And Paloma Rosen? Her life too will alter in countless ways when she fully opens her heart to Theo Tesh Park and Da Wong, a massive renaissance in this late stage of her life that she never intended, desired, or imagined, but will learn to embrace.
She understands now why she had been researching Mandarin words and rude sentences, Chinese names and their meanings, types of fish and caviars and Chinese desserts, the Chinese symbol for the restaurant with the scrawny yellow chickens hanging in the window, the way the streets are laid out down there, her own recollections of wandering through Chinatown when she was a young writer and done for the day working on the stories in Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life, making notes of everything in the back of the notebook. It had made no sense to her over the last week in her pine suite, but it’s so obvious now.
There was always going to be a Da Wong. Just like there was always going be a Theo Tesh Park, and a Paloma Rosen. And a new Joan Ashby, freed from her story that had contained the tragedy she knew it required—the arc of calamity and catastrophe and misfortune and heartbreak. Her own Devata here in Dharamshala resurrecting her from the past, the whole of it making her so much more than she ever anticipated.
She looks at her watch, two hours have disappeared in a heartbeat, and suddenly she is freezing, and practically soldered to the boulder, and her body creaks when she stands, but then she’s jumping up and down in the snow, warming up her limbs, getting the blood flowing, relieved when she can wriggle her toes.
She slips her notebook and pen into her pack, slides the pack onto her shoulders, and she is climbing again, up and up and up, past thick deodars and oak trees, their branches woven together, intricately entwined from years of buffeting by strong winds.
The heavens have the snow on a switch, heavy snowfall that tapers off, then begins again, over and over and over. She climbs for another hour, then a second, then a third, wondering when she’ll reach the top, telling herself to be patient, that she’s on the right path, will arrive soon enough. At last only a few gentle flakes are falling, and then the snow ceases entirely.
She pushes herself up the steepest slope yet, seven hours away from Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, drops her pack to the ground, and stares out. Kartar and his guidebook were right about Triund Hill.
She is at the peak, surrounded by majestic, spellbinding views, the expansive Kangra valley below, all those layered houses in the villages, and the vast energy running through the atmosphere, caused by the massive Dhauladhars, hits her like lightning. This is what it feels like to be home in the world.
She inhales deeply. She has shed all constraints and expectations, and she knows, as hard as it was, she did the right thing with Daniel. If some form of motherhood is part of every woman’s story, she has given one she birthed and grew from scratch a chance to find his way back. The decision she made wasn’t for her or for Daniel, not really or not only, but for those women who desired children and failed, for those who lost children to deaths nearly impossible to withstand, for those who tried their best and couldn’t make stick all the good lessons, for those caring for the damaged children who belong to others, and for those mothers and children who are lost to one another, left alone, and starving for love, wishing for the sweet snap that might make everything all right again. It was within her power to do right, and she did. The rest is up to Daniel.
Meanwhile, she has Paloma Rosen to complete, and writing students to teach, and a son whose accomplishments with Good Manning she would like to see, perhaps be a part of, and Amari to get to know, and she wants to meditate again with Camille and Ela in the Dalai Lama’s courtyard, and she wants the three of them to run naked many more times into Dal Lake, into all the sacred lakes in Dharamshala, into all the sacred lakes in the whole of the Kangra valley.
She thought she needed clarifying golden words straight from the Dalai Lama’s mouth, she thought she was waiting for him to respond to one of her letters, but the answers she has been seeking, she has discovered them herself. She has a marriage to end, a Dharamshala cottage to find now that Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise has served its high purpose, a home where she can live and write, a potential love to explore.
Snow begins sifting down, but a thin ray of sunshine has escaped, lighting up the clouds above and the valley below in waves of soft molten gold, pewter, and crystal. It’s growing late and a little colder, and she should make her way to the Rest House. She pulls out Kartar’s map, but, of course, it’s not drawn to scale, and she isn’t sure if the place she will stay for the night might be right around the next stand of trees, or much farther than that, and then she hears, on the breeze that has suddenly sprung up, “Joan Ashby, Joan Ashby,” and in the distance, beyond the top of Triund Hill, is Willem Ackerman, waving his arms, pinwheeling the snow.
“Kartar called me,” he yells out, running toward her, covering the distance between them rapidly, growing larger with each bounding leap.
He looks wonderful to her, grizzled and handsome and fully at home in these surroundings.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, when he reaches her.
“Waiting for you.”
“But I’m on a pilgrimage.”
“I know. Kartar thought you might be. But why not let someone walk with you, beside you?”
“I don’t know. I thought a pilgrimage was meant to be done alone.”
“Well, you’re wrong. You don’t need to do it alone. But what took you so long? I expected you hours ago.”
The snow is a curtain dropping from the heavens, falling down all around them, huge flakes dancing in the narrowing space between them, and Willem is reaching out his hand to take hers, but before she holds out her own, before she takes the next step forward, Joan says, “There are so many lost souls in the world, and I had to stop for a while, to write about another lost boy who is about to be found, saved by a woman who never imagined herself a mother.”
LITERATURE MAGAZINE
Fall Issue
(RE)INTRODUCING JOAN ASHBY
Although Joan Ashby declined to discuss with us her twenty-eight-year absence from the world of literature, she is breaking her lengthy silence in a major way.
Working from a cottage in an Indian valley beneath the Himalayas, she has embarked on the next act of her writing life. Ashby’s long-awaited first novel, Paloma Rosen, will be released next year in January. Her second novel, Words of New Beginnings, will follow in late December. Two novels in a single year from this exceptional writer reclaiming her voice.
Thus, this is the perfect time for those unfamiliar with her work to read her collections, and for those who are already familiar to read her again. Then brace yourselves, as we at Literature Magazine are bracing ourselves, for what will come.
Acknowledgments
Joan Ashby might not thank anyone, but with heartfelt gratitude I thank my wonderful connector, Pam Bernstein Friedman, my stellar agent, Erica Spellman Silverman, and my terrific editor and publisher, Amy Einhorn.