The Lost Girls (35 page)

This is the part where I'm supposed to explain, or at least obliquely reference, how we sealed the deal, but to my own surprise—we didn't. Even as our clothes were rapidly evaporating, I found myself nervously yammering on about my “no sex with
backpackers” rule and inquiring as to the recency of his last STD test. The latter was a standard question I always asked back in New York, but here, in a riverside hut in the middle of nowhere in Laos, it seemed a tad compulsive. As the words ejected from my mouth like bullets from a loaded handgun, I kicked myself for being such a neurotic freak.
Shut up! Shut up!
No wonder I hadn't gotten naked with a guy in so long!

Carter fielded my questions, then carried on as if I hadn't said anything at all, pressing me, but not too aggressively, to change my mind. When I didn't, we both fell asleep.

 

I
figured that after that night, Carter might hop the next bus out of town, but the following morning, not long after I'd done the flip-flop walk of shame, he came by my room to see if he could take Jen and me to breakfast. And then later he suggested that we hit up the river for more tubing. And then he proposed we take a field trip to the caves north of town. That night, after Jen and I went off in search of a place that sold pancakes for dinner, Carter tracked us down and asked if he could pull up a floor pillow.

Jen hardly said a word when Carter decided that we'd be traveling as a trio to Luang Prabang. “Hey, as long as you're having fun,” she'd said as we rerolled our clothes and wedged them into our packing cubes. “But just wondering…does he remind you of anyone?”

“Hmm…I guess he looks kinda like that actor from
Varsity Blues
.” I knew that's not what Jen was thinking, but I pretended to be oblivious.

There was something about Carter—his quarterback build, his sexy smile, the way he seemed right at home in any social setting—that reminded me of Baker. Once I'd realized it, my knee-jerk reaction had been to brush the comparison aside. Af
ter all, Carter was an entirely different person, and no way was I going to let the ghost of some relationship past prevent me from enjoying my present.

Before Jen could respond, or maybe shock me with her revelation, Carter arrived to hustle us to the bus stop. I glanced at his profile, and he turned to catch me staring.

 

L
ong before the three of us made the dizzying ride through the mountains to reach the ancient royal city of Luang Prabang, we'd heard extensive accounts of its charms. Travelers spoke of the place as a kind of Shangri-la, a modern-day utopia where locals lived in perfect harmony in the cradle of the Khan and Mekong rivers, surrounded by ripples of velvety green mountains under a smudged pink sky. The townspeople walked through their day unhurried and somehow never seemed to age. Even the children spoke in melodic whispers.

In light of this effusive praise, I'd assumed that the town would be a total letdown, like an independent film that everyone's hyped so much that watching it can only disappoint. That wasn't the case. Few places I've ever visited, before or since, have been imbued with such a sense of exoticism and intrigue, mystery, and romance as Luang Prabang.

In the morning, the sun rose just as the monks and their novices had spilled from temple yards into the frangipani-scented dawn, the amber light warming the backs of the almsgivers who tipped rice and other offerings into their bowls. As the town stretched from sleep into waking, wafts of fresh-baked baguettes, chocolatey pastries, and roasted espresso warmed the air. The scent was a subtle reminder, as was the nineteenth-century architecture, that the country was once a French colony. Now an independent nation, Laos has held on to the civilized parts of European culture while cultivating its own traditional one.

As we strolled through town, men lounging against idling taxis suggested they'd be happy to take us anywhere we'd like to go for just a dollar per person. Women rode past on yellow bicycles or bright red motorbikes, their umbrellas held at attention to shield their skin from the light. Later on, they greeted us shyly as we approached to buy one of the mango-, pineapple-, or banana-flavored cakes they sold from pop-up card tables.

After dusk the main road through town transformed into a well-organized night market. Strings of neatly spaced bulbs ran down the length of it like the dips and arcs on a carousel; patches of fabric were placed end to end to form quilted sidewalks. Within their appointed squares, families sold silk scarves, elaborately embroidered robes, slippers with elephants and monkeys marching across them, hand-stitched pillows, duvet covers and throws, star-shaped lanterns punched with tiny geometric patterns, and hanging paper umbrellas that, when you stared at them together, looked like a school of pastel jellyfish floating upward into the night sky.

After shopping stoked our appetites, we filled our stomachs with all manner of delicacies—dumplings, curries, stews, noodles, rice cones, and other unidentifiable dishes—for just 50 cents a bowl. Then later, when the fatigue of the day set in, we collapsed into beds at one of the local spas and got an acupressure massage so powerful and restorative I almost cried from the release of toxins and uncorked emotion.

Once we'd all plunked down $3 apiece to sleep in a guesthouse that reminded me of a Swiss chalet, Carter and I shared dinner at an outdoor café overlooking a firestorm sunset on the Mekong. I decided this place was about as close to backpacker heaven as I might ever get.

And whether it was the spell that the town cast over me, a smoky haze of romance that clouded out my earlier apprehen
sion, or just the patient, unhurried way Carter walked me back to his room later that night, I no longer felt any hesitation as we locked the door behind us. Tipping backward in his arms toward the bed and feeling his kiss on my throat, I knew I was finally ready to break the rules.

INDIA/SHRADDHA ASHRAM
NOVEMBER

I
awoke shivering, drenched in sweat. Inside, the dorm was silent. Outside, the wild dogs were howling as if it were a full moon. My bed felt like a Tilt-a-Whirl ride at the state fair, and every time I closed my eyes I feared I'd fall out and crash to the ground. A kaleidoscope of color bursts exploded in front of my eyes.

The virus that had been spreading through the ashram must have hit me as I slept. I considered waking Chloe or running to find one of the swamis for help. I was suddenly terrified that I'd die there alone in an ashram in India, thousands of miles away from home and everyone I loved. Some part of me
knew
I was being irrational, that I was just feeling ill and isolated in the darkness in a foreign land. But my mind had its own force. I didn't want to disappear in the dark on that lumpy mattress. I wanted to matter to something. I wanted to matter to someone. In my feverish haze, a thought surfaced that I'd kept buried deep: I feared I didn't truly matter to anyone. If I passed right then in the night, would I be just like a ghost who faded quietly away?

Managing to drag myself out from under my mosquito net, I splashed cold water on my face and fumbled around in the
shadows for my uniform so I could slip out of my sweat-soaked pajamas. Then I crawled back into bed and lost consciousness.

The next thing I remembered was waking to sunlight streaming through the empty dorm. I'd let my overactive mind go to extremes in the dark, and felt silly in the light of day.

Sitting up in bed slowly to test if the dizziness was gone, I felt my breath stop when I saw a black tarantula—whose body alone was the size of my hand—poised menacingly at the foot of my bed. I didn't stop to think about whether it was a nightmare but could only react. My eyes were swollen and bloodshot from the virus pumping through my body, but pure fear jolted me with enough energy to jump out of bed and run down the length of the dorm.

I remembered in too much vivid detail seeing a similar hairy, eight-legged creature while cleaning the bathroom stalls, then hearing the sound of its body being squashed by the Indian woman in charge of karma yoga, who'd killed it with a rock after I'd screamed.

Before coming to the ashram, I'd known that learning to sit with myself, to meditate, to just
be
, would take discipline. It wasn't supposed to be easy. But throw in culture shock, a fever-inducing virus, and waking up to a tarantula, and I could almost understand the feeling an alcoholic might have when she hits rock bottom—spinning out of control.

After making sure the tarantula had moved on, I used all my remaining strength to drag myself back to bed, too weak to make a getaway. I didn't move for hours, until Chloe stopped by with tea and fruit after I didn't show up when she waited for me at lunch. Then I fell asleep again, as still as one of the yogis carved in stone by the lake.

 

B
y day three of the illness I finally summoned up the energy to make it to a lecture. Sitting there on the floor, my body
sometimes felt as if it were vibrating—and just thinking about doing a downward dog gave me a head rush. But I was improving, and at least I'd felt well enough to leave the confines of my bed.

The day's lesson was about karma. Yogis think the body is merely a vehicle for the soul, subject to reincarnation, until you finally get it right and reunite with the universal consciousness, or God. In yoga land, there's no such thing as instant gratification, and the road to cleaning up your karma can be long indeed, spanning dozens of lifetimes.

As I had been raised a Catholic, the concept of reincarnation was totally foreign to me. I had been taught that we get only one life before we hopefully make it to Heaven by the grace of God, following the teachings of Jesus, and making sacraments, such as confessing sins to a priest.

Still, I found comfort in that rather than looking to a priest to serve as a sort of middleman to God, my yoga manual said, “Self-realization is god-realization.” That the whole purpose of life is to find your personal path that will help you connect to the spark of divinity everyone has inside him or her. I took this to mean that everyone has different gifts. Taking the time to figure out our passions is not selfish because once we find our calling, we'll feel that we have a solid purpose and a connection to something bigger. This helps bring peace.

“Regardless of your religion, your most important duty on this earth is to find your true self, and yoga's regime of self-discipline can help you get there,” Swami said. “Only once you know yourselves are you able to know God, because the two are not separate but one and the same.”

Once the swami finished his lecture, students with questions walked up to a microphone at the front of the prayer hall. Chloe rose to get up from her place next to me. “Swami, how would you explain why some people get diseases like AIDS and cancer and others don't?” she asked.

“People get diseases such as AIDS and cancer because they have impure minds or are paying off bad karma from a past life,” he stated matter-of-factly. I'd consciously tried to be open to the ashram's lessons and reserve judgment until the end. How else was I ever going to learn anything new? But I wasn't going to listen to the swami try to say sick people are at fault. I thought of Esther being left on Sister Freda's doorstep with a near-deadly case of malaria. I was so angry, I was ready to walk out.

“What about this eye virus that's going around? What's the cause of all the people at the ashram getting sick?” Chloe asked.

“Can everyone who has
not
gotten sick please raise your hands?” the swami asked. When more than half of the students did so, he shrugged as if his point had been proven. “People get sick because of karma, or else everyone would become ill.”

Feeling as though the ashram leaders saw me as a karmic leper, I walked outside to sit on the steps with my head between my knees. It was then that Vera, the bearded Indian man who served as kitchen master, came up beside me.

“Holly, how are you feeling? Like you have a weight on your head?” he asked, gently placing a hand on my shoulder. Even Vera had caught the virus and had spent the last week hiding behind dark sunglasses to veil his bloodred eyes.

“Vera, I have to leave,” I said, the decision suddenly pouring out of me. I didn't know where I would go, I just knew I didn't want to stay here. I
couldn't
stay here anymore.

I felt Chloe sit down on the other side of me. “Holly, please, please don't go,” she said, pleading. “You have only a week and a half left of the program. If you're going to be sick, you can be sick anywhere. You might as well recover here and at least have your teaching certificate to show for it.”

Until then, the only treatment I'd received for the virus had
been rosewater eye drops from the on-site ayurvedic clinic, which did nothing to heal and only stung my eyes, making them redder. Chloe offered to take me to the hospital so I could get some prescription meds to speed up the healing process, but Vera insisted that one of the staff escort me. As Vera helped me into the rickshaw, he whispered that he, too, had given up on the rosewater eye drops and had healed quickly after using prescription drugs.

 

B
ack from the clinic a few hours later, with three different kinds of pills, ointment, and eye drops, I didn't walk straight back into the ashram. Instead, I spun in the opposite direction and sat by the lake to think. Why had I come? Why should I stay? Intentionally sticking with a situation in which I was miserable felt foolish, especially after I'd seen real hardship and knew how truly lucky I was to have so many opportunities. I wanted to run back out into the world, to be with other people and not just in my own head.

The lions roared in the safari park across the way, and Hindi music carried over the water's sleek surface from tinny radio speakers playing in one of the nearby shacks. My T-shirt clung to my back from sweat, and I tipped my face to soak up the sun's rays.

I felt broken from all the rebelling my mind and body were doing in the ashram. Using all my energy to try to control my impulses had left me feeling depleted and empty. Ironically, the sheer emotional exhaustion had left my mind more silent than when I'd been actively trying to rein it in.

Why did yoga school feel more like boot camp or an emotional breakdown? I suddenly remembered the old Alcoholics Anonymous saying “Let go, and let God.” What if coming to the ashram was part of a larger plan, a lesson I needed to learn?
Would Sister Freda give up because she wasn't “happy”? Would she quit when she felt uncomfortable?

Sitting there, I recalled how the swamis had compared our minds to the lake: emotions such as worry, sadness, happiness, and desire created waves that kept us from seeing the bottom—our deeper, true selves. I could leave the ashram, but I couldn't keep running away from myself. I had to get to the bottom of my restlessness if I was ever going to be able to sit with myself peacefully.

I stared at the water, which was clear and blue. I saw sunlight glint off a school of fish far below the surface, their slick bodies effortlessly twirling near the lake's muddy floor. A flower floated by on the wind, maybe an offering carried away from one of the dozens of shrines peppering the ashram grounds.

Frustrated, I grabbed a smooth, flat rock and flung it at the water, watching the ripples radiate out from its center as it skipped once and then twice. I watched as the stone began to sink. Once it hit bottom, did it stay there forever, down in the darkness?

There's a metaphor in Buddhism about the lotus flower, which starts out growing on the bottom of all this muck and then rises through the swampy darkness into the light. When it finally gets there, it turns into what it was meant to be, opening up into something beautiful. But the flower doesn't open instantly; it has to go through the muck to get to the light. If I ran away from my own moments of darkness, would I never blossom into the person I was meant to be?

I recalled another Buddhist sentiment from a book of quotes I'd gotten back when I was a happiness editor: “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.”

I can't say exactly how long I sat there by myself, looking out
at the lake. Picking up another rock and aiming it at the water, I lifted myself up without waiting for the rock to hit bottom. I was going to finish what I'd started—I was staying at yoga school.

 

E
verything at the ashram became easier once I'd taken the prescribed meds and had gotten my health back. I hadn't mastered sitting still and quieting my mind, but my attitude had shifted. I wasn't going to fight myself—or the swamis—anymore. I began to suspect that the rigid schedule, the two meals a day, six hours of sleep a night, and four hours of yoga, was as much about pushing students toward their breaking point in order to reveal their real, raw selves as it was about discipline. But was the road to enlightenment supposed to be so uncomfortable? As the rest of the students filed out after class, I walked toward the stage where the swami was sitting in his standard lotus position.

He looked up at me and smiled gently. “You look like you're feeling better, Holly.” Telling him I was back to my old self, I went ahead and asked him the point of all this self-discipline.

“You're telling us that we have to learn to control our bodies and minds in order to know our true selves and to know God. But our instincts and senses are essentially programmed to lead us away from the divine—indulging in food and sex and sleep feels good. Why would God hardwire us this way?”

His luminous gray eyes softened. “That's an existential question, really,” he said. I suddenly felt sorry for him—he had a tough job of drilling self-discipline into all of those critics.

“We're not talking about living a life without flavor. What we're saying is that attachments and desires diminish pleasure,
because you can't fully enjoy something that you fear losing.” I wasn't sure if it was really possible to fully love something or someone without being attached. Did Elan understand this, and that was why he had let me go on my own journey? Had my own attachments to my relationship kept me from being fully present on the road?

I went to sit in the prayer hall to let his answer sink in. For the first time, I saw the point. The swamis weren't saying that we had to live an austere life in order to connect with God. It wasn't about forgoing fun and sidestepping love and banning rich foods forever. Rather, it was about diving fully into all of those things without holding back out of fear that they'd end. Because, inevitably, everything comes to an end.

I thought I'd learned that lesson already on the road. Hadn't I felt more alive when I'd stopped to buy postcards from Padma outside the Taj than when I'd tried to shut out the beggars? Even anxiety held meaning if I simply paid attention to it rather than pretended it didn't exist.

When we were just two days away from graduation, I plodded into the dark prayer hall for morning meditation and sat cross-legged on the floor, just as I'd done almost every other morning for a month. Incense filled the air, and everything was silent. Except, of course, for my mind.

I prepared for another hour of sitting with myself. Not silently and not comfortably, but I guess that's why they call it a meditation “practice”—because it's not perfect. Instead, I simply listened to my breath coming in and out. I'd given up trying to force anything to happen while I sat there. I'd just accepted that I'd devote myself to sitting, and the acceptance somehow made it feel less tough. I'd stopped struggling. I let go, and I let God.

Suddenly I fell into myself. I don't know how else to describe it. There were no flashing lights or tingling feelings. I was aware
that the world outside my mind kept turning, but for the briefest of moments, I felt blissfully still and was wrapped in a light, peaceful sensation. I felt myself smile from the inside, feeling that nothing outside myself would make me feel complete, because nothing was missing.