THE NEXT MORNING, Thalia woke up so parched she downed both bottles of complimentary water left in her bungalow and was still thirsty. After pulling her hair back quickly, she grabbed the empty bottles and headed out to the garden, where they kept a cooler of filtered, treated water. On the other side of a row of banana trees, she saw at least two dozen people seated quietly on the ground, their eyes closed. Aarush, her Indian-American host, was sitting on a small set of cushions in front of the group, with his back to her.
“Are you feeling better?” Thalia jumped enough to almost knock over the heavy cooler. It was Beam, Aarush’s wife.
“Oh, sorry!” Beam reached out to steady Thalia. “I only heard you weren’t well last night, and Neilan left you some ginger kombucha this morning.”
“What time is it?” Thalia felt a need to catch up. This must be a small island if word of the newcomer’s Thai tummy had already spread while she was sleeping. And Neilan had already been by? She looked out to the rows of meditators and recognized the man’s lion’s head curls and beard in the second row. In the light, she could see his wide nose and jutting cheekbones, which only added to the lion resemblance.
“It is just now seven. Often we have a bigger group for morning meditation, but the kirtan went really late, I heard.” Beam gestured for Thalia to follow her. She sat her down at a small table with two shrunken wooden chairs on the concrete porch that faced the street. The furniture was small enough that Thalia suspected for a moment that maybe it was meant for kids, but then she noted how small Beam herself was—barely five foot, if she had to guess. A few other women of similar stature were spooning dried coffee and sweetened condensed milk into metal cups with flowers crudely painted on them. They offered Thalia a cup. When she drank the concoction, she barely tasted coffee at all and almost gagged at how sweet it was. The women laughed at her reaction and spoke in rapid Thai.
Beam returned to the porch with a plate of two fried eggs, a leaf of lettuce topped with a sautéed tomato slice, and two pieces of toast. She said something to the women and they wandered off to the side of the porch, next to a sign that gave the prices for massage. Each price had been printed, then slashed with a marker and a new, lower price written below. The sign read “COVID Discount” in the same color marker. She wondered for a moment if it was a front for prostitution, but the women were middle-aged and thickly built, wearing matronly aprons over their polyester clothes.
“I didn’t know you ran a massage shop,” Thalia said as a way to make conversation, since Beam sat on the small chair across from her.
“My sister. It is her shop. I only help out when it’s busy, but it is not busy since COVID.” Beam stated this without emotion. “But after meditation class, we get a few customers. Meditation is free but good for business.” Beam busied herself around the porch then, sweeping and wiping down the wooden rails of the half-wall that separated the street from the porch. A few people rode by on motorbikes, and each one yelled out a greeting to Beam and stared at Thalia for a moment as they passed.
Once she was done with breakfast, she returned to the garden. Everyone was still meditating. A few more people had arrived and were quietly sitting in the back. She decided to join them. As she sat with her eyes closed, her thoughts splintered off into several directions. She hadn’t meditated since she’d dated Birch, dubbed “Birch the Buddhist” by her friends, and that had been two years ago. Mainly she remembered her feet falling asleep. Now, her mind hummed with memories of him, his casual goodwill and encyclopedic knowledge of vegetarian food in New York. But the pairing had not ended well, and she was discovering that her feet still fell asleep in meditation. Her mind drifted, as it often did, to movies.