The temple fronts, facades, courtyard, outer doors, even the pond that was built to reflect the temple to the sky, to the heavens.
It is extraordinary to look at, and Joan touches Eric’s sleeve, and he nods.
She steps away from him, enters the temple on her own, runs her hands over the hewn rock.
People carved this temple, with their hands, with small tools, like those Paloma will use.
Joan wonders how many people it took, how many decades, or centuries, to conceive this vision, make it come true. How many people died during the building, a construction possibly from hell, and if it wasn’t, how long before this contemplative and peaceful place was finished, opened to people eager for a sacred temple in which to pray.
She passes a large family, Tibetan by the cuts of their faces, their melodic intonations, and she leaves them behind, walks deeper inside.
The farther she goes, the cooling air takes on a mineral scent, the keenness of the born earth. She reaches the inner sanctum sanctorum, a room of rock, its walls sheared, but not made perfectly smooth, and she is completely alone. In front of deity idols she knows so little about, will never fully absorb, she kneels on the stone, feels how quickly it warms under her palms.
She puts her hands together in namaste and closes her eyes.
She thinks of Paloma Rosen, her flight to destiny, the materials she intends to make her own. Joan has researched so many, what a sculptor might choose, and for Paloma it will be stones and woods, loving most working in marble—a verb and a noun of pre-Greek origin: to flash, sparkle, and gleam, glassy, crystal-like rock, shining stone.
They are similar, she and Paloma, carving away in materials that are equally intractable, hard to chisel. By amputating her past and working in stone, in marble, Paloma Rosen will hurtle herself into her future. And Joan, what is she doing precisely? Working in words, trying to hurtle herself into her future, undecided about whether, or how extensive, an amputation of her own life is required. She has not yet had any response to the two letters she has written to the Dalai Lama, a third one written and delivered by Kartar to His Holiness’s secretary just this morning. Each letter Joan has written to the Dalai Lama has expanded her story. Today’s included how welcomed she felt by the crowd in Darpan’s bookstore.
She is kneeling in this stone temple, thinking how hard stone is, how it endures for eternity, and when she rises, she knows she is not prepared to leave this remarkable Indian world, not ready to step back into the small world of Rhome, to be with Martin, to answer the question of Daniel.
*
Just beyond the carved front doors of the temple, Joan steps out into the sunshine, and stops. Eric is next to the pond, a young woman by his side, her hand in his own. The girl is a lovely sapling tree, her hair up in a simple twist, loose pieces falling around her face like soft twigs. They are taken up with each other, and Joan studies them from a distance. They do not seem like two young twentysomethings in love for the first time. There is a maturity between them, a thoughtfulness that love has not blinded. The way their hands are clasped together, how Eric touches her cheek, how the young woman puts her hand on the back of his head, Joan sees they fit together. And it has little to do with how pleasing they are to the eye.
She would like to say to them take life slowly, don’t rush into making babies, but life here is different, slower and faster, deeper than the modern world allows. They will figure out on their own the tribulations, enjoy every sweetness.
Their bodies curve toward each other in a way that is beyond lust. They want the same life, consummately attuned to each other already. There will be no internal negotiations for either of them, no broken vows, no thoughts of what must be done to keep alive a love that was never expected. They will be helpmates for life.
She walks slowly toward them and when she is ten feet away, she coughs lightly. They look up in unison, both smiling happily at her, and Eric says, “Mom, this is Amari.”
48
It was Eric’s only slip, calling her Mom when he introduced her to Amari. The rest of the afternoon, it was Ashby as always, and Joan was surprised by the twinges of something, of sadness, maybe of loss, when he did so. Lovely Amari, twenty-five to Eric’s twenty-two. Both of them shadowed by who they were in the lives they previously lived, so young to already carry such histories, Joan had thought, then remembered she had been the same, a life lived in full by the time she was twenty-five. Martin’s and Daniel’s lives were free of that delirious leap from childhood to special existence. Did the normality of their own passages explain certain things? Was this why Martin had overstepped her boundaries so often in the past, failed to respect her authorial privacy, wanting to be inside her head, wanting what she could not, would not, give him, an explanation about how her brain worked? Was this why Daniel had stolen Words, to jump the divide, breach the gap between himself and his mother and younger brother? Should she have recognized he would deem his own accomplishments commonplace, lacking the rarity he so desperately desired, was it all there in that competitiveness he had shown early on? Using Joan’s own work to trounce her, to beat her soundly at whatever game was in his mind, might have seemed like fair play to him. But Daniel was not a child when he made his decision, he was an adult who knew what he was doing.
The sun is thirty minutes from rising, the birds in the forest are still sleeping, and these thoughts are too titanic for her barley tea, her hot lentils, the day’s sprig of fuchsia petals in a celadon vase. Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise trays are never without their surprising flowers, even though it is the second week of November. Thanksgiving in Rhome is just ten days away. She has not heard back from Martin, no response to her last email weeks ago that said simply, Please do not come.
On her pine desk are the ten stories she winnowed from all those left on Darpan’s counter. She had been wrong: the crowd, or most of them, knew who she was. Forty stories were left for her to read, many with personal notes identifying which story of hers was their favorite and what it had meant to them. She is still astonished by the geographic and temporal distance her work has traveled, humbled by the power they found in her words. Early on, she gave up trying to figure out if she was reading a story written by a female or male, the Indian names not making it easy, and decided not to worry about an evenly divided class, read only to find truths in the work. She moves quickly over the ten she has chosen, reads again their opening lines:
The girl looked in the mirror one day and realized she was no longer small, but grown.