The Art of Purring (The Dalai Lama's Cat 2)

There were chuckles from the audience. The picture on the screen showed a housewife dusting the furniture, while outside her husband was docking his antigravity car, having descended from a sky filled with flying cars and people with jet packs on their backs

“The Lucille Ball hairdo isn’t very futuristic,” one of the women in the audience remarked, to even more laughter. “The clothes,” someone else said to more guffaws. The woman in her puffy skirt and her husband in his drainpipe pants clearly didn’t look like anyone we would see today.

“What about those jet packs?” contributed another.

“That’s right,” agreed the speaker. “We’re still waiting for them.” He flicked through several more images. “These show what people back in the 1950s thought the future would be like. And what makes these images so wonderfully, charmingly wrong isn’t just what’s in the pictures. It’s also what’s not in them. Tell me what’s missing from this one,” he said, pausing at an artist’s rendering of a streetscape in 2020, with conveyer belts as sidewalks, whisking pedestrians along.

Absorbed as I was in my chicken dinner, even I found the image on the screen surreal for reasons I couldn’t quite place. There was a pause before someone observed, “No mobile phones.”

“No female executives,” offered another.

“No people of color,” said someone.

“No tattoos,” added somebody else, as the audience began to notice more and more.

The speaker allowed a few moments for the images to sink in. “You might say that the difference between the way things were in the 1950s and the way people imagined the future to be came down to what they focused on—antigravity cars, say, or conveyer-belted sidewalks. They imagined that everything else would stay the same.”

There was a pause while the audience digested what he had just said.

“That, my friends, is one reason why we are all so poor at guessing how we’ll feel about certain things in the future—in particular, about what is likely to make us happy. It’s because we imagine that everything in our lives will stay just the same except for the one thing that we’re focused on.

“Some call this presentism, the tendency to think that the future will be just like the present but with one particular difference. Our minds are very good at filling in everything else, apart from that difference, when we think about tomorrow. And the material we use to fill it in with is today as these images illustrate.”

Continuing, the speaker said, “Research shows that when we make predictions about how we’ll feel about future events, we don’t realize that our minds have played this ‘filling in’ trick. That’s part of why we think that getting the job with the corner office will deliver a feeling of success and achievement, or that driving an expensive car will be a source of undiluted joy. We think our lives will be just the same as they are now, with that one point of difference. But the reality, as we’ve seen”—the speaker gestured toward the screen—“is a lot more complicated. We don’t imagine, for example, the huge shift in work-life balance that comes with the corner-office job or the anxiety we’ll feel about getting scratches and dents in the shiny new car, not to mention the pain of those monthly lease payments.”

I could have stayed longer to listen to the speaker, but Serena wanted to get home, and she was going to see me safely back to Jokhang. Carrying me in her arms, she slipped out the back door of the café and took the short walk up the road. At Namgyal we made our way across the courtyard to His Holiness’s residence, where Serena bent down and placed me, like a piece of delicate porcelain, on the steps to the main entrance.

“I hope you’re feeling more yourself, little Rinpoche,” she murmured, running her fingers through my coat, which was now almost dry. I loved the feel of her long fingernails massaging my skin. Reaching over, I licked her leg with my sandpaper tongue.

She laughed. “Oh, my little girl, I love you, too!”

Chogyal, one of His Holiness’s assistants, had left dinner for me upstairs in the usual place, but having already eaten at the café I wasn’t really hungry. After lapping up some lactose-free milk, I made my way into the private quarters I shared with His Holiness. The room where he spent most of each day was silent and lighted only by the moon. I headed to my favorite spot on the windowsill. Even though the Dalai Lama was many miles away in America, I felt his presence as if he were right beside me. Perhaps it was the spell of the moonlight, which cast everything in the room in an ethereal monochrome, but whatever the reason, I felt a profound sense of peace. It was the same feeling of well-being I experienced whenever I was with him. I think what he was telling me as he left on his trip was that this flow of serenity and benevolence is something any of us can connect with. We only need to sit quietly.

I began licking my paw and washing my face for the first time since the horrors of the afternoon. I could still see the dogs bearing down on me, but now it felt as though I was picturing events that had happened to some other cat. What had seemed so overwhelming and traumatic at the time diminished to just a memory in the tranquility of Namgyal.

I remembered the psychologist down at the café describing how people often have little idea about what will make them happy. His illustrations were intriguing, and as he spoke, something else struck me about his message: it was quite familiar because the Dalai Lama often used to say the same thing. He didn’t use words like presentism, but his meaning was identical. His Holiness also observed how we tell ourselves that our happiness depends on certain situations, relationships, or accomplishments. How we think we’ll be unhappy if we don’t get what we want. Just as he pointed out the paradox that, even when we do get what we want, it often fails to deliver the happiness we expect.

Settling down on the sill, I gazed out into the night. Squares of light flickered through the darkness from the monks’ residences. Aromas wafted through the first floor window, hinting at the evening meals being prepared in the monastery kitchens. I listened to the bass-toned chants from the temple, as the senior monks brought their early evening med

itation session to a close. Despite the trauma of the afternoon and coming back to an empty, unlighted home, as I sat on the sill with my paws tucked under me, I felt a contentment more profound than I would have ever predicted.

The next few days were a buzz of activity down at the Himalaya Book Café. Along with all the usual busyness, Serena was rapidly evolving her ideas for a curry night. She consulted with the café chefs, the Nepalese brothers Jigme and Ngawang Dragpa, who were only too happy to share their own family favorites. She also scoured the Internet for rare treasures to add to her already full recipe book of personal favorites.

One Monday night Serena invited a group of friends she had grown up with in McLeod Ganj to sample some of the curry dishes she had rediscovered or reinvented. From the kitchen came a mélange of enticing spices never before combined in such glorious profusion at the café—coriander and fresh ginger, sweet paprika and hot chili, garam masala, yellow mustard seeds, and nutmeg.

Working in the kitchen for the first time since returning from Europe, Serena was in her element as she prepared crunchy vegetarian samosas, removed generous helpings of naan—Indian flatbread—from the oven, and decorated brass bowls of Madras curry with spirals of yogurt. She remembered the sheer joy of creation, the passion that had led her to train as a professional chef. Experimenting with a whole palette of flavors was something she hadn’t ventured in 15 years.

Her friends had been grateful but constructive critics. Such was their enthusiasm that by the time the last pistachio-and-cardamom kulfi had been eaten and the last glass of chai had been drunk, the idea of a curry night had expanded into something altogether more extravagant: it was to be an Indian banquet.

I was the top-shelf witness to the inaugural banquet less than two weeks later. As the abiding presence of the Himalaya Book Café, why would I not be? Besides, Serena had promised me a generous serving of her delectable Malabar fish curry.

Never had there been so many diners in the restaurant at one time. The event had proven so popular that extra tables had to be brought into the bookstore area and two additional waitstaff hired for the night. Joining the local residents who were café regulars were Serena’s family and friends, many of whom had known Serena as a child. Serena’s mother was operatic and center stage in a multicolored Indian shawl, her gold bracelets jangling at her wrists and her amber eyes flashing with pride as she watched her daughter choreograph the evening.

As if to compensate for the Italian brio, at the table next to Mrs. Trinci’s was a more sedate contingent from the Dalai Lama’s office, including His Holiness’s executive assistants, Chogyal and Tenzin, along with Tenzin’s wife, Susan, and His Holiness’s translator, Lobsang.

Chogyal, with his warm heart and soft hands, was my favorite monk after the Dalai Lama. With wisdom well beyond his years in dealing with often-tricky monastic matters, he was of great assistance to His Holiness. He was also responsible for feeding me when the Dalai Lama was away, a duty he performed punctiliously.

It had been Chogyal who, a year earlier, had volunteered to take me home with him while the Dalai Lama’s quarters were being redecorated. After lashing out at him for having the temerity to remove me from all that was familiar, I had spent three days sulking under the bedcovers, only to discover that I had been missing out on an exciting new world, one inhabited by a magnificent tabby who was to become the father of my kittens. Through all these adventures Chogyal had remained my patient and devoted friend.