by David Michie
For a while Mrs. Finlay wept quietly into her tissue. Serena gestured toward Kusali for a glass of water.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized after a while. “I’m so …”
Serena shushed her.
“We had a little one, just like her,” Mrs. Finlay said, gesturing toward me. “It took me back. All those years ago in Scotland, Sapphire was so special to us. She used to sleep on our bed every night.” She gulped. “Things were different then.”
A waiter arrived with a glass of water. Mrs. Finlay took a sip.
“They are very special,” agreed Serena, glancing at me.
But Mrs. Finlay wasn’t listening as she stared at the table while putting down the glass. She seemed transfixed. Until, that is, she somehow felt moved to confess, “Gordon—that’s my husband—is hating being here.” She said it as though unburdening herself of a terrible admission.
Serena allowed a moment to pass before telling her, “That’s not an unusual reaction, you know. For Western visitors coming here, not sure what to expect, India can be a real shock.”
Mrs. Finlay shook her head. “No, it’s not that. We both know India well.” For the first time she met Serena’s gaze. “Gordon has been here many times over the years. That’s why he chose it as the place to spend our first month of retirement. Only … it isn’t working.”
She seemed to be drawing strength from Serena’s compassionate presence, her voice less broken as she continued. “He’s just had a big success, you see, selling a business after twenty-odd years building it up. Gordon’s a very hard-working man. Determined. You can’t begin to imagine the sacrifices he’s made. Years and years of eighteen-hour workdays. Missing out on vacations. Always having to leave birthday parties and dinners and family celebrations early. ‘It will all be worth it’—that’s what he’s always said. ‘I’ll retire early, and we’ll have the time of our lives.’ He always believed it. I did, too. It didn’t matter how much we had to give up. We’d be happy when …” She looked pensive for a while, then began again. “It was all right for the first couple of weeks. He was a changed man, free to do as he liked. But it didn’t last. Suddenly there were no calls or messages or meetings. No decisions to make. No one wanting to know what he thought. It was as if an elastic band that had been stretched to the limit suddenly let go.
“When he was working so frenetically,” she went on, “the idea of all the time in the world seemed like heaven. Instead, he’s finding it a terrible burden. He didn’t bring his laptop with him. It was a part of his old life. But when he goes out in the mornings—he says for a walk—I’m sure he’s going to one of those Internet places.” Mrs. Finlay was looking at Serena, whose even expression gave not the slightest inkling that she knew Mrs. Finlay’s suspicions were correct.
“And he drinks. He’s never been like that before—drinking during the day. I know it’s because he’s bored and miserable and doesn’t know what to do with himself. He said as much this morning before he left the hotel. I’ve never seen him so unhappy.”
As she welled up again, Serena reached out and squeezed her arm. “This, too, will pass,” she murmured.
Not trusting herself to speak, Mrs. Finlay nodded.
Mrs. Finlay left the café a short while later, and the couple didn’t appear for lunch that day. Only time would tell exactly how she and her husband might resolve their unexpected disappointment; although the subject of the miserable millionaire came up again later that evening at the café.
It was approaching 11 P.M., and the half dozen or so tables of diners remaining were on dessert and coffee. Serena looked up to where Sam was sitting on his stool behind the bookstore counter and caught his eye with a questioning gesture. He responded with a thumbs-up. Only one browser remained in the shop: a pair of ankles and the bottom of a monk’s red robe peaked out from beneath one of the bookstore partitions.
Serena headed toward the bookstore for the end-of-the-day ritual. Two heads lifted up from the wicker basket under the counter; Marcel and Kyi Kyi were focusing on the promising direction of Serena’s footsteps.
She reached the top of the short flight of steps to the bookstore at the same time the last remaining customer was leaving.
“Lobsang!” She greeted him warmly, stepping forward to embrace him. Lobsang had become a frequent visitor to the bookstore, finding on its shelves a range of Buddhist and recent nonfiction titles that were dazzling compared to what had previously been available in Dharamsala. And thanks to the fact that he and Serena went way back, she had insisted he be given the most generous available discount.
Since their early teen years when they had gotten to know each other while working as Mrs. Trinci’s kitchen hands, their lives had taken them on very different trajectories. While Serena had been away in Europe, Lobsang, whose incisive intellect and outstanding language skills had been evident early on, had won a scholarship to Yale to study semiotics. Returning to India to work as the Dalai Lama’s translator, he had also evolved in other ways. In particular there was a calming quality about his presence to which other people invariably responded, sometimes visibly leaning back in their chairs and relaxing their shoulders or breaking into a smile.
“Sam and I are about to have a hot chocolate. Would you like to join us?” asked Serena.
For all Lobsang’s tranquility, I noticed that something about Serena brought about a change in him. He seemed to find her company a cause of great amusement.
“That would be wonderful,” he replied enthusiastically, as he followed her toward the two sofas.
A short while later Kusali arrived with hot chocolate for the humans and a saucer of dog biscuits, which he held over the coffee table for a suspenseful moment, inciting the dogs’ desperate anticipation, before placing it down with a Pavlovian clink that triggered their frenetic scramble toward the bookstore.
For my own part, I hopped off the shelf and stretched out my back paws, flaring one claw then the other, before crossing the room and nimbly leaping onto the sofa, landing between Serena and Lobsang, who sat facing Sam.
“HHC is very lucky to have you,” observed Lobsang, as Serena leaned forward to pour my saucer of milk. “Especially with His Holiness away.”
“We feel lucky to have her,” said Serena, stroking me. “Don’t we, Rinpoche?”
She hadn’t yet placed the saucer on the floor, so I stepped onto the coffee table and began lapping up milk.
“Do you allow cats on the table?” Lobsang asked, amused by my audacity.
“Not as a rule,” replied Serena, regarding me with an indulgent smile.
For a while all three humans watched in silence as I lapped up the milk with a lusty purr. Was it feline telepathy or just my imagination that Sam wasn’t pleased to have Lobsang join their usual end-of-the-day get-together?
Serena asked Lobsang about the project he was currently working on, and he mentioned the commentary on an esoteric text by Pabongka Rinpoche that he was helping translate. Then conversation moved on to what had happened during the day. Serena told them about her encounter with Mrs. Finlay, and how Mr. Finlay’s hard-fought vision for early retirement had turned out to be such a bitter disappointment.
Lobsang listened to the story, sympathy pervading his immense calm, before he said, “There are few of us, I think, who don’t make the same mistake. Believing in I’ll be happy when I retire. When I have such and such an amount of money. When I achieve this particular goal.” He paused, smiling at the absurdity of it. “We create our own superstitions and then persuade ourselves to believe in them.”
“Superstitions?” challenged Sam.
Lobsang nodded. “Inventing a relationship between two things that have no connection, like a broken mirror and bad luck, or a black cat and good luck.”
Lifting my face from the saucer, I looked over at him at that precise moment. All three of them laughed.
“Or a Himalayan cat,” offered Serena, “and extreme good luck.”
I resumed my lapping.
Lobsang continued. “We begin to believe that our happiness depends on a certain outcome or person or lifestyle. That’s the superstition.”
“But I have shelves and shelves here”—Sam gestured behind him—“filled with books on goal-setting and positive thinking and manifesting abundance. Are you saying they’re all wrong?”
Lobsang chuckled. “Oh, no, that’s not what I mean. It can be useful to have goals. Purpose. But we should never believe that our happiness depends on achieving them. The two are really quite separate.”
There was silence while Sam and Serena digested this, broken only by the sound of my lapping and the dogs’ snuffling for crumbs under the table.
“If any object, achievement, or relationship was a true cause of happiness, then whoever had such a thing should be happy. But no such thing has ever been found,” continued Lobsang. “What’s saddest of all is that if we believe that our happiness depends on something we don’t currently have, then we can’t be happy here and now. Yet here and now is the only time we can be happy. We can’t be happy in the future; it doesn’t yet exist.”
“And when the future arrives,” reflected Serena, “we discover that whatever we believed would give us happiness doesn’t make us as happy as we thought. Look at Gordon Finlay.”
“Exactly,” Lobsang said.
Sam was shifting in his seat. “There was a neuroscience study on this not so long ago. I think it was called ‘The Disappointment of Success.’ It looked at pregoal attainment versus postgoal attainment. Pregoal attainment—the positive feeling people get working toward a goal—is more intense and enduring in terms of brain activity than postgoal attainment, which elicits a short-lived feeling of release.”
“Followed by the question, Is that all there is?” suggested Serena.
“The journey really is more important than the destination,” confirmed Lobsang.
“Which only makes me wonder all the more about going back to Europe,” said Serena.
“You might stay?” Lobsang asked, his voice full of hope. When she looked at him, he held her gaze, not just for one or two seconds but until she looked away.
“The night of the Indian banquet was the start of it,” Serena explained. “It made me realize how much more fulfilling it is to work for people who really appreciate what I’m doing, instead of for people who go out just to be seen in the right places. Why put myself through all that stress? Look at what happened to Gordon Finlay. He’s one of the greatest success stories of the decade in the restaurant world. His success is what tens of thousands of people aspire to. But it made him such a workaholic that he just can’t stop. What’s the point of having all the success in the world if you have no inner peace?”
Beneath Serena’s words I detected other unspoken concerns. Over the past weeks, I’d watched her greeting old school friends who came to visit with their husbands and children. Each time it seemed to me that she was feeling pulled in a very different direction.
The next morning, Gordon Finlay arrived at 10:30 A.M. From the moment he entered the café he looked like a man unburdened. Making his way to his banquette, he ordered an espresso and chose a copy of The Times of India from the newsstand.
After flicking through the paper and finishing his coffee, he got up and approached Serena at the counter. “My wife tells me she came in yesterday and you were very kind to her,” he began in his Scottish burr. “I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate that. Just as I appreciate your … discretion.”
“Oh! You’re welcome.”
“This place has been like an oasis for me,” he continued, glancing at the Buddhist thangkas hanging on the walls. “We’ve decided to go home. No idea what I’m going to do, but I can’t sit around drinking two bottles of wine a day. My liver wouldn’t last long.”
“I’m sorry things haven’t worked out the way you planned,” said Serena. Then almost as an afterthought she added, “I hope there was something about India that you enjoyed?”
Gordon Finlay looked thoughtful for a moment before he nodded. “Funny, the thing that immediately springs to mind is helping that kid down the road get his act together.”
Serena laughed. “Happy Chicken?”
“He’s doing a roaring business,” Finlay said.
“Are you a shareholder?”
“No. But I was only too glad to set him up. He reminded me so much of me when I was starting out: starved for capital, surrounded by competitors, and no product differentiation. All it took was a couple of hundred pounds and a bit of training. Now he’s acing it!”
As he spoke, Gordon Finlay seemed to grow taller and stand straighter. For the first time there was a glimpse of the commanding CEO he had been until so recently.
“Perhaps,” suggested Serena, “you’ve just described what you might do next.”
“I couldn’t rescue every street vendor in the world!” he protested.
“No. But you would change the lives of the ones you did. You obviously got a lot of satisfaction from helping just the one. Imagine the satisfaction from helping many!”
Gordon Finlay stared at her for the longest time, a glint illuminating his dark, observant eyes, before he said, “You know, you just might be on to something.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Boredom. It’s a terrible affliction, is it not, dear reader? And as far as I can tell, it’s an almost universal one. On an everyday level, there’s the boredom of being wherever you are and doing whatever task lies ahead, whether you’re an executive with a dozen dreary reports to produce before month’s end or a cat on a filing cabinet with a whole empty morning to doze through before those deliciously crispy goujons of sea trout—perhaps with some clotted cream to follow—are served for lunch down at the café.
How often I overhear tourists say, “I can’t wait to get back to civilization”—the very same visitors, I expect, who for several months earlier were eagerly crossing off the days on their calendars in keen anticipation of their once-in-a-lifetime trip to India. “I wish it were Friday” is another variation on the same theme, as if we must somehow endure five days of oppressive tedium for those precious two when we may actually enjoy ourselves.
And the problem goes even deeper. Raising our heads from this particular batch of month-end reports or this specific empty morning on the filing cabinet, when we think of all those still to come, our boredom slides into a more profound existential despair. What’s the point of it all? We may find ourselves wondering, Why bother? Who cares? Life can seem a bleak and endless exercise in futility.
For those beings with a broader perspective of Planet Earth, boredom is sometimes accompanied by a darker companion—guilt. We know that compared to many others, our lives are actually quite comfortable. We don’t live in a war zone or in abject poverty; we don’t have to dwell in the shadows on account of our gender or religious opinions. We’re free to eat, dress, live, and walk however we like, thank you very much. But even so, we’re bored beyond measure.
In my own case, if I can claim mitigating circumstances, the Dalai Lama had been away for some days. There was none of the usual bustle of activity and no visits from Mrs. Trinci, lavish with both food and affection. Most of all, there was none of the reassuring energy and love I felt simply by being in His Holiness’s presence.
And so, I set out for the café one morning heavy of heart and slow of paw. My customary dawdling was even more dawdling than usual; just moving my rear legs felt like a Herculean effort. Why was I even doing this? I asked myself. Delicious though lunch might be, eating it would take me all of five minutes, and then it would be a long wait until dinner.
Little did I realize how events were about to shake me from my lethargy.
It all began with Sam behaving in an unusually urgent manner, leaping off his stool in the bookstore and hurrying down the steps to the café.
“Serena!” He stage-whispered to catch her attention. “It’s Franc!” He gestured behind him to his computer screen. Franc was in the
habit of Skyping for business updates, but his calls were always on Monday morning at 10 A.M. when the café was quiet, not in the early afternoon when activity was near its peak.
Serena hurried over to the bookstore counter. Sam turned up the speakers and opened a screen revealing Franc in a living room. There were several people behind him sitting on a sofa and in armchairs. His expression was strained.
“My father died last night,” Franc announced without preamble. “I wanted to tell you before you heard from anyone else.”
Serena and Sam offered sympathy and condolences.
“Even though it was inevitable, it’s still a shock,” he said.
A woman got up from the sofa behind Franc and came toward the screen. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without him!” she wailed.
“This is my sister, Beryle,” said Franc.
“We all loved him so much,” sobbed Beryle. “Losing him is so hard!”
Murmurs of agreement came from behind them.
“It was good that I could be here for him at the end,” Franc said, seeking to regain control of the conversation. Even though his relationship with his father had been difficult, his return home had come at the insistence of his feisty lama, Geshe Wangpo. One of the senior most lamas at Namgyal Monastery, Geshe Wangpo was uncompromising on the importance of actions over words and others over self.
“I’m glad that Geshe Wangpo persuaded me,” Franc continued. “My father and I were able to resolve …”
“We’re having a big funeral,” interrupted an elderly, disembodied man’s voice from behind Franc.
“Very big funeral,” chimed in someone else, evidently impressed with the scale of it.
“Over two hundred people are coming to say goodbye,” added Beryle, looming up in the screen again. “That’s the main thing right now, isn’t it? We all need closure, all of us.”