I was the last person to leave the bus, tumbling down the steps under the weight of too much baggage, and falling into the spider-like grip of the bus driver below who had been watching my inelegant exit. Lugging around Sam’s guitar with my giant backpack and other bags didn’t help. I had spent a sleepless night crammed in the ancient bus, creaking its way for several hours from New Delhi, through the UP plains, and then upwards to the foothills of the Himalayas. The other passengers had quickly disappeared into the thick crowd that had congregated around the bus station. A wisp of a young women in a thin cotton sari, appearing from nowhere like an apparition, shuffled over. She was holding a small child.
‘Behan-ji, I need to buy milk for my baby.’ She mimed a delicate hand gesture as if feeding her child.
I looked at the child, barely two years old, her dark kohl rimmed eyes staring vacantly into the distance. I had been warned that sometimes beggars were scammers, and the children weren’t even their own. But how could I possibly know? I placed a small wad of rupees into the woman’s hands.
‘Thank you, sister, God bless you.’ I didn’t tell her that I didn’t believe in God.
Outside the Snow Lion Guesthouse – my home for the next few months – a pair of monkeys sat sunning themselves, the larger one meticulously picking nits off the other’s fur, their long curling tails forming question marks. I recognised the monkeys as the infamous grey langurs and rushed past, but they ignored me and carried on with their grooming. The manager of the guesthouse, Prakash, was chatty. Originally from Bihar, he had moved to McLeod Ganj four years ago. He told me that what he best liked about McLeod Ganj was that it didn’t feel like India.
‘There are 15,000 Tibetans living here and also we get visitors from every part of the world like you – so many young people wanting to learn the yoga and the meditation and see His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,’ Prakash said, in his precision sounding like he had swallowed a travel brochure.
With its mountains and Buddhist atmosphere, it did feel very different to flat, sprawling, crazy Delhi.
‘You are lucky His Holiness is in residence right now,’ Prakash said. ‘There is free wifi in the lobby and restaurant. You can check out his website for his speaking schedule.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, showing little interest. Prakash looked up and scanned me like I was a Martian. Who comes here and doesn’t want to see the Dalai Lama?
The room was simple and clean. The only items of furniture were a bed, a nightstand, a desk and a chair. There was a mirror on the wall and a framed thangka of green Tara. I pulled back the curtains and gasped.
‘Oh my god, look at the view of the mountains,’ I said to the guitar. It had started out as a joke but now I couldn’t stop talking to it. The guitar, like the monkeys, ignored me.
*
I met Hala at the Moon Peak Cafe. Prakash, who had forgiven me for my earlier transgressive reaction to the Dalai Lama, had recommended it. Best views and coffee in town he’d raved. I was sipping on a cappuccino, watching the hawks in the distance circling over the town, when Hala came over and introduced herself. She had noticed my Lonely Planet guidebook on the table and guessed that I was new in town. Hala didn’t waste any time on small talk. She told me she was from Israel and had come here after her brother, a soldier in the Israeli army, was killed in the Gaza. I wanted to argue with Hala about the plight of the Palestinians, but she looked so sad about her brother it didn’t feel right. She had been here for a few months and had settled into a routine of yoga classes and volunteer work at the Tibetan Children’s Village. She was free the next day and invited me to hike with her to a nearby village that was home to an old Hindu temple and a popular waterfall.
Hala was wearing a salwar kameez and chunky silver and turquoise jewellery. With her dark wavy hair and olive skin she could easily pass for a local. I was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, and my travel-frazzled hair had started to look like dreadlocks. I stood out as the foreigner. The path was crowded with people – locals and tourists – and monkeys on the sidelines, rummaging through rubbish. A group of local boys, aged thirteen or fourteen, approached us. They politely asked if they could take our photo. We posed and they snapped away on their phones. The boys decided to hike with us up to the waterfall. As we walked the boys danced around us asking question after question. Where were we from? What was it like back home? Why had we come to India? Did we have boyfriends? The boys seemed especially intrigued by Hala’s choice of clothing. Why are you wearing Indian clothes, Miss Hala? You don’t like jeans? They laughed and seemed very sceptical when Hala said she loved salwar kameez and owned several.
We reached the first pool under the waterfall. The boys joined a group of their friends and we said goodbye. The waterfall was thin and unspectacular but the pool below with its slight emerald-green tinge was pretty. There were too many people sitting on the rocks around the pool, so we carried on walking towards the top of the waterfall. We spotted a sign on the side of the trail for The OK Café.
We stepped into a bright square room, one side of which was a large picture window with a sweeping view of the valley below. The other walls were decorated with Buddhist thangkas and framed photographic prints of the Himalayas. The tables in the café were low and there were no chairs, just large brightly coloured floor cushions to sit on. We ordered lemonade and egg sandwiches and found a table near the window.
A young man picked up a guitar and started strumming an unfamiliar tune. The rest of his group cheered and started singing along in Hindi. I felt a few tears roll down my cheeks. I quickly wiped them away, hoping Hala hadn’t noticed. She had.
‘Tears of happiness or maybe a little homesick?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Neither. Or both maybe,’ I said.
‘Is it the music? The guitar? I’ve seen a guitar in your room,’ Hala said.
I didn’t want to talk about it, but she had me pinned down.
‘It’s actually not my guitar. It’s Sam’s – my boyfriend. We’d planned the trip here together. He’d always wanted to see the Dalai Lama…’
Hala seemed to understand without me having to say more.
‘I’m sorry Elena. You know it’s a funny thing about this place. Lots of us have come here with a shadow of grief over us … and yet it’s probably the happiest place I’ve ever lived in.’
‘Yes, I’ve been feeling that too. I want to be sad all the time and then sometimes I feel happy and then I feel guilty for being happy and for being here when he can’t be.
There was a silence and then Hala said, ‘Do you want to talk about Sam? About what happened?’
‘Not really. It was just one of those pointless, meaningless things that happen, out of the blue. A motorcycle accident,’ I said. ‘It was just an ordinary day like any other.’
I’d always been amazed how common it was to hear people say the exact same words when prefacing a bad event, it was an ordinary day, as if the humdrum rhythm of everyday life, the bubble of routine was a protective shield from the extraordinarily bad happening.
I remembered exactly what I’d been doing when I’d heard the knock on the door and the police had come with the news of the accident. It was so precise a memory, it felt like only yesterday that I’d been sitting at my desk watching an instructional video on clouds in the troposphere. I had been preparing for the next day’s science lesson – a lesson I never ended up delivering, but the information had stuck with me and most days now, I would look up at the sky and identify the clouds, the cumulus, the cirrus, the stratus, or maybe the nimbus on a rainy day.
‘He was coming home after his lectures, just like he did most days, only on this day he never made it home. A man driving a car on the other side of the road was going too fast and lost control taking a bend…’
Over the next few days and weeks and months I hadn’t known what to feel or how to behave. Life carried on without Sam. Every day the newspaper arrived with new headlines of wars, scandals, and disasters. The elections were held and there was a new president – Sam would have hated the result. I watched the season finale of his favourite tv show and cried. He would never know the ending.
*
Hala had registered us to attend a public talk by the Dalai Lama. It was a grey day as we made the hike up to his compound. We carried only a cushion for seating, a cup for the tea that was always shared, and Hala, being always prepared, had brought along an umbrella. The sky was thick and grey, spongy with nimbostratus. The compound was elevated on a peak above the town, and it was a slow walk up the narrow stony, almost vertical, path. Hala was excited at the thought of seeing the Dalai Lama whom she revered as a master teacher and the incarnation of the Buddha. There were images of him everywhere in town. I liked the old black and white photos of him in the guesthouse lobby – frowning in concentration as he repaired a watch, and on horseback leading a caravan of monks escaping Tibet in 1959, young and frightened.
We finally arrived at the compound, stopping for a moment to catch our breath and look out across the valley. The day was dark and dull, only brightened by the hundreds of prayer flags hanging overhead.
Hala breathed in deeply. ‘Isn’t the air here lovely?’
‘It is,’ I said, bending down to turn a prayer wheel.
Walking past a small group of monkeys sitting on boulders on the side of the path, I no longer flinched in fear. We entered the courtyard of the main temple, joining a large crowd of people sitting on cushions, sipping tea and waiting patiently. After a short time, the Dalai Lama came out, stepping onto a small, raised platform.
‘The talk is in English, isn’t it?’ I whispered to Hala.
Hala struck her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Oh, how stupid, we forgot to pick up the headphones for the translation. He usually speaks in Tibetan.’
‘Can you see the glow around him?’ I heard a woman nearby ask her companion.
All I could see was a slightly bent old man with a kindly face – someone who had smiled so much that their face had permanently taken on the planes and angles of a happy expression. Just then the skies split open, as they had been threatening to do all day, and rain poured out thick and fast. The crowd rose in unison, umbrellas were opened, and people ran in all directions seeking any type of shelter from the monsoon rain.
I watched the Dalai Lama, who like everyone else didn’t want to get wet, as he rushed away. Doors were opened for him, and I saw the back of the small, red-robed figure receding and eventually disappearing into the distance. Standing almost alone in the middle of the compound, I was completely wet. Rain dripped down my face and into my eyes. A blurry Hala came over and pulled me under the large canopy of her yellow sunflower-patterned umbrella. Walking in the rain under our small pool of yellow sunshine we carefully made our way back down the path we had come on.
*
Latika Vasil writes short fiction and non-fiction. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and journals including Landfall, The International Literary Quarterly and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and broadcast on Radio New Zealand. Her first collection of short stories, Rising to the Surface, was published in 2013 by Steele Roberts Publishers. Her stories have won prizes in the NZSA Asian Short Story Competition and the Takahe International Short Story Competition.