In those early days, Harriet and Nisha pestered me about Luke, but I didn’t have much to tell them. All he did was point out my tasks when I arrived, then work beside me until rota was over. When I asked him why there had never been rota in the garden before, he opened his palms to the sky. “I’ve never needed help before,” he said. “I must be getting old.” When I reported this to Harriet and Nisha, a thrown bone, they shrieked with displeasure. Old? Old? Old? Not hardly. Not a little. Old?
Of course, I told them nothing about how good he smelled, like wood and sweat and burnt sugar, and something else familiar I couldn’t name but that tugged at the back of my throat like a swallowed lure. I told them nothing about his soft inner-elbow skin, or how intensely I wanted to touch him, to climb onto his back, to have him swing me through his legs the way my father had when I was small. He could have managed it: he was almost exactly as tall as my father. I had measured this by standing very close to him and noting where my nose hit his shoulder. This measurement was not at all related to the shape of his mouth, except in the ways that it was.
Once, after two hours with the spade, I stood up, shaking out my wrists, and Luke grabbed my hand, just as Magda had. Clearly, Buddhists are not shy about this sort of thing. (It’s only the physical body, after all.) I tried to pull away, but he only smiled and pulled on my middle finger, hard, and I heard my knuckle pop. He popped them all, one by one. I closed my eyes to focus on the sensation of my bones shifting beneath my skin. Had any man ever touched my hands before? Only my father, and Luke’s hands were much rougher than his, and much dirtier too. My father’s hands were always clean, even in the garden. That is one thing I remember about him.
That day, during free hours, I went looking for Shastri Dominique’s office. It wasn’t difficult to find: the main building was smaller than it looked from the outside, and though there was no map or directory, each of its doors was marked with a small handwritten sign framed in blond wood, indicating its use. When I found the door with Dominique’s name on it, I knocked, and could hear her sigh from the hall. “Yes?” she said.
The office was plain, much plainer than I had expected after the shrine room’s gilded drama. The walls were white, their only adornment a series of identical-looking framed photographs that ringed the room. The only real color came from the window frame, which was painted red—the same saturated shade as the door of the garden shed.
Dominique herself was sitting at a white desk flanked by large metal filing cabinets. She looked tired—or perhaps that day she just looked her age.
“What can I do for you?” she said.
“I was hoping you could help me,” I said, hating the whine creeping into my voice but unable to stop it. “I’m looking for someone who was here at the Center last year.”
Dominique frowned. Her fingers were long but unpainted. They looked like lit candles. “I’m afraid I can’t give out any information about program participants,” she said. “We have a strict confidentiality policy. It’s to protect you girls more than anything.”
“It’s not a girl,” I said. “It’s my father.”
She hesitated, and seemed to look at me a little harder, as if she might be able to guess whose child I was on resemblance alone.
“Even so,” she said.
The coolness of her tone startled me. I looked away from her and noticed that one of the photographs on the wall showed a small group of men standing in front of the Center’s main doors. At the bottom of the photograph, a piece of yellowing tape read Darshan Family 1982. I looked at the photo to its right. 1983. Dominique cleared her throat; I ignored her, and followed the photographs around the room until I came to the last one—but no, it was two years old. There was no sign of my father in it. I did see Luke, looking young and clean, his hair short, one arm around Dominique’s waist, the other around the shoulders of a woman I didn’t recognize, all three thin and grinning. I put my hand against the wall where the next year’s photograph should have hung. It felt strangely warm.
“If that’s all,” Dominique said. “You’d better get ready for dinner.”
I didn’t ask Harriet and Nisha about my father. Instead, I asked them about Serena, but they only knew what everyone did, which was everything.
What was known about Serena: that she had been to the Center every summer since her birth, sixteen years ago. That she’d been born there. That she was part Tibetan, and was in fact related to the monk who had founded the place, and that’s why she always got the best tent. That’s why she was never required to do any of the required activities. That no, obviously she was the heiress of a fat, cigar-sucking oil tycoon, and had more money to her name than any of us could imagine, a number there isn’t even a number for, and that’s why she was never required to do any of the required activities. That actually she was a gypsy princess, and her father was a pirate king, and he’d left her on the Center’s doorstep in a basket when she was a squalling hot-faced baby and the kind-hearted Buddhists took her in and in all her years she had never left its boundaries. That no, she had left its boundaries many times, and had in fact been kicked out of thirteen boarding schools, seven of them military. That she had a sister who wasn’t really her sister, but her daughter—that old slog. That she’d slept with a movie star. That she’d slept with a teacher. That she was a virgin. That she was a witch. That, virgin or witch or virgin witch, she could fly, and that she would zip around at night, stark naked, and catch birds and rabbits with her hands, and rip out their throats with her teeth, and that their blood would run down her bare breasts in the moonlight. That she was no witch, but a werewolf, and about that moonlight, well—just wait until the fat moon, girls. Then you’ll see something! That it wasn’t thirteen boarding schools, but thirty, and that they hadn’t been boarding schools, but mental hospitals. That she could convince you of anything, anything at all, by looking directly into your eyes and telling you it was true.
And that might have been the end. I might have merely watched Serena and her friends all summer, bingeing on recycled rumors, working silently in the garden, confusing Luke with my father and also with the lover I thought I might have someday, or maybe sooner rather than later, why not, and forgotten why I was there, and what I wanted, and then gone back to my mother’s house without having changed a thing and let myself grow up just like her, logical and harsh and unbelieving. And maybe that would have been better, all things considered. In fact, I’m sure it would have been. But one afternoon, during free hours, I wandered toward the east side of the main building and came upon a group of visiting monks in maroon robes, huddled on their knees before the Center’s elaborate front entrance, building a bright sand mandala on the stones.
At first glance, the mandala seemed to be glowing, but soon I saw that it was only the richness of the colors, reds and golds and ultramarines that had been coaxed into lotus flowers and knots of eternity, spoked wheels and conch shells and tiny Buddhas. It occurred to me that all this careful artistry would soon be destroyed. The half-finished mandala was spread across what was likely the single most trafficked spot on the mountain. Once the monks stood and dusted themselves off, it wouldn’t be long before their work was scattered across the road.