Hippie

“Shall we let Rayan finish his story?”

“Mirthe is right: it was ‘bad influences’ that led me to Nepal the first time. When I was serving in the army, I was in the habit of going to a pub in Limerick, near the barracks. They had everything there, darts, pool, arm wrestling, everyone trying to prove to the others how manly they were, how they were ready for any challenge. One of the regulars was an Asian guy who never spoke; all he ever did was drink two or three glasses of our national treasure—a dark beer called Guinness—and leave before the bar owner would ring the bell advising it was nearing eleven at night and the bar was about to close.”

“It’s all the fault of the English.”

In fact, the tradition of closing at eleven had been set by Great Britain at the start of the war, as a means of keeping drunk pilots from setting off to attack Germany, or soldiers lacking discipline from waking up late, ruining morale.

“One fine day, tired of listening to the same stories of how everyone was getting ready to go to America as soon as they could, I asked permission to sit at the table of this Asian man. We sat there for maybe a half hour—I figured he might not speak English and I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. But before leaving that day, he said something that stuck in my head: ‘You may be here, but your soul is in another place—my country. Go in search of your soul.’

“I agreed and raised my glass to salute him, but avoided getting into details. My rigid Catholic upbringing kept me from imagining any scenario beyond body and soul united, awaiting their meeting with Christ after death. They are obsessed with this idea of the soul in the East, I told myself.”

“Yes, we are,” said Rahul.

Rayan realized he’d offended the man and decided to poke fun at himself.

“We’re worse still, we think the body of Christ can be found in a piece of bread. Don’t take me the wrong way.”

The other man waved his hand, as if to say, “It’s no big deal,” and Rayan was finally able to finish his story—but only a part, because soon they would all be interrupted by some bad energy.

“So anyway, I was already resigned to return to my village, take care of our business—more specifically, my father’s dairy farm—while the rest of my friends crossed the Atlantic to see the Statue of Liberty as it welcomed them, but I couldn’t get that man’s comment out of my head that night. The truth was I was trying to convince myself everything was all right, that I was going to find a girl one day and get married, have kids, far from this world of smoking and swearing where I lived, even though I’d never made it further than the cities of Limerick and Dooradoyle. I’d never been curious enough even to stop and have a walk through one of the small towns—villages, actually—between these two cities.

“At that time, I thought it was enough, safer and cheaper, to travel through books and films—no one on the planet had laid eyes on fields as beautiful as those that surrounded me. Still, I returned the next day to the pub, sat at the solitary man’s table, and even knowing it’s risky to ask questions that have a high probability of getting an answer, I asked him what he’d meant. Where was this country of his?”

Nepal.

“Anyone who’s made it to high school has heard of a place called Nepal, but he’s probably already learned and forgotten the name of its capital, the only thing he can remember is that it’s far away. Maybe in South America, in Australia, in Africa, in Asia, but one thing’s for certain, it’s not in Europe, or else he would have met someone from there, seen a film, or read a book about it.

“I asked him what he’d meant the day before. He wanted to know what he’d told me—he couldn’t remember. After I reminded him, he sat there staring at his glass of Guinness for several moments without saying anything, then finally he broke his silence: ‘If I said that, perhaps you really ought to go to Nepal.’ ‘And how do you suppose I get there?’ ‘The same way I came here: by bus.’

“Then he left. The next day, when I asked to sit at his table so he could tell me more about this story of my soul awaiting me so far away, he told me he preferred to drink alone, as he did, after all, every night.

“Now, if it were a place I could reach by bus and I managed to find some company for the trip, who knows, maybe I would end up visiting that country after all.

“That’s when I met Mirthe, in Limerick, sitting in the same spot I often visited to stare at the sea. I thought she wouldn’t have any interest in some kid from the country whose destiny wasn’t Trinity College in Dublin—where she was finishing her studies—but the O’Connell Dairy, in Dooradoyle. But we had an immediate connection, and during one of our conversations I told her about the unusual character from Nepal and what he’d said to me. Soon I would be going home for good and all that—Mirthe, the pub, my friends in the barracks, everything—would merely be a phase from my youth. I was caught by Mirthe’s tenderness, her intelligence, and—why not just say it?—her beauty. If she thought I was deserving of her company, it would make me more secure, more confident in myself in the future.

“One long weekend, just before the end of my military service, she took me to Dublin. I saw the place where the author of Dracula had lived and Trinity College, where she studied, which was bigger than anything I could have dreamed. In one of the pubs near the university, we sat drinking until the owner rang the closing bell. I sat looking at the walls covered in photos of the writers who had made history in our land—James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw. At the end of our conversation, she handed me a piece of paper telling me how to get to Kathmandu. There was a bus leaving every fifteen days from the Totteridge and Whetstone subway station.

“I thought she’d grown tired of me, wanted me far, far away, and I grabbed the piece of paper without the slightest intention of going to London.”

* * *

—

In the midst of telling his story, Rayan pretended not to hear a group of motorcycles pull up and then rev their engines in neutral. From the travelers’ vantage point inside the restaurant, they couldn’t tell how many bikers there were, but the sound was threatening and out of place. The manager of the restaurant mentioned they were closing soon, but no one at any of the other tables had budged and Rayan continued speaking.

“Then Mirthe surprised me with what she said: ‘Setting aside travel time, which I won’t mention so as not to discourage you, I want you to come back from there after exactly two weeks. I’ll be here waiting for you—but if you aren’t here by the day I think you ought to arrive, you’ll never see me again.”

Mirthe laughed. That wasn’t exactly what she’d said—it was closer to “Go in search of your soul, because I’ve already found mine.” What she hadn’t said that day, and wasn’t about to now, was “You are my soul. I’ll pray every night that yo

u return safely, that we meet again, and that you never want to leave my side, because you deserve me and I deserve you.”

“Was she really going to wait for me? Me, the future owner of O’Connell Dairy Milk? What would she care for a kid with so little culture and so little experience? Why was it so important for me to follow the advice of some strange man I met in a pub?

“But Mirthe knew what she was doing. Because the moment I stepped onto that bus, after having read everything I could find about Nepal and then lying to my parents that the army had extended my service time for misconduct and was sending me to one of its most remote bases, in the Himalayas, I came back another person. I left as a hayseed, I came back as a man. Mirthe came to meet me, we slept in her house, and ever since we’ve never been apart.”

“That’s the problem,” she said, and everyone at the table knew she was being sincere. “Of course I don’t want some idiot at my side, but I also wasn’t expecting someone who would say to me, ‘Now it’s your turn to go back with me.’?”

She laughed.