On 5 May 1975, as his flight to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, was about to take off, Charles was so engrossed in conversation with a French couple that he was unaware of the covert glances of a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt who sat several seats in front of him. She was a serious-looking girl with a sharp, intense face, deep blue eyes, and dark shoulder-length hair. When she overheard Charles speaking French, her own language, she was pleased.
This was the fifth day of Marie-Andrée Leclerc’s three-week holiday in India and the first time she had travelled overseas from her small town in Quebec. As her companion, a young, balding accountant from Montreal, fastened his seatbelt, Marie-Andrée looked back at the Eurasian man. She was determined to meet him.
Below, the landscape changed abruptly as the Air India DC9 crossed the barren Pir Panjal Range and dropped into the Vale of Kashmir. The terraced hillsides were patched with neat squares of gold and green, and streams ran down from the Himalayas into a network of connecting lakes which glinted up at the passengers like mirrors as the plane descended.
The famous houseboats on the lakes were rented from their proprietors at the Government Tourist Centre in the capital, four miles from the airport. It was there amid the crowd of gesticulating Kashmiri landlords and earnestly bargaining tourists that Marie-Andrée caught sight of Charles again. He was arguing in English with a Kashmiri man in an embroidered skull cap and waistcoat, with the patient smile of an old hand. Although she couldn’t understand what was being said, it was obvious that the man with the compelling Eurasian face was controlling the situation. The Kashmiri almost jumped up and down as he spoke: ‘My dear sir, there are three double bedrooms, each one with a flushing toilet, meals included, also morning and afternoon tea. Fifty rupees a night, worth double.’
‘We need only two of the bedrooms,’ Charles said, ‘so why should we pay for more?’ He turned to his new French friends. ‘This man is unreasonable. There are plenty of other houseboats.’ He knew it was a good deal but the locals despised bad bargainers.
‘It has all the luxuries, sir,’ the Kashmiri pressed on. ‘Fully carpeted, with antiques, sterling silver. You will find it greatly to your liking. A very lovely view of a Moghul fort, sir, very high standard, worth the money.’
‘No, we won’t pay for a room we don’t want.’
‘May I suggest, sir, that you save money by sharing with other tourist people? It is often done.’ He gestured at an uncertain-looking couple standing nearby, and Charles’ glance lighted upon Marie-Andrée and her friend, Jules Dupont. He introduced himself and explained the problem. Yes, they would be happy to rent the third bedroom, said Jules. Grinning like a cat in a TV commercial, the landlord hurried them all into his rickety sedan for the drive to Dal Lake.
Intersecting streams gushed beside the road; ducks paddled, dogs barked, women sat on the ground selling apricots. They drove down a track through an apple orchard and pulled up beside the lake. The giant cedars and willows shaded the banks and the huge, fanciful houseboats, each one outdoing the next in its display of woodcarving and paintwork, bobbed gently in the still water that reflected the peaks of the Himalayas.
The landlord led the group to a boat built of yellow walnut carved with Islamic curlicues and with pink gauze curtains fluttering at its windows. The five travellers filed across the gangway to a front porch lined with pots of geraniums and chintz cushions. A miniature flight of steps at the stern led down to the water, where a skiff was tied.
The landlord proudly showed them the rooms and introduced the cook, a stooped old man with a white beard and turban who ran out to show them his book of testimonials dating back to well-fed generals of the British Raj. That afternoon everyone stretched out in deck-chairs on the roof of the houseboat while the bearer served afternoon tea, a British tradition continued on most of the craft on the lake. The white peaks of the mountains turned pink in the setting sun. A man in a long skiff piled with roses and lotus blossoms paddled from boat to boat, calling out: ‘Flowers, groovy flowers for your sweetheart.’
As Charles watched, Marie-Andrée stood at the railing looking out across the beauty of the scenery. She reminded him of Chantal.
Marie-Andrée had the same proud way of throwing back her head, and the same apparent stubbornness which, Charles knew, he could overcome, and transform into eternal devotion. Chantal, he believed, still loved him. The divorce had become final while he was in jail. It had been granted on the grounds of his incorrigible criminality. One day, though, they would meet again and he would hold her and Madhu in his arms. In the meantime, Marie-Andrée was obviously very attracted to him, and he liked her. He decided to play a little game. The outcome mattered little; he was not about to become involved again with a woman. Once was more than enough.
In the days that followed, Marie-Andrée, Jules Dupont and the French couple toured the sights of Kashmir. The boatman picked them up at dawn in a shikara, a long skiff cushioned and curtained like a sultan’s bedroom, and the two couples floated off to the bazaars and carpet factories, the lakeside palaces and the terraced Moghul Gardens.
Marie-Andrée had loved Jules. At home in Quebec she had spent all her weekends and spare nights with him. They had even built a small cottage in the country together. She’d been happy, except for the times when his mother came to the house and his manner would change and he became nervous and cruel. Was it to show his mother he preferred her to Marie-Andrée? Still, they had loved each other and when he proposed one Christmas she accepted. Excited, she designed her own wedding dress. Her family was happy for her and she dreamed of children. But as it came close to the wedding, it became clear that Jules Dupont had not yet told his mother about his plans. When she did hear the news from the next-door neighbours, she insisted that the young couple must come and live with her. Marie-Andrée said no. She would not marry Jules Dupont. The wedding was cancelled but they remained friends.
In Kashmir, Charles always refused any invitations to join the two couples’ touristy outings. Once he took them all to dinner at an expensive restaurant in the town, but usually he went off on his own or stayed on the boat. Marie-Andrée realized the holiday would soon be over, they would go their separate ways, and life would resume its provincial regularity for the girl from Quebec.
Charles seemed aloof to her, as though he had more important matters on his mind than just enjoying himself. He gave her the impression of being very profound and clever. He spent his time reading and from the fragments of his conversation he always seemed to be speaking from vast experience of the world, a well-spring of learning mixed with street argot and a suggestion of bright lights in faraway cities. He was wealthy, successful, charming, mysterious, and his physical presence electrified her. Sometimes, passing down the narrow corridor to their bedrooms, their bodies would touch in a way that disturbed her.
There seemed no situation in which he was not in control. At first, the floating merchants had besieged the boat, trying to sell tailored suits of Harris tweed and music boxes carved in walnut. ‘Alain’, as he was known to her, shooed them away with such offhand authority that they never came back. Sometimes he would gaze across the Himalayas and let drop a cryptic remark about China.
‘They talk honeyed words, but they sharpen their stings,’ he commented.
Although he looked Eurasian, he seemed very French to her. He was muscled and lithe. She watched him as he stretched out on a deck-chair in the sun. Close to him she felt excited, adventurous. His face, sometimes so scholarly and distant, lit up when he spoke to her. His tone of voice was an instrument of courtship. His business seemed vague, something international which caused him to travel a lot.
One night as the holiday drew to a close and the two couples had retired, Charles remained in the Edwardian-styled living room, stretched out on the crimson velvet sofa, reading. He was always reading. The door opened and Marie-Andrée, wearing pyjamas, walked softly into the room. He looked up over the top of his glasses as she came through the doorway and asked, ‘So, you’re not asleep yet?’
‘No, not yet,’ she said, drawing the footstool close to the sofa and sitting down. In the soft pink glow of the lamps she seemed very pretty and vulnerable. Looking into his eyes, as though she had been rehearsing her resolve to make this move, she said, ‘May I kiss you?’
Charles returned her gaze without emotion as the boat rocked gently in the silence of the lapping water. In his head he counted the seconds and then said aloud, ‘Why not?’
He put his arms around her. For several minutes they kissed until Charles heard footsteps coming from the hallway and pushed her away. Dupont was standing in the doorway in his robe.
‘Come to bed, Marie-Andrée,’ he said sharply, ignoring the other man.
In the morning, when Charles and Marie-Andrée were alone on the roof of the boat, he asked her what Dupont had said.
‘Oh, he was angry,’ she said, ‘and asked if we kissed. I said no.’
‘We’d better stop this here,’ Charles said. ‘I don’t want to come between you.’
‘Oh, he’s nothing to me, Alain,’ she insisted. ‘It’s over and we’re travelling together on the understanding that we are both free to do what we like. I’m under no obligation to him.’
‘Maybe,’ said Charles, ‘but you sleep in the same bed.’
‘Yes, but we don’t make love,’ she told him.
‘Well, why aren’t you honest with him about me?’
‘He might get angry and spoil our holiday.’
The merchants, their skiffs loaded with embroideries and carpets, were already skimming across the lake shouting their wares, and tourists from the other houseboats were heading out towards the bathing barge.
‘When we get to Delhi today I’ll be leaving you, so it doesn’t matter,’ said Charles.
‘Don’t say that. I think I love you,’ she blurted out. ‘Don’t you feel anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He knew that Western women were useful in Asia, especially pretty ones without criminal convictions. ‘I don’t like your cat-and-mouse game. Let me speak to Dupont.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘As you like,’ he replied, but he had already decided.
After breakfast the two men walked along the edge of the lake. Washing flapped on the lines hung between the willow trees, bright splashes of colour along the lush green of the shore. Charles asked Dupont if he was planning to marry Marie-Andrée.
‘If you are, I’ll just disappear the moment we return to Delhi.’
‘No, I haven’t got a chance,’ Dupont told him. ‘Do what you like.’
After four days on the boat, Charles and the two couples flew back to Delhi. On the plane he sat next to Marie-Andrée.
‘I talked to Dupont,’ he told her. ‘He loves you a lot. Why don’t you marry him?’
‘I already told you, it’s over,’ she said impatiently. ‘But why did you tell him I made the first move?’
‘I didn’t want to take the blame for breaking up your relationship,’ he said. ‘My life is very complicated at the moment. It’s not easy and to be frank, I live outside the law.’
Charles claimed later that he knew she wouldn’t give a damn what he did, and his candour would only impress her.
‘I like you very much,’ he said, ‘but what’s the point? You live and work in Canada. I could never go there.’
‘Well maybe … I could come back.’
‘You mean you would come to Asia and live with me?’
‘Of course I’d have to think about it,’ she said.
‘And I’d have to think about it too,’ he agreed. ‘You know, this is the only time in my life that a woman has ever been the first one to ask for a kiss.’
His bewilderment was genuine. Charles had spent so long in jails that feminism had passed him by.
‘I did it because I guessed you would do nothing, and time is short,’ she explained.
When they arrived in Delhi, Charles and the two couples took three separate rooms in the Nirula, a small hotel off Connaught Circus. The next day they all took the morning express to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. In the evening they returned to the hotel. Charles asked Marie-Andrée whether she would like him to find a way for them to be alone together and she agreed.
He had not been with a woman since he was arrested in Athens, seventeen months ago. That same evening, the French couple left the hotel and continued their journey to Bali, unaware that his courtship of Marie-Andrée had distracted Charles from drugging and robbing them.
In the morning Charles was the first of the three to go to the dining room. ‘Come down to breakfast,’ he called through the door of the Canadian couple’s room as he passed. At a table in the faded dining room he ordered coffee for three, and Dupont and Marie-Andrée entered as Charles was filling their cups. After breakfast the three of them strolled around the dilapidated circular colonnades of Connaught Circus. Charles kept looking at his watch, waiting for the effect of the five Mogadons he had slipped into Dupont’s coffee. After twenty minutes the accountant began to stagger.
‘What’s the matter?’ Charles said. ‘Are you sick?’
‘I don’t know. I feel dizzy.’
‘It must be sunstroke from our visit to the Taj Mahal,’ said Charles, holding him by one arm in case he fell. ‘I told you to wear a hat.’
Marie-Andrée held the other arm and Dupont was helped back to the hotel. Charles brought him a glass of water.
‘The best thing for you is vitamins,’ he said, handing him another sleeping pill. When the accountant was lying snoring on the bed, Marie-Andrée followed Charles into his room.
The next morning as Marie-Andrée lay beside him in bed, she asked Charles when he expected Dupont would wake up.
‘Don’t worry. He’ll sleep until ten at least,’ he said. But according to his calculations Dupont was awake already and he hid this from Marie-Andrée because he wanted the other man to catch them together. It would force them both to face the facts. At seven-thirty there was a knock on the door and they heard the accountant shout, ‘Marie-Andrée, I know you’re inside. I’ve been listening at the door for the last half-hour.’
‘She will come to see you in your room in twenty minutes,’ Charles called through the door.
They took a shower together and he asked Marie-Andrée if she loved him. Oh yes, yes she did. Would she leave her job in Canada and come to live with him? Of course she would.
And so she agreed to be frank with her former fiancé. After she had been with Dupont a few minutes, Charles entered the room and told him to stop shouting at her.
‘Listen, I asked you in Kashmir if you wanted me to leave. You said then that you didn’t mind and that you weren’t jealous. Now you have to face the reality.’
The two men talked it over and the accountant agreed he would have to step aside.
‘All right, man, no hard feelings,’ Charles said, giving him his hand.
Later that day Charles invited them both on a trip to Kathmandu and Bangkok, offering to pay both airfares and all their expenses. From then on Marie-Andrée and ‘Alain’ travelled together.
Their three days in Kathmandu were happy ones for Marie-Andrée. Charles was attentive, romantic, generous, perhaps a little in love with her. Still paying the expenses, he swept the Canadians off for eight days in Bangkok. Then, on 25 May, the three of them returned to Bombay, where Marie-Andrée and Dupont were due to catch their flight back to Quebec. It was a month since Charles had escaped from Aegina. At the airport he took Marie-Andrée aside, leaving Dupont to supervise the luggage.
‘Alain is not really my name,’ he told her and explained that for reasons of business he must travel constantly and keep changing his identity. It sounded romantic, important – he was an adventurer, a buccaneer, a man of a thousand faces. ‘In case we lose contact,’ he said, writing down Noi’s address at Villa La Roche, ‘I’ll give you my mother’s address in Marseilles. What’s your address and phone number?’
‘Well, Monsieur Dupont,’ he said, turning to slap the other man on the shoulder, ‘I hope you enjoyed Asia.’
‘Yes, a wonderful holiday,’ the accountant assured him, picking up the bags as Charles embraced Marie-Andrée.
‘You will come back to me and be my little queen,’ Charles murmured, his voice low, urgent, compelling, and as he looked into her deep-blue eyes: ‘You will share my house … my life. It’s strange, but you remind me so much of my first wife.’
A few days after saying goodbye to Marie-Andrée Leclerc, Charles was walking along Ormiston Road in Bombay to his old recruiting ground, Dipti’s House of Pure Drinks. The afternoon sun shone on the mustard-coloured shutters of the cheap hotels opposite as Charles strolled through the door and sat down at one of the grimy wooden tables. The place hadn’t changed in the last few years. A few Western travellers stared dolefully into their glasses of beetroot juice with that air of having forgotten their own names. Charles smiled at the girl next to him; she was beautiful, and he began talking to her.
The next day, 5 June, after a French nuclear scientist failed to turn up at Bombay’s Atomic Research Centre to deliver a lecture, he was discovered unconscious in his room at the Taj Mahal Hotel with an empty bottle of Chivas Regal by his bed. His valuables were gone, and he had been injected with Quaalude. The last thing he remembered, he said later, was having coffee with a Swedish girl who introduced him to an Asian-looking, French-speaking man.
Two weeks later, when the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel was buzzing with the news that Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, had been told by the High Court that she had won her parliamentary seat illegally and must give it up, an alert security guard saw Charles walk through the door.
As the man watched him move across the vast white marble foyer towards the Shamiana coffee shop, he remembered the description given by the nuclear scientist of his assailant’s peculiar panther-like gait.
But even as Bob Thomas, the security chief, went to arrest him, Charles, with his uncanny sixth sense, slipped away. Thomas checked his files. Yes, the culprit was almost certainly Charles Sobhraj, who was still wanted in India for robbing the Ashoka Hotel four years before.
The Bombay police were alerted and later, as Charles was checking out of the Ritz Hotel with a Chinese man and the Swedish girl, he was arrested and locked in the back of a police van. By the time the van arrived at the lock-up the only prisoner left inside was the girl, Laura. She said later that she was moved to pity by the story Charles had told her of his early life and she wanted to stand by him. Laura was jailed.
On 26 June, after hundreds of political leaders had been arrested, a state of emergency was declared in India and all constitutional rights were suspended. Charles was making his own contribution to the country’s chaos as he zigzagged across the continent, leaving a trail of dazed and penniless victims behind him.
Charles next surfaced in Hong Kong in July. Later he would claim that he had come to the colony for more calculated reasons than further petty thefts. From Delhi, he later said, he had let certain people know that he was free to offer his services and had accepted an engagement from a criminal organization based in Hong Kong – a group of Chinese businessmen involved in the smuggling of heroin from Thailand to Europe. This organization, which invested huge sums of money in the heroin trade, had declared war on amateurs – the small-time operators and their young travellers who, for a few thousand dollars, would carry consignments of heroin from the source to the marketplace. They were disrupting the business. Amateur drug rings made a small investment, took high risks, and often got caught. The large organizations based in Hong Kong invested millions of dollars and took minimal risks. Their merchandise was rarely intercepted. But now the carelessness of the small-timers and the constant arrest of their couriers was attracting unwanted publicity and forcing world police and customs officials to tighten borders.
Charles had form with the criminal cartels, and was rumoured to have led drug caravans through the dangerous Khyber Pass. And so this Hong Kong organization decided to discourage the amateurs by recruiting him, or so he would claim. A large fee was to be paid into a bank account. He would be given some names, and discretion to follow up leads. It was suggested that he establish a suitable front in Bangkok, where an assistant would be sent to him. From this point on, he would be carrying out orders.
Charles had met a young French geologist, Denis Gautier, while in Hong Kong, and had stolen his passport. Charles retained the first name from his previous identity (‘Alain Gittienne’), and took on the surname of Gautier, which he was soon to make infamous throughout Europe and Asia.
In Singapore on 28 July, he stopped off at the Hyatt Hotel to visit a Cartier representative he had befriended in Hong Kong. Over breakfast he borrowed the key to the young man’s room and took fifty silk shirts, just delivered from the tailor, two new suits, a silk robe, two calculators, a camera and a crocodile-skin attaché case. Downstairs he asked for the key to the safe deposit box and cleaned it out. ‘A hotel safe is never safe,’ he said afterwards.
After buying five diamond rings with the man’s credit cards he then flew on to Bangkok. It was from here, three days later, that he made the phone call to the girl from Quebec. The call would change Marie-Andrée Leclerc’s life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, it was a hot July afternoon in San Pedro, California. Emma Knowlton said goodbye to her three assistants at Irene’s Beauty Salon and walked outside. In her early sixties, tall and rangy, Emma was in high spirits as she crossed Weymouth Road. Her granddaughter, Teresa, was coming to visit her. Teresa had been in California for the past three weeks attending a course on Tibetan Buddhist meditation at Lake Arrowhead.
Emma had not heard from Teresa during the course, where they all took vows of silence. But the minute it was over, Teresa had phoned. She would be coming to stay for a couple of weeks before going home to Seattle and back to college. Teresa was smart, and now that she had settled down to studying seriously she was doing well. Her report card showed A’s and B’s in everything. Emma now hurried up the driveway of her Spanish-style stucco bungalow. She eased off her shoes, sat on a chair near the window, and lit a cigarette.
It was about three years since Teresa had first told her grandmother that she was into Tibetan Buddhism, after coming home from a trip to the East with her boyfriend. Another fad, Emma had thought, and like the others, this one would soon pass. Teresa had already been a Rosicrucian and a Theosophist.
Theirs had started as a difficult relationship. When Teresa was twelve her parents had divorced and she had come to live with Emma and her husband George. Handling a teenager in the late 1960s had been hell. Teresa got into drugs at San Pedro High School and went boy crazy. In 1970, when Teresa was seventeen, she went off to try living with her mother in Seattle. It didn’t work. Teresa grew wilder and took more and more drugs. She left her mother and had herself fostered-out to a part-time security guard at her high school who had lots of other foster children. Emma remembered her granddaughter visiting her with bare feet and dirty jeans.
When she was nineteen, after her trip overseas with a boyfriend, Teresa started talking about a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu called Kopan. The monks there were from Tibet, she said, and it seemed to Emma they had given Teresa something that replaced the drugs and wildness. The change was a miracle. With its emphasis on death, Emma wasn’t sure she liked Tibetan Buddhism. But after what it had done for Teresa, she could hardly complain. They had always loved each other, even during bad times, but now, because she was so open to new ideas, Emma was unusually close to Teresa.
Emma heard the loud toot of the car horn, and she hurried onto the patio. Teresa’s red Volkswagen was parked in the drive, and her granddaughter was bounding up the steps with that lovely, big, vivacious smile. But Teresa had changed.
‘Teresa! What have you gone and done?’ she cried out in shock. As a child, Teresa’s mother had thought nothing of spending $70 on having Teresa’s hair done with a blonde rinse because she had such beautiful hair. Now it was gone, cut into a rough bob around her ears.
‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’ Teresa laughed as she threw her arms around Emma.
‘Of course I am, darling,’ said Emma, blinking as she led her into the living room. Teresa was wearing a long Indian skirt and a white cotton blouse which she had embroidered herself with flowers. She was petite, less than five feet, with her grandma’s wide smile and firm jaw.
Emma ruffled at her granddaughter’s hair. ‘Why the heck have you gone and done a thing like that?’ she asked.
Giggling, Teresa bounced onto the beige vinyl sofa, slipped off her sandals and sat cross-legged, wiggling her toes. She had cut her hair off at the Buddhist retreat, she said, as part of her spiritual practice.
‘The day your mother brought you home from the hospital to this very room, Grandpa and I admired your lovely hair,’ recalled Emma sadly.
‘Don’t take it so seriously, Grandma,’ Teresa said.
Emma asked her about the meditation retreat.
‘Oh, it was wonderful! We did samsara visualizations. That’s when you sit with your eyes closed and the lama reads out the steps that you go through when you die. We use the awareness of death to remind ourselves not to waste a single moment of our lives.’
‘It sounds morbid to me,’ Emma said.
‘It’s just the opposite,’ Teresa assured her. ‘Do I look morbid?’
Emma smiled. Teresa never looked morbid.
‘It’s just so that when the time comes you’ll know what to expect. It means you can find your way around, and you won’t get frightened.’
Teresa’s spiritual teacher was Lama Yeshe, whom she had met on her first trip to Kopan. A small man with a maroon robe and shaved head, he had come to America for the first time to teach the course at Lake Arrowhead.
‘Some of the students took Lama Yeshe to Disneyland,’ Teresa told her grandmother. ‘He really wanted to go. He went on the ghost train, and all the kids were worried for him, Grandma. They thought he’d be scared. After all, he’d only been out of Kathmandu a week. When he got off the train, he said, “Oh, that was nothing. I’ve seen it all before in my visualizations.”’
What a joy to see her, thought Emma. So alive and happy, no longer wild and rebellious and harming herself.
‘Grandma, I made a big decision while I was on retreat. It’s another reason why I cut my hair.’ Teresa looked so serious, so intense, Emma thought to herself. What is she going to do next?
‘I’m going to go back to Kathmandu in October, to Kopan. I’ll do the meditation course and stay on when it’s over to help the lamas.’
Emma was disturbed but she tried not to show it.
‘I can teach the children maths, and just being close to Lama Yeshe is very good for my karma.’
‘That’s nice, darling, if it’s what you want. Are you going with a group?’
‘No, Grandma, I’m going by myself. It’s time for me to start doing things alone. Anyway, at the monastery everyone is a friend.’
As she lit a cigarette, Emma asked how long she would be gone.
‘About a year,’ Teresa said. She wanted to have time to work things out and to force herself to be more serious. ‘Doing the course is one thing, but then you get back on a plane, fly home to America, watch television, and eat junk food again.’
Emma reminded Teresa that she had been doing so well at the Community College in Seattle. ‘Why do you want to give all that up?’ she asked her.
Teresa had planned it out. She would apply for a year’s study leave and continue learning Tibetan for credit. She would also do a paper on the role of women in Buddhist society.
Emma tried not to oppose her granddaughter’s independence. Once Teresa had given her a little paper scroll with a saying by Kahlil Gibran, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.’ She told herself that as long as Teresa was happy, that was all that mattered.
‘I’m so excited, Grandma, just to be seeing Asia again. On the way I’ll stop off at Hong Kong and Bangkok. It doesn’t cost any extra, and I’ve never been to those cities.’
Emma didn’t warm to this news.
‘Those places are rough, Teresa. Kathmandu is one thing, you have friends there, you know the place. But Hong Kong and Bangkok are no places for a young girl on her own. Why don’t you go straight to Nepal?’
‘Oh, Grandma, Hong Kong is on the way and I want to see Thailand. That’s a Buddhist society too.’
‘I just don’t want you to go to those places, Teresa, especially not to Bangkok.’ Emma found she was crying. What was wrong? Why did she feel this sense of foreboding?
Teresa came and comforted her, putting her arms around her grandmother’s shoulders. ‘Silly,’ she said. ‘I’m a Buddhist, remember? It’s like going home for me. No one will hurt me there.’
Teresa stayed with her grandparents until mid-August while she taught a course in meditation to a neighbourhood Buddhist group. She ate raw vegetables from her grandfather’s garden, sometimes cooking Emma and George meals with soy beans and buckwheat which they couldn’t get down, but Teresa didn’t mind. At last they had all learned to respect each other’s beliefs.
With a friend Teresa put statues of Buddha in the four corners of the backyard. While her grandfather pottered around in his vegetable garden, the two girls sat in the sun in the lotus position, reciting Buddhist sutras.
In August, as Teresa packed her belongings into the Volkswagen, Emma gave her a small, gold Bulova watch engraved on the back with ‘Emma 12/25/37’, a Christmas present from George thirty-eight years before. Teresa hugged her grandmother and promised to write from each stop on the way to Kathmandu the moment she arrived. As she watched the Volkswagen roll down the driveway on the start of her granddaughter’s journey home to Seattle, Emma Knowlton cried.