The Best Women's Travel Writing (24 page)

I tried to let my thoughts slip from me, but my legs fell asleep right away, still unaccustomed to the position. I cracked my eyelids open: everyone around me kept their backs straight and their hands folded. Someone had dimmed the lights, and when a gray-haired woman wearing lots of turquoise jewelry lit a candle up front and clicked two little chimes together, the room fell into an even deeper quiet, steady breath the only sound.

But I couldn't keep my mind still. This wasn't like the yoga I'd practiced up in Rishikesh, in an old man's living room that became a studio every afternoon. In this glittering space, thoughts crowded in on me and raced around. Little twinges in my muscles and on my skin grew into itches, cramps. I wanted to stretch but knew that doing so would disturb my neighbors, breaking them from their trances. The candle smelled sickly sweet, and the room grew heavy and warm with all the bodies.
Notice your breath
, I reminded myself, but my thoughts just shot away again. I was hungry, and where was that scarf I bought last week from the woman on the corner? I hadn't seen it lately. Meanwhile, my leg pricked and my foot fell numb. My mind circled over itself, reeling.

Then I remembered the journal. I thought of the words that filled the pages and the startlingly empty sheet. I thought of the scrawled signature, and imagined touching the penciled words. Teddy's breath on my neck. When the gray-haired, turquoise-clad woman touched the chimes together again, I blinked in the light with everyone else, understanding for the first time the way opening your eyes after meditation can feel like waking from a dream. I hadn't emptied my mind, but at least I had thought only of that creamy blank page for the final long minutes of the session.

After meditation, we ambled to the German bakery, still in our robes, and ate soup together at a long table where other soul searchers congregated. Outside the German bakery, vendors displayed long racks of red and white robes for sale. I tried not to meet their eyes on the way out. How foreign I felt in my robe, how conspicuous.

Aman liked to wash before the White Robe ceremony, so after we'd attended the second meditation and eaten dinner, he went into the bathroom. I could hear the water running as I changed into the white robe. At least it was cooler, sewn of thin cotton instead of scratchy polyester. Aman emerged from the bathroom eventually, his hair slicked back with water, his white robe cloaked over him. He'd ironed it that morning; I told him it looked nice. He nodded humbly, and I thought I caught him blushing; this ceremony was where he shone, I realized. We walked back across the river to the ashram, where a hundred other people in white robes waited outside the big auditorium, its silhouette reflected in the meditation pool that lay before it.

It took a while to get to the door, because everyone needed to remove their shoes and place them in cubbies, then grab a handful of tissues for the breathing meditation. We all murmured and mumbled in line, but no one spoke loudly or laughed, unwilling to break the stillness of our reflections in the meditation pond. Slowly we made our way up the stairs and into the cavernous auditorium lobby.

“Miss,” I heard a woman call from behind me. I turned; “Miss,” she said again, and beckoned with her hand for me to come back.

“I'm sorry, miss,” the woman said as I pushed back through the doorway, against the flow of white. “You can't attend the ceremony today.” She glanced at my robe. “It's the flowers, these little flowers here. The robe needs to be totally white, just plain.” She shrugged her shoulders—
sorry, they're the rules
, her look said.

“Are you serious?” I asked her, and a few heads turned. I was making a commotion, I realized, but
really?
After Aman washed the robe, the one we'd taken pains to borrow?

The woman nodded. “Sorry,” she said, out loud this time, then coolly moved her gaze from my face to monitor the others still trickling in. I glanced through the doorway to see if I could find Aman—he'd been ahead of me in line, talking with friends. I didn't see him. So I laced my shoes back up and left, taking the stairs two at a time, my face aflame.

Mostly, I was annoyed—after the initial shock of being banished wore off—that I didn't have a change of clothes. I figured, as I tried to steady my breath and slow my beating heart, that I had two choices. I could go home, or I could wait for the White Robe ceremony to end so I could still walk back with Aman. After pondering the walk home alone, across the bridge beneath the dimming sky, I chose to wait, and so I walked out the ashram gates, white robe and all, toward the German Bakery, where I thought I'd get a coffee and try to find a magazine or someone to talk to. Something to take my mind off the shame and frustration.

Stupid white robes,
I muttered as I walked past the beggars and into the bakery.
Damn flowers.
And then I saw Teddy, standing there at the counter, and my cursing stopped short.

He turned and grinned, recognizing me immediately, then took a moment to study my white flowered robe and my flushed face. “Everything okay?” he asked carefully.

“I'm okay,” I said, then blurted it out. “I got turned away from the White Robe ceremony just now.”

He grimaced. “Was it the flowers?”

I nodded. “How'd you guess?” I asked, half sarcastic.

“I've been to a few of those White Robes in my time,” Teddy said. He put on a grim doctor's face: “I've seen this before.” I laughed at his tone, which compared the ceremony to a serious condition that lacked a cure. I felt, all of a sudden, less embarrassed. How silly it all was, and how funny I must have looked in the banished robe.

“Let's have coffee and make fun of the ashram,” Teddy suggested.

“Or maybe something stronger,” I joked, but I was grateful for someone to sit with. Teddy eased the moment, and while we sat and talked, I forgot all about the empty page in the journal and the little voice that had warned me about Teddy. How kind he was being, paying for the coffee and then leading me outside. The air had cooled, the wind smelled sweet, the tables outside were littered with newspapers and crumbs. Our coffee was hot and thin and laced with sugar.

“So what do you do here?” I asked him as we sipped. I could smell chocolate emanating from the bakery.

“I'm a Ph.D. student,” he answered. “Anthropology. I'm especially interested”—he paused, put down his books, and stretched his hands out before him—“in the palms.”

“
You read palms
?” I asked, then immediately regretted my dubious tone. A true Westerner I was proving to be, doubtful of the softer, spiritual sciences. Sure enough, he looked offended.

“I don't just
read palms
,” he insisted, as if he'd dodged the question all his life. “I read them in the traditional, voodoo-ey way.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to emphasize
voodoo. “
But my degree has many levels. Astrology, physiology, human biology, psychology …” the list petered out. He set his coffee down beside him and leaned back on the heels of his hands. “It's a complicated degree,” he finished, drawing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

I watched him strike a match and light a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered the pack to me. I shook my head. “So, what can you see in the palms?” I asked him. I looked at my own; they were sweaty, for one thing, with a few scooping lines.

“Oh, you can read many things,” he finally said vaguely, maybe still miffed. He drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the street. He took another drag, exhaled. “Many things,” he said again, this time as if to himself, drawing the words out like honey scooped with a spoon. I guessed he was going to make me beg. He turned and looked at me for a long moment, his gaze uncomfortably piercing. I looked away.

“You don't have to tell me,” I finally said.
Two can play at this game.

“It's not that I don't want to tell you,” he said, and just like that, the tension hovered and eased. He smiled again. “It's that …” he paused, “I'm afraid to tell you what the palmist sees.”

I waited for him to explain.

“Everyone wants their palm read,” Teddy said, “but when they hear what the lines mean, they often see them as …” he waved his hands, looking for the right word. “As ugly. People are afraid of the truth in the lines.” He looked over, down at my hands, and only then did I notice that I was running my first finger along the lines of my left hand.

He grinned at that. “Do you really want me to read it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and though I made my voice casual, I realized I meant it. I wanted to see if he really was who he said he was, but more than that, I wanted to hear the ugly bits.

“You sure?” he asked. “Because I will. I'll tell you what it says.” His voice was still lighthearted, and I nodded. He smiled that half-smile, the one I'd seen creep across his face in the bookshop.

“Okay then, hand it over. Ha, get it?
Hand
it?” He laughed, and I caught a glimpse of the molar, the rotten one his lips usually concealed.

I faked a laugh. “I get it,” I said, sticking my left palm out.

“I need to see both,” he said. He put his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe and flicked the thick gold filter into the gutter. Then he took both my hands in his; how warm his fingers felt, how they nearly pulsed against my skin. He rubbed my outstretched palms with his thumb, as if to draw out the lines. For a very long time he stared at them, looking back and forth between my two hands.

“It's a very interesting hand,” he muttered finally. “A very,
very
interesting hand.” Again he went quiet, pressing my palms again with his thumbs. Then he let both hands fall.

“You will have an ordinary life,” he said with a shrug. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

“That's it?” I checked my palms myself; what was so wrong with them? “Tell me, Teddy,” I urged. “I won't be hurt.” Even then I think I knew it was a lie.

“Yes, you will,” he affirmed, and inhaled deeply, letting his breath out slowly. “This is why I never read the palm of a friend,” he said, going for his cigarettes again. “They never leave me alone after that.”

But I wanted to know! I
had
to; now that he'd seen, we couldn't go back. “Please tell me,” I said, and now I really was begging. What could be so terrifying in the lines?

“Okay,” he finally said, after a few long drags on his new cigarette. “Okay. I can tell you about now, because the hand is always changing to show the present. Here,” he reached for my right palm and poked a finger into the longest line, “in India, you're afraid. You're suspicious. And, you're often alone?” he looked at me. I nodded, unimpressed—any female traveler would feel those things. “But, you feel as though you are searching for something here?” he continued. “And,” he added, “you worry you'll go home without it.” Again he looked at me, confirming. I nodded yes. “You're expecting something. Not
expecting
,” he laughed, “as you Americans say, but
expectant
. You're waiting for something.”

“That doesn't sound so horrible,” I said. It was all I could think to reply. Only later would what he said really sink in: all throughout India, I felt oppressed by the constant eyes upon me, the omnipresent crush of people.

“There's something else,” he told me. “Something happened, before you were born. Maybe something happened with your parents, or in your family. I think,” he paused, took a drag, let the cigarette fall, “it was something bad.”

Teddy stood, his coffee cup empty. He stretched his arms high and glanced down at me. I must have looked bewildered, because he said, as if to comfort me, “Don't worry; luck will be on your side.” He mumbled something about how he had to meet his friend inside. “You okay?” he asked. I nodded.

“See you, Teddy,” I called softly as he walked away, but I couldn't be sure whether he heard.

Instead of returning to the ashram, I walked toward the city center. This walk was always rich for the senses, and I let my mind wander into everything I passed. I couldn't think too much about what Teddy said—I just couldn't. It was as if he'd seen me, watched the movements behind my eyes, the shifting beat of my heart. His words were like the empty page of the journal we'd found together: meaningless without context, yet somehow important, too. The most frightening thing was his hesitation, the way he'd glanced at me, tight-lipped.

I walked home, letting the sights of the walk replace the nagging curiosity of what he'd withheld. Vendors tended stands from dawn until dusk, and the cigarette and sweet shops stayed open through the night. Boats on the river pulled up to the banks, and bums and sadhus slept on the shores, shaded by day and protected from the wind by night with trees and boulders. Taxis pulled up from the train station; buses came through from Bombay and sometimes from as far away as New Delhi. The buildings alongside these roads crumbled with peeling paint and broken blocks, and I thought that those signs of age, of wear, gave each structure a rugged beauty. How many years those layers marked: a decade of cream, another of blue, each shade revealed in patches. Thin old men pedaled bike rickshaws as I approached the city center, their rubber sandals flapping on their dusty feet.

The wealthier, more modern side of Pune came next, with paved roads and expensive restaurants, a shopping mall and a university. The center pulsed with people on bicycles, scores of buses, cars that slunk through the crowds. The visitors ambling around the mall were dressed in Western clothes; almost everyone wore sunglasses, their skin tanned. I forgot about my white robe and let myself observe: the women could have stepped onto Fifth Avenue and been admired for their beauty, their cutting-edge style. I hadn't seen Louis Vuitton in months, but suddenly I was surrounded. There was Jimmy Choo and Vera Wang, draped over the wrists and arms and heads of the women who glanced at me, taking in my robe, the sweat at my hairline. They didn't interrupt the flow of chatter into their cell phones, just raised curved eyebrows or half-smiled to themselves and turned their eyes down, amused.