And Joan is taken aback, that page from her book isn’t one she had wanted to heed. Despite his agelessness, in spirit, in outlook, in the wisdom he has acquired, Eric is still so young chronologically. She wants to say she does not believe the experience of having a child is necessary to live a great or good or happy life, can cause the opposite. She would soften the declaration with a lie, that she would never change having him and his brother, and tell him a new truth, that she really does love him.
“And working at Rogpa gave me a lot of ideas. They cater only to little children, but I’m aiming higher. Amari has helped me research what’s worked in the past in Dharamshala, when it comes to charitable good works, and what hasn’t. And I’ve decided to open a center focused on providing children aged five to eighteen with specific kinds of extracurricular education: arts, like photography, music, and dance, different kinds of sciences, like astronomy, even computer coding, if there’s interest. This coming week, we’re looking at spaces we won’t outgrow in a couple of years. I’ve hired an Indian lawyer in McLeod Ganj and he’s set up a nonprofit for me called Good Manning Works, and the center will be called Good Manning. What do you think?”
Joan takes a moment to collect herself, looking at Eric’s face, so eager to hear what she has to say. Her own news can wait. It’s not far in the past when he ignored her completely, when he would not have cared what she thought.
“It’s a huge undertaking, but I shouldn’t be surprised. You started Solve at thirteen, why not an educational center at twenty-two. That’s not much older than some of your potential students,” Joan says. “Does that feel okay with you?”
“It’s weird, I know. But my life experience is completely different from theirs, and, in most ways, I feel so much older than I am.”
“Will you run it?”
“Yes, and Amari will come on board, and there’s a place for Vivek, too,” he says, putting a hand on Vivek’s shoulder.
“Space first, and if there’s no appropriate space, then we’ll build exactly what I see in my mind. I’ve looked at land and an architect from Mumbai is coming week after next, a friend of Amari’s father. I’ve been talking with him on the phone.”
“So, Dharamshala is going to be home for you.”
“Yes. It already is. In a way Rhome never felt like home to me. I hope that doesn’t upset you.”
Joan shakes her head. She understands exactly what he means.
“And Amari? So are you dating each other?” she asks.
“More than that. But you already figured that out.”
One son is nearly dead to her, this son she is getting to know in a different way. Is Eric telling her she will suddenly become a mother-in-law? Motherhood, she still mostly wants in the distance, and now, mother-in-law-hood, a young woman possibly wanting to bond with her? The thought is much to contemplate.
“She’s great, you’ll love her. She’s been working at the Tibetan Institute for the last three years.”
“The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts? I’ve been there. Camille and I saw a troupe rehearsing something called a lhamo opera, a masked dance drama, it was explained to the audience. Thrilling and bizarre, even if we couldn’t understand what any of it meant, or what it signified. Our fault, I’m sure.”
She wants him to know she will do whatever is required for Amari to feel included.
The mission statement on the front door of the institute articulated its goal in pretty script: To share Tibet’s cultural heritage with international audiences.
“Is Amari Tibetan?”
“No, Indian. From Mumbai. She thinks she was born into the wrong life, like I do. What her family wants for her, she doesn’t want for herself.”
She is not hurt by Eric’s statement. She understands it. Joan was born into the wrong family, Martin felt he had the wrong father, and she wonders how many people in the world feel that way, if Daniel felt that way, and if he did, does he still?
How does she ask Eric if Amari knows about Solve, his money, his time in Oregon?
“Have you and Amari talked a lot about your lives?”
“She knows everything. Dropping out of school, my company, my rehab in Oregon, the money I’ve made.”
“Has she told her parents about you?” Joan knows little about Indian castes and how they work, or about arranged marriages, and wonders what trials might be ahead for the young couple.
“They aren’t that happy that I’m American, but they like that I live here, and that I’ve run my own business, and that I’m starting something real. That I’m not one of the backpackers or hippies who come wandering through, never wanting to go home.”
Vivek calls back to them. “We’ve gone twenty-seven miles, just ten to go.”
A good time, Joan thinks, to move away from young love.
“What a wonderful way to invest your money, in the lives and futures of others. You should be proud. I am. Have you told your father about the sale? About your plans for the center?”
“I’ll know when it’s the right time to tell him about everything,” he says, which tells Joan that Martin still knows nothing about the sale of Solve, or that their second son is never returning to Rhome, or that he is in love and it seems to be very real. It strikes Joan again how rarely she and Eric mention Martin.
They are in a part of the Kangra valley Joan passed through on the way to the Pong Wetland with Willem.
“I forgot to tell you. Daniel wrote me a few days ago, said he bought himself a year’s membership at some yoga studio near him. Maybe I’ll turn around his way of thinking after all. If I can turn Daniel around, maybe I can do the same for Dad.”
Joan doesn’t want to picture Daniel in a yoga class, standing on an unfurled mat, preparing to assume one of the poses she did for so many years, those poses restoring her sanity in those hours she was away from Eric, his minions, the house. She doesn’t want to feel this agonizing pinch at her heart.
After all these months in India, meditating on everything, she is no closer to understanding how her eldest son’s thinking went so awry, does not know if he has processed the message she intended to send by her flight.
This is the first time Eric has spoken of Daniel to her, and she wonders if her Buddha-like son either knows more than he’s letting on, or intuits something profound. Unless he asks her directly, Joan has nothing to say on the subject.
“One mile,” Vivek calls out.
“You haven’t told me where we’re going,” Joan says.
“Masrur. But that’s all I’m going to say.”
*
Vivek refuses to join them. “Have this time on your own,” he says. “I’ll stay with the car.” And then Joan and Eric are walking on a dirt path, and the wind begins to whistle, and then the air hushes, and they round a bend, and there, in front of them, is a massive temple painstakingly carved out of rock, out of a single stone, on the edge of a large pond reflecting the temple’s myriad surfaces and planes in the autumnal sun, and Joan inhales deeply.
“It was carved in the eighth century,” Eric says. “It’s actually fifteen temples. The central temple right in front of us is carved inside too, and there are seven temples on either side, but they’re carved only on the outside. They call it the Masrur Rock Cut Temple, and the Himalayan Pyramid, and some call it a wonder of the world.”
Stone.
Everything is carved from stone.