Joan grabs her backpack, leaves her pine suite behind, finds Kartar already at the low teak reception desk, musky incense lit on the table in the sitting area. “Good morning, Ashby. You are up and out early.”
When she sees his bright and open face, she thinks how Kartar is not an uncommon Indian name, just as Lucky Star is not an uncommon name for a diner—she Googled it this morning and found twenty diners and bistros named exactly that—so it is most likely a bizarre coincidence. Still, she considers asking if he lived in DC during his two years in America, and if so, whether Lucky Star is his family’s diner, and if it is, whether he worked there on weekends, and if he did, whether he delivered meals to a young man named Daniel Manning, and if he delivered such meals, whether he prophesied about the creativity he felt taking place in Daniel’s apartment. She nearly says something, but decides to retain the mystery, to keep close the mystical connections she wholeheartedly believes in these days.
“Kartar, I think I know where I’m going, but I want to be sure. Can you draw me a map to Triund? And then the location of the Rest House, and then from the Rest House to Illaqa?”
“Of course, Ashby,” and Kartar pulls out a large unlined pad and begins sketching.
“It’s nine kilometers from the center of McLeod Ganj, but only eight from here. You’ll take one of the oldest routes used by the Gaddi shepherds of the Chambra and Kangra valleys.
“Now here,” he says, writing KARTAR AND ASHBY at the bottom of the paper, “is Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise.”
Then he draws a long line upward and says, “You’ll walk up this road, and it turns into a path, but keep going and going until you reach Triund,” and he makes an X to mark the spot, “from which you will see all of Kangra.
“Now here,” and he draws a box past Triund, “this is the Shri Kunal Pathri Devi temple. Make sure you go there.
“Then here,” and he draws a house with a chimney, “this is the Rest House.
“And here,” he says, drawing another windy path that seems to go uphill gently, “this is Illaqa, where the monks spend the summers in meditation and prayer.”
Then he draws a mountain with a mouth, and says, “This is Lahesh Cave, where you’ll go deep inside and see the snowfed waterfall.”
She takes his detailed map and folds it up, slides it into the pocket of her down coat. “Thank you for this, Kartar.”
“How long will you be gone, Ashby?”
“Two days, maybe three.”
Kartar smiles and nods and does not look worried at all by her plans. Perhaps this journey is not as foolhardy as she already thinks it might be, and for that she is glad. She is eager to be above it all, up on Triund, to see the Kangra valley in the snow, the temple, Illaqa, the cave, the waterfall. She did the calculation back in her room: eight kilometers is just under five miles, just five miles uphill to Triund.
“Shall I give Mr. Willem Ackerman any message should he come by again, or phone?” Kartar asks.
“I’ll find him as soon as I’m back.”
“Very good. Have a wonderful time, Ashby. Namaste.”
“Namaste, Kartar,” and then Joan is out the hotel’s front doors, and down the steps, into an exalting cold, snow coating the ground, a floating snowfall falling from above, but no wind at all. The sun’s thready light plays hide-and-seek between the clouds.
The climb will be steep, but she has taken so many hikes since her earliest days here that neither the angle nor the distance is of any concern. She is warmly dressed, sweater and jacket and hat and gloves and scarf, her pack a comfortable, easy weight against her spine, still strong and upright.
She thinks of Vita Brodkey making a full circle of her life. She thinks of Camille always returning to this place for a revival of her life force and spirit. She thinks of Ela finding her purpose here, after the life she had expected to live was torn from her. She thinks of how Paloma Rosen would never back away from her destiny, would only march inexorably forward.
Joan starts up the hill in a silence made pure by the delicate white flakes, large and light and lacy, and her own certainty. It takes an hour before the hotel is out of sight, lost somewhere far below, where pastures of flowers will hide beneath the snow until springtime. She inhales the second, minute, hour, day, month, the cold, the hill, the snowflakes on her face, her fate.
*
Two hours later, there is a looped bend in the road, a brief upward turn that will set her climbing toward the tree line. She can see that the easier grade of the hill will soon give way, turn precipitous. She is all alone, but she has no fear, only hope that she will see the snowbirds Willem Ackerman has mentioned, perhaps even the musk deer, but not the black bears; she hopes they have gone into hibernation. She imagines the rainbows in Illaqa’s snowfed waterfall, wonders how fast its waters run. She’s walking and thinking of the way Paloma Rosen might walk, then she’s thinking of Paloma Rosen walking slowly from her Wooster Street loft to Chinatown on a hot summer morning, and when Joan sees a huge boulder up ahead, just off the main path, she heads for it, drops her pack, fishes out her notebook and pen. She won’t maintain her daily writing schedule on Paloma Rosen over the next few days, and she needs to get down exactly what she’s seeing in her mind, what she’s hearing. She settles down on the boulder, rips out pages from the back of the notebook black with words, turns to a fresh page, and begins to work.
53
It feels like a long walk from home to Chinatown this morning. When she must be clear-headed and sharp, her dreams have left her jumbled. She feels herself buckling down into the concrete, the weight of the steaming summer heat pressing down on her head, though it is still early, and a Saturday, and Chinatown is mostly sleepy and quiet.
Foot after foot, heading downtown, then east, her left knee sticking, her right knee catching, but she’s going to make it all the way to Haiyang Best, the best seafood market in Chinatown, the only seafood market she has frequented since landing on the shores of Manhattan.