Back in the kitchen, with its clean cabinets, its shiny new appliances, the long limestone island so cool to the touch, she ran her fingers over its white swirls, its pale-green comets, took another swallow from the bottle, and set it down. On the bottom of the title page, she wrote in pen, Final Draft: August 10, 2007. She turned the book facedown, picked up the last few pages to read once more.
For ten solid days and nights in their arcadia, rain pelted the meadows and dandelion fields, bled the purpled hills gray, the mountain peaks were lost to the mist, the slow-moving brooks became torrents that rushed and screamed, the energy vortices were extinguished, sopping wet, blown out.
Everyone huddled in their one-room cabins, in their tree houses, in their modernized tepees, in the rooming houses they shared, in their painting and sculpting and pottery studios, their rehearsal rooms, their writers’ alcoves, their music spaces, that they had built together when Devata was founded.
Five years of golden mystical weather disappeared with a thunderclap, the slap of first rain. But even though the muddied streets emptied, and the land’s energy locked itself away, no one stopped working, no one flagged, or took a break, or slept.
Through the lightning, the thunder, the teeming drops big as cats and dogs, everyone carried on, refreshing themselves with bread the bakers baked, with wine from the grapes the vintners nurtured, then stamped into juice, then bottled and let ripen, with cheese from the cows and goats farmers herded and milked, the milk curded, salted, and cured, getting naked for a quarter of an hour with another, to replenish their creative stores.
Anton and Lila finished the final strokes on the triptych they had jointly conceived, a rash of colors unknown to man, ground from the random stones and rocks found around Devata. Lila had been careful with Anton’s tender heart; it had flourished, grown huge, turned a bright, bright red. She had been carrying their baby from the moment they each laid a stroke on the canvases, the third canvas, that first stroke, one they had done together.
Bernard penciled in the final notes of his symphony, a scaffolding of birdsong, its undernotes turned electric and ethereal, that made people believe, when they heard bits and pieces floating from his windows, that if Devata was not heaven, which they thought it might be, then surely a real heaven existed, for the sounds Bernard created were impossible to attain without a belief in something even greater than their own personal talents.
Zena danced like a dervish in the rehearsal space she shared with Minu, whirling and twirling, adagio, allegro, bravura. Whipping fouetté turns, arabesques, grand jetés, tour jetés, and coupé jetés en tourant. There were strings of fast cabrioles, as Zena beat her legs in the air, one of Bernard’s birds gone mad, reaching perfect height and precision, and pas de bourrée courus, as she breathlessly glided en pointe across the varnished floor. She was wearing a delicate ballerina creation, as pale as the underside of a loving cloud, which clung to her body, made her a sculpture in motion. Minu, her lover, who would dance this dance with Zena, for all of Devata, who had helped to choreograph it from its inception, caught, on her camera, frame after frame of Zena moving through space, through the past, the present, and the future.
Bash, who still thought of Goa, still pictured the Italian marchesa in his mind, could easily conjure the faces of his family, hearts plucked free from their chests when they realized he had disappeared, had escaped in the van to the airport, along with the guests who had biked the Tuscan countryside for a week, or two, or three, whom Bash’s family had fed and watered with wine, he had learned a crucial lesson in Devata these years. He was free, unfettered, and it was what he had always known, he had a single life, built one word at a time, until the edifice sparkled, was strong enough to withstand doubt and old memories of hunger and fear and hurt and violence. He had written a glorious novel about his childhood in India, about the little boy who once splashed in the Arabian Sea, who found a seashell on a rock, put it to his ear, and heard the world. On the tenth night of the storm, Bash wrote The End at the bottom of the page marked -800-.
Before dawn on the eleventh day, every Devatan gathered in its center, in the rain. They held hands, turned their faces to the sky, let the water flood their skin, slide into their joints, their muscles, their bones. It felt as if they were waterlogging their own souls, their fervent spirits.
At first no one comprehended the sudden silence, but then they did, they understood, saw that the rain had stopped all at once.
In that sudden silence, the sounds they used to know returned. They heard the trees swaying in the faint breeze, the birds flapping their wings, their own breaths rushing in and out.
The mist dissipated, the hills regained their natural hue, the mountains reared up. The sun peered out from behind them, then climbed and climbed and climbed, a molten monolith, golden again and hot, spreading its rays across Devata, across all of their upturned faces, across all of the earth.
Joan felt her own breath perfectly syncopating, a lightness in her head that was not from the bubbly drink, so different, a miracle of expression, of grace, of epic achievement.
She, who had never believed in God, or in gods, who had felt writing was prayer, and that spirituality could be found in words, she thought she now might believe. Her people did. They had named their arcadia Dēvatā‘ō? kī bhūmi, Hindi for Land of the Gods, shortened to Devata; or rather Joan had named her conjured arcadia in that small unnamed American state Dēvatā‘ō? kī bhūmi. She had made gods of Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton, jointly controlling their own metamorphoses, the manifestations of their ripening talents, seeing beyond the horizon, seeing that the horizon no longer separated life from heaven.
She placed those last pages carefully down on the stone island and ran outside, ran across their land, through the high carpet of unmowed grass, sharp ends catching at her feet, through the gardens, then over the knoll, and down into the glen. She was crystalline ecstasy. Surrounded and protected by the tall trees she had planted, had nursed and encouraged. She called out her name, called out Joan Ashby, for that’s who she was, had always been. She flung off her summer dress and stood naked for a long time, feeling the sun heating her skin, feeling grounded to the earth, even as she was flying high. Then, as balletic and graceful as Zena would have been, Joan arched herself out into space, and plunged, for the first time, into the new pool.
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