room. Puritanical furnishings—two single beds covered in blue chenille blankets, a blue grosgrain rug on the floor—lit up in sunset gold from the windows someone has opened for her. She is used to the colors of India, the various shades of red and yellow, all banned from this room. It has the feel of an old boarding-school dormitory. She leaves her mud-caked shoes near the door. Standing at the windows, it is easier to recognize the bruised beauty of the wetland. Beyond the reservoir, the granite bulwark of the Dhauladhar range soars upward from its green base, peaks blanketed by an eternal glacial snow that Willem has told her will never melt.
She steps out of her grimy clothes. The bathroom is more luxurious than the room: large shower and tub, modern sink and toilet, a full-length mirror. She looks relaxed, the faint lines around her eyes erased, her cheeks flushed from the sun. In the shower, she is amazed by the dirt washing off her body, out of her hair, spinning down the drain. She stays under the water a long time, then twists her hair into a high knot and stretches out naked and damp on the bed. Her ass, thighs, and calves feel taut and sore from walking such a distance on uneven ground wearing inappropriate footgear; her thick-soled tennis shoes are not up to the task, she needs hiking boots like Willem has.
The golden-red sun is hovering above the peaks when she dresses in the Indian tunic she bought in the Kotwali Bazaar, slips on her golden crystal sandals. She unravels her hair from its knot, and it falls like a black river down her back. She contemplates her reflection, leaves it down when she feels the trigger of something unrestrained within.
Willem and Joan are not the only lodge guests, because this place is too remote for a casual drop-in meal, and there are other people already dining on the roof. A young Indian couple in traditional dress sits at one table, glowing like characters in a Bollywood movie, the air between them fraught with flirtation within preapproved limitations. Nearby, two old Indian women are watching over them, chaperones picking at their dinners. At another table, a middle-aged father and his teenage son are speaking French. There is an empty space between them, a missing wife and mother. The father wears a look of retained power, but he seems lost, and Joan wonders which is responsible, divorce or death. The boy might be fourteen or fifteen, his eyes revealing something painfully adult that makes him appear worn, older than his years. The others look over and nod when Willem and Joan sit down at a table. Despite where they all are, at the edge of a reservoir, on the roof of a lodge in the middle of nowhere, there is no easy informality, no introductions, no exchanging of stories about how or why each party is in this isolated place inhabited primarily by birds.
Willem has brought with him a bottle of his Montepulciano, which a server quickly uncorks. When he clinks his glass against hers, he says, “I’ve done this for a very long time, and I’ve learned firsthand that when I’m having a rough time in life, watching birds alters everything, provides the right perspective on the world.”
*
Their second morning, an hour into their walk, Joan feels a thrill of recognition; she can identify a few of the birds she saw yesterday, recall their names. She is quick now to sight the binoculars where Willem points, to focus and find what he wants her to see, and it is still early in the day when he points out the Sarus cranes perched in the shallows.
He is good company, the way he provides just the right amount of educational information, before they again walk in silence. She watches as he scans the sky, the shallows, the mud, the small shipwrecked water in the middle of the deserted landscape. He has a list of birds he has been trying to sight over the years, to photograph for his own purposes, but today he is searching for buzzards, the subject of his next National Geographic piece.
“Are you aware we have a pack of flies following us?”