Originally published in BEST WOMEN’S TRAVEL WRITING: VOLUME 8 (Travelers Tales)

The day I met Teddy, the heat and the grimy streets of Pune had mixed a muggy haze outside, which leached its way into the bookstore, slicking our foreheads and necks. As I examined the travel section, the bell above the door clanged and Teddy stood for a moment in the doorway, backlit by the sun, and then walkedto where I stood, so close I could hear him breathing. I watched from the corner of my eye as he scanned the horror novels and selected an old hardcover. I caught a glimpse of the curling binding: Carrie, by Stephen King. The bell above the bookstore door clanged again; hot wind blew in.

            Teddy was a tall black man with close, tight curls and white teeth save for a brown one toward the molars, which he’d learned to hide by keeping the left side of his mouth closed. Because of this, he talked with only half his mouth, and that, combined with the rotting tooth behind full lips, gave him a sly, crafty look. I wouldn’t learn why he smiled the way he did until later, of course, and so on the day he walked into the bookshop, all I saw was the crooked smile. He was careful about hiding the tooth, practiced at concealing it after so many years. We were four hours northeast of Mumbai, in a city known mostly for an ashram, built by the guru Osho.

            Teddy’s eyes sidled to mine as we browsed, but I looked away. Aman, my host, had warned me of certain people on my first night in this city. There were those who came to Pune for the money that could be made selling drugs to hippies at the ashram; there were the ones who slipped pills into tourist’s coffees at the German bakery, or took them away by motorbike into the night. Aman was a friend of a friend, a second cousin of a farmer I’d met picking apples near Dehra Dun, and I figured he was exaggerating a little, protective and trying to scare me into being extra-careful.  Still, I took the horror novel in Teddy’s hands as a sign; I kept my eyes averted and continued to browse.

            The books on the shelf before me bore beaten bindings and dated titles, and I set my attention on those. The USSR Today, one stated gloomily. Myanmar: Temples of Splendor, read the cracked yellow spine of another. When I tugged it down, opening the long cover that drew stickily back, a flattened moth broke off and spiraled to the floor. The pages showed Technicolor tourists admiring a crumbling, sunlit temple.

              Those books were like the maze-like, rutted streets outside, the old men on rickety gray bicycles, even the street-children, their cries at once pitiful and joyful, and the beggars with their practiced wheedling. I would remember each one as an enduring, Indian staple: worn by time, accustomed to crowds, doggedly resilient. Teddy, on the other hand, was fresh, with pearl buttons on his Western shirt and pointy shoes on his feet. “Have you read this?” I heard him ask. I looked up; he waved Carrie. I couldn’t help it: I smiled, shook my head, and pretended to look grim. No, he wasn’t at all like India’s enduring things: he was tall and upfront, his face unlined, his eyes flickering.

            “What’s wrong?” Teddy asked, seeing the look on my face. “What’s it about?” His question was mockingly innocent. Even if you knew nothing about Carrie, the cover, with the heroine’s body covered in cow’s blood, told you everything. “Just joking,” he said at my raised eyebrows, and flipped fast through the pages like he was just seeing how long it was, how closely set the type.

              “So, you can’t stand the gore?” he asked after another moment. When I looked at him, he winked. Be careful, a voice inside me said. But Teddy continued talking, and I kept listening. How welcome his English sounded, because everyone who’d told me that English was spoken all over India had been wrong. In the cities, sure—the language was spoken, marked with that charming and plucky accent, but it wasn’t nearly as common in India as I’d expected.

            “That Stephen King—he’s something else,” Teddy remarked, lowering his voice a little as an elderly Indian couple brushed past us. “He’s American, like you?”

I could tell by the way he said it that he knew the answer, but I nodded anyway. His own accent sounded imprecise—a little off-kilter, rolling and round. He was from South Africa, if I had to guess.

              He looked at me like he was waiting to hear me ask where he was from, but I remembered Aman’s warning and said nothing. Don’t push it. When I looked up from the Myanmar book again, he’d bent to examine the rest of the Stephen King section. I slid my book back beside the others on the shelf, and as I walked toward the door to leave I ran my fingertips along the soft spines once more. I love the way old books feel, the way they leave their scent on my hands, the way their pages can feel leathery or dusty, brittle and crackling or soft as butter. Anywhere you’ll go, you’ll find books, if you look hard enough. I like knowing that.

            Just before I reached the end of the stack, the pad of my first finger caught on the broken coil of a spiral-bound book, and I drew my hand back. I thought I felt a tiny spark as my fingers left the book. I stopped, peered at it, then eased it out from between the other books. It was a loose-leafed notebook, the kind you buy in American drugstores. I felt Teddy glance over, but in that moment, nothing could keep me from lifting the cover and looking inside. There was something funny about that notebook, I just knew. There’d been a spark.

            Handwriting choked the inside cover and the very first page: all Sanskrit and all in pencil, delicate marks made by a trembling hand. The words spilled onto the next page, and then the next and the next. In places, the writing ran over itself, and as I turned the pages the characters grew smaller and began to march up and down the margins and snake between each coil of the binding. It was as if the book had been the writer’s only source of paper for a very long time.

“Someone’s journal,” I heard Teddy whisper beside me.

            “Maybe,” I said. Put it back, the little voice said, and leave Teddy. That’s what Aman would want you to do. But I just couldn’t take my eyes from those pages. The notebook felt both heavy and flimsy, like the words were weighing down the cheap paper. Teddy didn’t try to take the book, didn’t say anything else, and together we looked at the pages the way little kids look at picture books without reading the words. The tightness of those lines; their growing frenzy.

            Toward the very end of the notebook, we came across a nearly clean page, startling and white like a flat, smooth stone in grass. The lines resembled veins on a wrist, and the only other thing on the pagewas a signature at the lower right. The signature was both scratchy and looping, if that can describe it: hard at its points, but soft in its curves. How had it happened, this page? I heard Teddy’s breath quicken a fragment. Had the writer waited as he filled up every other page for the person who would sign their name on the only blank one? I imagined a prisoner, or someone exiled. Someone banished. Was it a hastily scribbled prayer?

              Teddy brushed the signature delicately with one calloused thumb. I reached out myself and felt the way the writing cut into the page. It was impossible to tell whether the signature was a man’s or a woman’s, in the way it both rolled and cut into the page. I glanced at Teddy; he shrugged. When I looked down again I felt a little chill, even in the hot store: looking at that page was like seeing a secret.

             I felt increasingly guilty as I held the book in my hands. What was it doing on these shelves, anyway? I glanced toward the counter at the young shopkeeper, who was typing into her cell phone intently, perched on a stool with her legs crossed. I closed the book, knelt down, and slid it onto the lowest shelf, taking care to tuck it in so that it wasn’t easily visible to a browser. Teddy didn’t protest. It didn’t occur to me to even ask whether the book was for sale, for it seemed a mistake, placed on these shelves by accident when really it belonged in a locked drawer, or behind a pane of glass in a museum. For one selfish second I imagined waiting for Teddy to leave, and then slipping the book into my purse, hurrying back to Aman’s and holding it open again, this time alone.

            We stood there silently for a while, looking at the place where I’d slid the book back. What could be said, after all, except that those pages held a mystery? Teddy broke the spell—“Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked, and then, all of a sudden, I was aware once moreof the shouts of chai-wallas and the shotgun explosions of motorbike engines. No, I didn’t have time for coffee; meditations started in an hour and I still had to meet Aman beforehand. I shook my head.

            “Can I at least get your name?” Teddy asked, and I told him. What the hell; we’d already shared one secret. “I’m Teddy,” he replied, and plucked Carrie back up off the shelf. “I’m taking this one,” he added, grinning.

            “Good luck with that,” I said, and without looking again for the spiral-bound book on the shelf, I left the store and went back out into the sunshine.

            The ashram wasn’t like the rest of Pune, which was built, as far as I could tell, around the wide, trash-littered, dried-up river that divided the city. Aman lived on the northern side, opposite the ashram, up a little street lined with apartment buildings built in the seventies. Most of Pune’s streets were unpaved—except for the wide avenues that circled the city center—and were crowded with vegetable stands and bidi shops, vegetable wallas and munching cows. The deeper you walked into the old city’s heart, the further you stepped back in time: no cars, just cows and bike rickshaws and a crumbling red temple, centuries old. Strings of marigolds for sale.

            But the ashram was perpetually manicured, forever gated to keep the scented flowers protected, the wood floors gleaming and the servants immaculate in their starched white linens.Beggars gathered at the ashram gates, but guards planted there day and night made sure they’d never get inside. You could feel the shift as soon as you entered; gone were the noisy cars, the shouting hawkers, the trash on the ground. Fake waterfalls obliterated all unpleasant noise, and neatly shorn grass or tall, carefully planned stands of trees replaced the city’s broken pavement.

            I was late to meet Aman after the bookstore, even though I’d been rushing. It always took longer than I thought it would to race back to the flat and change into my red robe. Everyone at the ashram had to wear the red robe, even the guards and front-desk agents. The robes kept us all looking the same, and the most enthusiastic attendees wore the red robes everywhere. Those devout, red-robed souls stuck out like sore thumbs among the city’s chai wallahs and rickshaw drivers, fruit vendors and street children. As for me, I hated my robe—it chafed my skin and made me sweat profusely—but when I didn’t wear it to the ashram Aman took offense. He’d given it to me as a gift and wore his each day, washing it carefully in the evenings and putting it out on the little balcony to dry in the night.

            I didn’t tell Aman about Teddy as we sat sipping our tea before meditation. Of course I didn’t, for he’d only frown and warn me. Aman was a little man with large, dark eyes and glasses that magnified them further. He had no family, as far as I could tell, and I knew he took pride in showing me his city, his ashram, introducing me to his friends and neighbors. It was strange to be led around the city by this little man who’d taken me in with delight; sometimes, I just wanted to walk by myself. Still, I was grateful for Aman’s kindness, and I tried not to let my occasional grumpiness show.

            I didn’t mention the notebook to Aman, either. Instead, I held it in my mind like a precious stone, something to be guarded and saved. Aman and I just drank our tea and he went over our schedule: noon meditation, another at two, and then the White Robe ceremony in the evening.

            Aman had taken great pains to ensure that I attended at least one White Robe ceremony. In the first few days after I’d arrived, we’d both been too exhausted; meditation at five AM followed by afternoons of touring Pune tired us out. But today, Aman was determined. The morning before, he’d sent me across the street to his neighbor’s, a woman who lived with her teenaged daughter. They lent me a white robe stamped with cream-colored flowers. Aman laundered it again for me after I brought it home – just in case, he’d said. In case of what? I wanted to ask, but bit my tongue; anyway, I figured I knew why. While Aman kept his flat spotless, right down to the shoes lined up by the door, the neighbor’s house was just two rooms, smaller than Aman’s and stinking of cigarettes, the windows shut tight to preserve the air conditioning. I didn’t mind the smell much, just the close, freezing air. The television blared.

Aman drank down the last of his tea and we made our way to the meditation room. It was just like the website pictures: the whole room sparkled with mosaics made of mirrors. A few dozen people already sat cross-legged on the low, wide steps that rose toward the back of the room, their eyes closed. Silently, Aman and I joined them, and he settled into a lotus position, closing his eyes and slowing his breath.

            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.The candle smelled sickly sweet, and the room grew heavy andwarm with all the bodies. Notice your breath, I reminded myself, but my thoughts just shot away again. My mind circled over itself, reeling.

            Then I remembered the journal. I thought of the words that filled the pages, and the startling 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 talked and ate. Outside the German bakery, vendors displayed long racks of red and white robes for sale. I was the buyer; they were the sellers. 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 took off my red robe and slid on the white one. At least it was cooler, sewn of thin cotton instead of the red robe’s scratchy polyester. Aman emerged from the bathroom eventually, his hair slicked back with water, his white robe cloaked over him. He’d ironed the robe 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, following the other white-robers inside.

            “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, but didn’t see Aman inside. 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 PhD 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, like he’d dodged the question all his life. “I read them in the traditional, voo-dooey way.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to emphasize voo-doo. “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.”

            I thought about what he said, and I’ve wondered about it ever since. I’ve never asked my parents, or my brother, but his words have stayed with me.

            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. Foodsellers 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.      

            I got lost in the winding streets of Pune, and it was dark before I took a rickshaw back to Aman’s flat across the river. He’d been worried sick about me, it was clear; when I knocked on his door, he opened it immediately, relief in his eyes. His hair was greasy, like he’d run his hands through it over and over. He’d changed out of his white robe, but still had his black sneakers on.

            “Oh, dear,” he gushed, before I was even inside. “I heard about the robe.” He looked me over. “I guess I should have known. They’re very strict about the white robe.” He went to the stove to start tea. “Oh, darling,” he went on as he filled the kettle, “where were you? Oh, I’m so sorry. I apologize. What a long night you must have had.”

            He turned to look at me, to check whether indeed I’d had a long night, and perhaps to hear where, exactly, I’d been. But I couldn’t think of an excuse. How could I tell Aman that a palmist had seen something bad in my hand, and I’d wandered the city as a way to escape? I apologized, explained that I’d gone to the bookstore and lost track of time.

            Aman and I resumed our routine. For three more days we rose in the morning, walked across the river for morning meditation, sipped tea at the ashram. Aman and I did not attempt the White Robe ceremony again, nor did we speak of the night I’d been turned away.
            I tried to give the place another chance—Aman loved it so—but the sealed-off grounds and surly guards wore on me. The ashram tried to push India out, tried to erase the sounds, the pulse, of this country, and this was not what I’d come to India to find. So far, the closest thing to peace I’d encountered was the blank page in the journal, the one I could settle my mind upon. And so after my seventh day in Pune, while Aman and I stood in his kitchen, preparing tea, I told him I’d be leaving the next day. He was kind, helping me to buy a ticket to Goa, my next destination. I could tell he was sorry I hadn’t loved the ashram the way he did, and I was grateful he didn’t plead with me to stay.

            Aman still slept as I crept out the door in the darkness of early morning. I scribbled a note on the pad beside the phone: Aman: thanks for everything. Will call when I get to Goa.

            Then, as I let myself out, closing the door quietly behind me, I saw the envelope on the ground, tucked halfway under the door.

            It could have been mail, an electricity notice, some apartment document, but something compelled me to pick it up and lift the open lip. Perhaps it was the spark I felt on my fingertips, seeing the unmarked envelope lying there. Opening it, I saw that it wasn’t meant for Aman at all. I drew the page from the envelope slowly, knowing just what it was and at the same time hoping it was anything but.

            It was the empty page, with the signature in the lower right corner.

            The edge of the paper was ruffled from where it had been torn from the notebook. Ripped from its context, it had been folded and smudged, and now resembled trash. I held the envelope and the piece of paper with trembling hands. I remembered my train. With the papers still clutched in my hands, I ran down the stairs, through the gate, and onto the main road where I caught a rickshaw that would take me to the station.

            I don’t have the empty page anymore. When I got to Goa, I looked up the address of the bookstore and mailed it back. I don’t know why Teddy tore the page from the book, or how he knew where to leave it. But the memory stays with me, even as my time in the ashram has fallen away. The ashram was a place where I failed, spiritually and logistically, but Teddy and the empty page remain unanswered questions in my mind. Maybe, holding that journal in my hands, with Teddy looking over my shoulder, I did find what I was seeking in India. Maybe his smile was never sly after all; maybe he only used it to conceal something ugly from the world. Meanwhile, places that glimmer aren’t always made of gold, and the truest beauty can be found in the clamor of an unpaved road, or in the layers of paint on a building – creamy white beneath robin’s-egg blue, or coral cracking over teal. [maybe the thing about the building paint would be nice and work here? I think you’d have to leave part of it in at the beginning, though, and reference it again here?] Secrets sometimes live in dusty bookshops, even when they’re impossible to locate in the glistening reflection of a mirrored mosaic, or in the rhythm of a hundred people breathing.

            I think of the creased paper, the texture of the scrawled words, and I hope that whoever wrote that journal will someday come to claim it again, that they will open the cardboard cover, check for the scrawled name, and find the page where they left it, torn from the spiral rings but intact, blessed in its comparative bareness.

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