“In New York, each day he passed a blind musician playing his violin on a street corner. And each day, Chand put a dollar into the case at the musician’s feet. This went on for months, and then one day the blind musician was gone, and Chand debated what to do with his dollar. He put it in an envelope, and he did the same thing each day the blind musician was missing. Soon Chand had collected fifty dollar bills. When the musician reappeared playing his violin on the corner, Chand did not have the envelope with him. ‘I have missed you and your playing, my friend,’ Chand said to him, and learned the musician had been ill, but was better, and would be back to his regular schedule, playing on the corner each day. But the next day, the blind musician was gone again, and Chand continued to collect the dollar bills he would have otherwise given him. This went on for two years, until the envelope held seven hundred and eighty dollars. Chand added bills until there were a thousand, and then, when he knew the blind man was gone for good, he sent the money home, to Dharamshala, and asked his brother-in-law to donate it to the music school for the blind, with the request that it be used to buy instruments for musicians in need, which the brother-in-law did. Although Chand never saw the blind musician again, he has collected a dollar a day ever since, sending money back home to the music school. His donations have allowed the school to buy five violins, two cellos, and a flute, so far.
“This story carries the tenets by which we are intended to live, and underlies many of the mantras we chant. It is important to remember that the smallest gesture of kindness and generosity can have a huge effect, rippling the waters out from ourselves, allowing us to touch others in a wondrous way. Those of us who stand in the sun must share the light with others.”
Ela takes a moment to sweep across each person’s face, smiling all the while. Then she says, “Camille, which mantra will we chant today?”
“Ela, thank you for such an honor. And in the spirit of Chand, I have chosen the Moola mantra, in honor of my friend Ashby who has learned this mantra by heart, although her first time here she could not make heads or tails of it, and sweetly lied to me when she claimed to have enjoyed the experience. I knew she had no intention of coming back, but she did, and I am so glad for that.”
Joan feels she’s graduated from something important, or to something important, the way Ela, and Eric, and Camille are smiling at her, and those on the other red silk pillows, faces familiar and unfamiliar, smiling at her too. The tears she never used to shed, how much easier they come now, a few drops sliding down her cheeks, her hand in Camille’s, and then Ela hits the gong, once, twice, three times, settling the group, knitting it together under that tonal embrace, and the chanting of the Moola begins.
*
After the chanting and the silent meditation, when the namastes have all been said, and the red pillows are stacked in the corner of the courtyard, Eric joins Joan and says to Camille, “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m sorry we haven’t met until today, and now you’re leaving.”
Camille says to Joan, “Is this the beautiful young man you’ve told me so much about?” and to Eric, “You’re the lucky one chosen to meet with the Dalai Lama.”
Eric nods. “It won’t happen until next year, March maybe, or April, maybe even May. But time passes so quickly here.”
When he has his personal audience with the Dalai Lama, Eric will be into his second year in Dharamshala, and Joan wonders if she will be here too, during those months, in a whole new year.
“I miss that a great deal when I’m back in London. Days are the same length wherever you are, but in a big city, sometimes they last forever.
“Ashby,” Camille says. “I forget what you told me. How did you two meet?”
Joan knows she never told Camille any story about meeting Eric, as if he were a stranger she ran into at Namgyal Café, or up at Kareri Lake. For Joan, omission, while a sticky area, does not constitute an outright lie.
“I’ve known her my whole life,” Eric says, which seems to answer the question to Camille’s satisfaction.
After Eric waves goodbye and disappears around the side of the courtyard, Ela joins them, her blush-colored sari turning her into an elegant pale rose, her umber hair arranged on top of her head like flower petals. She hands Camille a package wrapped in pretty paper. “A small gift, to be opened when you’re back in London on a day that’s making you unhappy. Then a little Dharamshala to cheer you up.”
Camille is softly crying and Ela is holding her close, and then Camille says, “Enough, I do this every year. Ashby, come with me,” and Joan looks back at Ela, and Ela mouths, “See you tomorrow.” Then Joan and Camille are at the bottom of the trailhead, below the monastery, performing a last kora together. Turning the heavy prayer wheels all these months has made the effort not quite effortless for Joan, but easier than it was at the beginning. Camille stampedes through the wheels, shucking them around, barely breathing hard at the end.
“Come to my cottage with me,” Camille says when Joan joins her at the finish. “I have something to give you.”
“I have something to give you, too,” Joan says.
*
Camille’s cottage is high up in the steep hills, near the teahouse where Joan and Camille and Ela first shared tea, before they ran naked into Dal Lake on Ela’s seventy-fifth birthday. She has been here many times in these months, the backyard a postage stamp with the mountain rearing up right behind it, and each time Joan sees the cottage, she thinks of a sapphire that a jeweler damaged in the cutting. The whole house tilts, lists, really, to the left, and inside, the light has a cool blue glaze because the walls are all painted a cerulean blue paled down to its haunting jeweled base. She stole that color for the Parisian apartment Paloma Rosen has just left behind.
Joan stands at the front window and the whole of the marketplace is on view. At the Dalai Lama’s compound, under its white tent, a broad crowd funnels into the courtyard to listen to the debating monks. The colorful prayer flags flutter in the late afternoon fall breeze.
From her bag, Joan takes out her own present to Camille, a shawl hand-woven by a woman named Pema who sits surrounded by skeins of wool at the back of her shop in the Kotwali Bazaar. The knitting woman reminded Joan of Carla, and the shop Carla used to own in Rhome, Craftables, just off Strada di Felicità, the last of the Pregnant Six to give up the lives they had led before motherhood.
“You didn’t have to, but I’m so glad you did,” Camille says, ripping off the paper, opening the box, carefully pulling out the shawl.
Joan had chosen carefully. Luxurious and oversized, in various grays lighter and darker than Camille’s flint bun, with a vermilion stripe to remind her of Ela’s own parted stripe and bindi.
“Absolutely perfect,” Camille says, twirling around, ducking into her small bedroom to look at herself in the mirror. “I’ll wear it constantly. Now, sit down, I’ll make us some tea. There are a few things for us to talk about.”
When their teacups are filled, and the teapot and a plate of Nakhatai cookies that Camille says she baked herself, “Eggless with cardamom,” are on the table, Camille sets a bag on the floor near her chair.
“First, Eric is your son, yes?”
Joan was not expecting this. “Yes.”
“And you have another son, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
And she remembers Daniel asking her questions the same way—was she a writer, did she have books published, was she writing anything then? And she remembers the answers she gave him: yes, yes, no. The third answer, the no, a lie. She had been writing Words of New Beginnings.
“And the other son, he’s the reason you’re here?”
Joan can’t return to the discovery of her novel stolen and chopped into two, Daniel’s identical Lewis Carroll acknowledgments at the back of J. D. Henry’s books.