The crowd is noisy, everyone talking to one another, to Darpan, calling out to her, “Ashby, Ashby, we are here for you!”
It’s ridiculous and marvelous and she thinks she should have told Eric about it, asked him to come, allowed him to see his mother, to see Ashby in a way he would not recognize, knows still so little about, and Kartar, and Willem, if he was back in town. She spots Lakshmi at the back, with her father, Hadi, and Pema, the woman who wove the shawl she gave Camille the day she went home, and she recognizes the food stall chef from whom she regularly orders momo, and waves at them, lets them know she’s seen them, that she’s touched they have come.
If this is what she experienced when she was young, how had she given up this reward for the long hours of shaping characters and stories, the sentences that brought them alive? Had she been too young to understand what she had been given back then? Is fame better in the later years? This is just a small bookstore in Dharamshala, but the pure adrenaline she’s feeling reminds her that life is not yet at an end, that the powers of creation cannot been ravaged by time or events. Despite how she has been tested, despite being left with a conditional sense of her own being, she is still who she once was and is becoming again, a writer, and a woman as solid as Vita, Camille, and Ela. She knows this afternoon will keep her charged up through all the coming months of writing Paloma Rosen.
“Everyone quiet,” Darpan yells to the crowd.
“Order, order!” he tries next, and when the decibel level fails to drop, Joan steps to the front.
“Hello, everyone,” she says. “I’m Joan Ashby,” immediately aware she has spoken her full name, perhaps for the first time since Natwar cycled her from the Kangra valley train stop to Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise. And the room grows quiet, then still.
“Thank you all for coming, for choosing to be here. Darpan said he wanted to start a writing class, and asked if I would teach. There are so many of you today, perhaps it would be best if I talked a little about different kinds of writing: the fiction of short stories and novels; the true stories of histories, autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs; thrillers, crime sagas, and detective stories. Well, the list can go on and on.”
She stays focused and precise, talks for thirty minutes and then closes. The audience has been rapt and she wants them to remain that way, does not want to be responsible for their losing interest, does not want to experience their losing interest in her. After today, she will be less of a mystery to them, and won’t necessarily remain atop whatever pedestal they have placed her on.
“I’m happy to answer questions,” she says.
Hands fly into the air. Joan is not completely sure they all know who she is, or have read her books, or will even read the copies in their hands that they previously purchased; her appearance at the bookstore might simply be a welcome break from the routines of their days. But no matter, she is having great fun, and even if the adulation is not specific to her, it still feels nice to be respected, made to feel special, to be looked at adoringly. And it’s amusing watching Darpan hush those who presume to talk without being called on first. She wonders what they will ask her. She has vague recollections of banal questions thrown at her all those years ago, at the end of a reading. But surely here, in Dharamshala, a place threaded through with spirituality, the questions will have a different heft:
“Will you read my story?”
“Will you read my story?”
“Will you read my story?”
“You did not talk about writing about vampires and werewolves, why not?”
“Is it possible to write a good story in, say, three hours?”
“If I want to be a writer, do I have to read books?”
“Will you read my story?”
“What single piece of advice would you give?”
“Will you read my story?”
“Will you read my story and have your publisher publish it? It is very important to me.”
It’s nearly an hour before the questions peter out, an hour that severely taxes Joan’s ability to deflect, in different ways, the dominant request, but she has made it through, and is still smiling.
When Darpan says, “If anyone bought a book Miss Ashby didn’t already sign, she’ll sign it now, but no pushing and no shoving,” she leans over to him and, hoping she won’t come to regret it, says, “Darpan, if you still want me to lead a writing class, then those with stories should leave them with you. It can’t be a class this big, but I’ll read them through and choose ten that show the most promise. We could start there.”
“Brilliant, Miss Ashby,” and Darpan gives out the new instructions, where to line up for the book signing, where to leave their stories, and just as Joan thinks it, Darpan yells, “Your stories better have your names and phone numbers, otherwise tough, you’ll be out of luck, never part of Miss Ashby’s most amazing writing class.”
Christ, Joan thinks, it’s true what Darpan said about himself; he is a sensational marketer, he could sell anything. She wonders how much he intends to charge. She does not want to be paid anything, but Darpan should make enough to hang a new sign out front. The bookstore could end up very busy after all this.
47
Other than Willem Ackerman’s orange jeep, and the occasional jalopylike taxi with Camille when they explored places too far away for foot travel, Joan walks everywhere.
It feels odd to be in a shiny black Mercedes with fine leather seats, to realize that Martin drives this same make and model, bought last year, that could be parked this moment in his spot at Rhome General.
At the wheel is Vivek, whom Eric introduces as his right-hand man. Vivek, in jeans and a black leather jacket, is short and broad and his hair is buzzed down to his skull, but he has the ruddy, round face of a choirboy, his smile permanently attached.
Eric is as radiant as ever, and serene, but he’s grinning, and they have barely cleared the Dalai Lama’s compound when he says, “I have so much to tell you.” She is thinking she has much to tell him too, has decided she will tell him about the wonderful afternoon in the bookstore Friday, about the writing class she has agreed to lead, about Paloma Rosen.
But then Eric says, “I’ve been volunteering at the Rogpa Daycare Center. Taking a page from your book. Maybe one day soon I’ll want my own.”