I still sensed something raw and incoherent within my own personality, and I remained vulnerable to those large vague longings, the urge to throw oneself into a grand and noble venture, into whatever could give coherence and shape to my own life. But these moments went by quickly, much to my relief. I did not resist the self-pity that inevitably followed them. I was more conscious than ever of how absurdly romantic and incongruous these longings were for me.
*
In the first few years in Dharamshala, I was still vulnerable to many memories from my time in Benares and Pondicherry — I had to train myself to see that past as dead. It became important, as a kind of mental discipline, not to think about it, or attempt to ferret out any meaning from it. It had taken much time and willpower before that past could settle in my mind as a time of confusion and loss, to which I no longer needed to return.
But then all of a sudden, and in quick succession, people from that very past appeared in Dharamshala, and I was forced to think about it again.
*
The first visitor was Priya, who showed up at my school at the end of a taxing day. The peon told me that a girl from Chandigarh had come to see me. I went out into the dusk and saw a diminutive figure standing under the crescent-shaped rusty signboard that had the school’s name painted on it.
She was as thin as I remembered her, with shorter hair and eyebrows whose earlier thickness had been stylishly plucked. She wasn’t alone; there was a tall young man with her, with smooth-shaven cheeks, blackheads around his sharp-edged nose and straight long hair that he kept wiping across his forehead in short nervous gestures.
I had been in touch with her after leaving Pondicherry. I had written her a brief note apologizing for the misunderstanding I had caused. She had written back a surprisingly mature letter, in whose tone and vocabulary I saw the hand of an older person, probably Deepa. She berated herself for her ‘childish impetuosity’ and proffered her own apologies.
From another, later postcard I had learned that she was living in nearby Chandigarh, attending the local university. And now she was here in Dharamshala, on an excursion to a hill station with, I soon recognized, her first ‘boyfriend’.
It was a big adventure for her, and she was awkward before me. I took her and her boyfriend to Harry’s Restaurant, where we had an uncomfortable tea, none of us saying much. The vulnerability she revealed in Pondicherry was even more pronounced now; so were the contradictory ambitions. She now told me that she wanted to be a social worker, but wanted to do an MBA first, in the United States. Then, changing her mind, she said she wanted to write poetry and be a writer.
An inquisitive Uma Devi sat behind the counter and gazed at us, trying to figure out my connection to the young couple.
Later, walking through the market, I spotted them at the video shack, laughing and joking with the Tibetan youth who ran it. They looked relaxed, restored to their natural everyday selves.
*
And then, one day in August, the school semester yet to begin, I was browsing through a shelf of expensive new arrivals at the bookshop and chatting about the pound— rupee exchange rate with the owner, a kindly old bespectacled Tibetan called Tenzing with a big black bump on his forehead, when I heard someone behind me say, ‘Guess what! A voice from the past!’
I turned back to see Mark, looming over me, grinning, his abundant hair falling over his ears. He had seen me come in just as he was about to go out; he said he had hung around and eavesdropped on my conversation with the bookseller in order to make sure that he wasn’t mistaken.
A slight paunch bulged out above the broad scuffed belt of his khakis, but he hadn’t lost his handyman’s tough good looks and friendly manner. He held in his hand a new book on Ayurveda medicine. But it turned out that he had given up his research. He had a new grant from some foundation but had turned it down. He had gone back to America for a few months in the summer and then had come straight up to Dharamshala, where he planned to spend a few weeks before returning to Benares. He said he had been coming to Dharamshala for the summer and monsoon months almost every year. He couldn’t stay away from India; it had become a routine that he couldn’t do without.
When I told him that I had been in Dharamshala for seven years, he gave a small whistle of disbelief. ‘It’s weird, you know,’ he said, ‘we should have bumped into each other by now.’
He was in a hurry, he said, but lingered on, talking about the Kangra valley, where he had just done a long trek.
And then he added, apropos of nothing, ‘Have you heard about Panditji? He and his wife died suddenly, within days of each other. People said there was something fishy about it; apparently they weren’t on great terms with their son, Arjun. .’
He was still speaking as he moved towards the door. ‘I’ve got to tell you about Miss West,’ he said, pushing out the door, ‘but it’ll have to wait until next time. Anyway, now that we are connected, let’s keep in touch. Drop in some time. I’ll tell you where you my house is. You go two blocks to the left. .’
A few days later, I found myself walking down the quiet cobblestone alley Mark had described. Hanging baskets of bougainvillea framed the front doors of the small houses and white prayer flags fluttered from the clothes lines stretched between roofs.
It had taken me some time to decide whether I should visit Mark, and I still wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. I had been surprised at first by the coldness with which I heard about the death of Panditji and his wife: the event seemed so distant, with so little relation to anything in my present life; it was like the events in the newspapers I occasionally picked up at the bookshop. But then, later, the news had worked on me in my solitude, had loosened another kind of memory of Benares: the memory of the serene days I had spent there, the afternoons at the library, the evenings at the ghats, the smoky blue twilights, all the eventless days with their restful vacancies. Something within me kept going back to it, wanted to stay with the pictures in my mind; it was what took me to Mark’s house that afternoon.
*
A bespectacled Indian girl wearing a chikan kurta opened the door, and for one moment I thought I had come to the wrong house. But then she said something, with an unmistakably American accent, the sun sparkling on her glasses, about Mark having gone out to the bazaar, and I knew I hadn’t.
She said, ‘You are welcome to hang out here if you want.’
Inside, there was the same assortment of ethnic knick-knacks I had once seen in Mark’s house by the river in Benares: Azamgarh dhurries, Himachali wall hangings, Gujarati lampshades, Tibetan tankas and various kinds of pots and pans.
The woman extended a small warm hand, introduced herself, and then sat down before me on the dhurrie. Her name was Rekha and she was in her final undergraduate year at Berkeley, California. That made her someone in her late teens. But she looked older; her glasses gave her a severe, studious look, and she spoke fast, with a kind of flatly emphatic tone and accent that sat oddly with her Indian face.
She said she was working as an intern for the rights of single-mother minority women in San Francisco. After graduation, she planned to get into law school and work permanently as a lawyer for the rights of single-mother minority women.
The conversation floundered on my side. She asked me no questions, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to her disclosures, which she seemed to make with complete sincerity and frankness; and when she got up to make some tea, I half wondered if I ought to offer to help her.