“Yes, and I thought about sharing—” and Camille cuts her off.
“Dharamshala is a place to figure things out, as I said to you when we first met. You don’t need to tell me. If you had been ready to share with me, you would have, and you’re still not ready. But I know how far you’ve come since you arrived. I’ve seen the pain, the confusion, the hurt and fear that riddled you, slowly starting to fall away, and that’s really all that matters. When you’re ready to tell me, we’ll talk. It is the other side of the world, or it feels like it, but we’re just a series of numbers away from each other. We can talk all we like.
“Drink your tea, Ashby, have another Nakhatai cookie. Good, aren’t they? So the next thing,” and Camille lifts the paper bag onto the table.
“The name Ashby was familiar, but I just never put anything together,” and Camille extracts from the bag two books, in English, Joan’s own Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life.
“Why didn’t you mention this part of your life? I loved your books when they came out, bought the hardcovers, couldn’t stop reading them, still have them at home. These I found at that bookstore at the end of Kotwali and bought them so you could sign them for me. Have you been to that bookstore?”
Camille is talking about Darpan’s bookstore, where she met Willem Ackerman. “Not since August, the day of the first heavy rain.”
“Well, you should visit it again because your books, in English and in Hindi, are stacked up in the window and above them is a sign that reads ‘Dharamshala’s Very Own Most Famous Writer.’”
“Holy Christ,” Joan says.
“You meditate now, so maybe call to the goddess Durga, or Hanuman, or to the Divine in the Moola, or the Buddha.”
And then Joan is laughing, and Camille is laughing, and they laugh until the laughter begins to turn, catching in their chests, their throats closing up, and Joan thinks how remarkable it is, the way laughter is so connected to pain. And then she and Camille are hugging a last time, and Camille is at the door, waving her shawl at Ashby—“You’re Ashby to me, I can’t imagine calling you Joan, and I really hope you’re writing something new”—and Joan is waving back, unsure if she has nodded to Camille’s last words, if she has acknowledged that she is writing something new, but she turns to negotiate the street because it is so steep, and with this laughing and crying, how easy it would be to fall, to trip over her golden crystal sandals, to roll all the way down to the bottom.
44
The Dalai Lama’s compound is deserted when she passes it, the monks and the meditators have left behind chanting and silent meditation and are loud at the food stalls, keeping the chefs busy cooking their aromatic offerings. The sun is dropping from its height in the sky, the breeze kicking up when Joan reaches the end of Kotwali.
At the bookstore’s window, she looks at the display Darpan has made of her collections, artistically arranged like five-petaled flowers. An English-language flower and a Hindi-language flower, every petal a stack of five books.
Darpan must have ordered these books specially. A small Dharamshala bookshop would not have on hand fifty copies of her collections, twenty-five in each language, initially published so long ago. The sign is something else: Dharamshala’s Very Own Most Famous Writer in beautiful golden calligraphy, outlined a second time in silver, and a third time in black. The sign hangs across the entire window. It causes a crash of emotions inside of her.
The chime over the door tinkles when she walks in. There is Darpan, on his chair, mangling another thick paperback.
“Miss Ashby,” he cries, and jumps up. “Did you see? Is it not marvelous? The books in the window, all I have left. I have sold one hundred in the last week!”
She is stunned, and her old agent, Volkmann, will be surprised when the royalty statements from Storr & Storr show the number of Joan’s books purchased by a single store in a small village in India. The collections still sell surprisingly well and have long been a staple of colleges and universities and MFA programs, but she can see Volkmann scrunching up her face, saying to herself, “This can’t be right.”
“Willem has been gone since your trip to Pong Wetland, he’s been all over, now following the birds in the Kullu valley, so I couldn’t ask him to find you for me, and I don’t know where you have been staying, but you’re here now, and it is meant to be. Do you mind signing the copies in the window?”
“This is all such a surprise,” Joan says. When Darpan’s mouth turns doubtful, she says, “A great surprise. I love it,” and she thinks she might actually love it. She wasn’t sure on those steep hills down from Camille’s. But she is now. She does love it. “I’d be happy to sign all the books you still have.”
Darpan clears off the counter, pats his tall stool for Joan to use, brings the books to her in armfuls, and hands her a pen.
“So, Miss Ashby. Willem does not know this about me, but he is not the only writer, with his big articles and his little poems and his whatnots. I have my own desire to write, and I was wondering, if it was possible, if you had time, would you consider teaching me how to be a writer? And, if I am not getting too far ahead, too far afield, Willem always says, there are others here who fancy themselves writers. You could be our teacher, show all of us how to do it like you. You could become Dharamshala’s first ever writing teacher.”
Joan laughs. “I’ve never taught writing to anyone, Darpan.” She can’t teach them talent, but perhaps she can help them figure out how to put whatever talent they do have to good use. “But I might be willing to try.”
“Wonderful, Miss Ashby, simply wonderful.”
When she finishes signing the last book, her hand cramping from exhaustion, Darpan bows deeply. He straightens and says, “Miss Ashby. Don’t believe Willem—” And she was wondering the same thing. She has not heard from Willem Ackerman since he dropped her at Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, a quick kiss on her cheek, and he was gone. She has wondered if the kiss marked the end of their new friendship because she declined his offer on the lodge roof that last night, to allow him to take her to bed. She is glad to know he left Dharamshala immediately, is off working, that there might still be a chance for them, though she has deliberately not considered the nature of that chance. At the very least, she would like their friendship to continue.
Darpan says, “Don’t believe him because I am sure he told you that he has read your books so many more times than me, but I am like the tortoise, catching up to the hare.”
That makes her laugh, and she says, “I don’t know what to do with all of this flattery, Darpan.”
“Miss Ashby, one can’t flatter by telling the truth.”