The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Art of Purring (8 page)

Many visitors, on first encountering this, heave a visible sigh of relief.

The visitor’s wife wasn’t quite so emphatic. As she looked anxiously at her husband, she seemed to be hoping the café would suit him, which it did. Eminently!

Stepping forward to greet them, Kusali showed them to a window table, where the husband studied both menu and wine list as if for the first time, before ordering precisely the same bottle of wine. On this occasion he sipped his SSB with slightly more restraint, but during the course of the lunch, he sailed effortlessly through most of the bottle with minimal help from his wife.

Watching the two of them from a distance, I sensed something awkward about the way they were together. There were long pauses in their conversation, during which they looked everywhere but at each other, followed by exchanges that soon petered out.

Most Western visitors had such busy itineraries that they would visit the café only once or twice during the course of a brief stay. Not our dapper friend and his wife. The very next morning at 11
A.M.
, the hallowed moment at which alcohol was served, he arrived at the café, walked to the banquette, and ordered a glass of SSB. Foreseeing a rerun of the previous day’s events, Kusali made a gracious appearance, pouring the visitor’s wine personally before suggesting, “Would you like me to bring a wine bucket to your table, sir?”

The visitor decided that, on balance, yes, he would. Helping himself to refills as he paged through a travel brochure with somewhat less interest than the day before, he soon dispatched the contents of the bottle.

Once again, half an hour after leaving, he reappeared at the café entrance with his wife, this time telling Kusali, who was at the reception desk, that they had enjoyed the previous day’s visit so much they had decided to return. The ever-diplomatic Kusali smiled politely as this official, somewhat edited version of events was established.

Dear reader, would you believe me if I told you that the exact same
Groundhog Day
reenactment occurred the following morning? Well, perhaps not exactly. On day three, the visitor walked straight through the door to “his” banquette at 11 o’clock, whereupon Kusali had a waiter deliver his preferred wine in an ice bucket. Serena, who had been on a visit to Delhi for the two previous days to order new kitchen equipment, watched this happen and approached Kusali a short while later, eyebrows raised. During their tête-à-tête, when the visitor stared at his cell phone with a somewhat downcast expression, Kusali indicated it was safe for her to look in that direction.

As soon as she did, she froze. Then she quickly ended her conversation with Kusali and headed toward the bookstore. Moments later she was standing beside Sam, who was sitting behind the counter at his computer.

“Can I jump on for a minute?” she asked urgently.

“Sure.” As he slid off his stool she quickly opened a search engine.

Gordon Finlay.
Sam read the name as she keyed it into the search field.

“You know who he is?” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“I think he’s over there,” she said, tipping her head in the direction of the banquette. “Bagpipe Burgers.”

Sam’s face lit up. “That’s him?”

The two of them stared at the Wikipedia entry, which featured a photograph of the Bagpipe Burgers founder.

“‘Started as a single-outlet burger bar in Inverness, Scotland,’” Sam was reading. “‘Now one of the biggest fast-food franchises in the world.’” Skimming down the page, he pulled out highlights: “valued at half a billion dollars”; “presence in every major market”; “famous tartan uniforms”; “creators of the gourmet burger”; “commitment to quality.”

“Is it him?” Serena prompted.

Sam studied the photograph in front of them before turning to look at the restaurant patron. “Our guy looks … less jowly.”

Serena snipped her index and middle fingers together. “Dr. Knife.”

“You know about the drinking these past couple of days?” Sam asked her.

“Occupational hazard in our line of work.”

Sam gazed intently into her eyes. “But what’s he doing in McLeod Ganj?”

“That’s what I’m …” She reached over him to the keyboard and tapped in something else, nodding as another page opened up on the screen. “Yup. This happened when I was leaving London. He cashed out for five hundred million dollars.”

“That guy over there?” whispered Sam, wide-eyed.

“Exactly.” Serena squeezed his arm before stepping away from the counter for another discreet peek.

She nodded. “People in London couldn’t stop talking about it. It’s every entrepreneur’s dream, and for the restaurant business, it’s an inconceivable amount of money. People either love him or hate him.”

“Which side are you on?”

“Admire him, of course! What he did is amazing. He got into a sector with a whole lot of poor-quality associations and created something that was genuinely distinctive. People liked it, and it took off. He made a pile of money, but it took him twenty years of incredibly hard work.”

“Weird guy, though,” Sam said, shaking his head.

“You mean the multiple visits?”

“Not only that. You know, he spends hours in the Internet Shop down the road.”

It was Serena’s turn to look surprised.

The Internet Shop, which catered to an almost entirely local clientele, was dirty, overcrowded, and poorly lit.

“I see him going in there every morning.” Sam lived in an apartment over the café with windows facing the street. “He’s there from eight in the morning. Afterward, he comes here.”

Over the next week, Gordon Finlay was a regular fixture at the Himalaya Book Café. He did miss a couple of mornings, during which the rear banquette felt curiously vacant. On the first occasion he and his wife were seen climbing into the back of a tour van that took visitors on all-day excursions through the surrounding countryside. On the other occasion, a waiter reported having seen him in conversation with Amrit, one of the vendors who plied their trade beneath the tangled chaos of telephone wires along the street.

Of all the vendors, the ragged Amrit was the youngest and least popular, struggling to interest passers in the deep-fried dumplings he retrieved from a filthy-looking pan. What Gordon Finlay found of interest about the ever-disconsolate Amrit was hard to fathom. But when Finlay missed both his preprandial bottle of wine and his lunch, Kusali looked out the window and noticed that Amrit was no longer at his stall.

The mystery was solved the next day when Amrit was seen back in position, in bright yellow-and-red overalls and cap, with the blackened pan replaced by a shiny silver outdoor-barbecue wok and jaunty bunting fluttering around a
Happy Chicken
sign. As he flipped chicken breasts for a growing line of customers, Gordon Finlay stood behind him in his trademark cream jacket, giving instructions.

At 11 o’clock sharp, Finlay was back in the café.

Exactly what Gordon Finlay was doing in McLeod Ganj became a subject of growing conjecture. Surely he hadn’t picked this modest little town in the Himalaya foothills as the starting point for a new global fast-food chain? Why bother coming here only to spend so much time drinking? Wouldn’t somewhere in Italy or the South of France be more agreeable for this? And what about all the time he spent in the Internet Shop, when he could so easily have gone online from the far greater comfort of his hotel?

I am pleased, dear reader, to claim a vital part in discovering the answer to these and other open questions. Like many of life’s most intriguing developments, this one didn’t arise from any deliberate action on my part. My simple, if admittedly irresistible, presence was all that was required to unleash the most unexpected flow of pent-up emotion.

Occupying my usual spot in the café, I had adopted what Ludo might have called
the pose of Mae West,
lying on my side with my head propped up on my right front paw. It was getting close to the time that Gordon Finlay usually made the first of his two daily appearances. But when I glanced up from where I had begun to groom the fluffy white fur on my tummy, who should appear at the door but Mrs. Finlay. She looked anxiously about the restaurant before making her way toward the book shop. She had never ventured this far before; she and her husband usually occupied the same table closer to the front. She had almost reached the magazine rack before Serena approached her.

“I’m looking for my husband,” Mrs. Finlay told Serena. “We’ve been here a few times.”

Serena nodded with a smile.

“It’s become his favorite place in Dharamsala, and I was hoping …” Her lower lip was quivering, and she drew a deep breath to compose herself. “I was hoping I might find him here.”

“We haven’t seen him today,” said Serena. “But you’re very welcome to wait.” She was gesturing toward the banquette at the back, the one at which Gordon Finlay enjoyed his morning bottle of wine, when for the first time Mrs. Finlay looked at the shelf where I was grooming myself.

Sensing I was being stared at, I looked directly at her.

“Oh, good heavens!” Mrs. Finlay’s already fragile composure was threatened again. “Just like our little Sapphire.”

Stepping toward me, she reached out to stroke my neck.

I looked into her red-rimmed eyes and purred.

“This is Rinpoche,” Serena told her, but Mrs. Finlay wasn’t listening. First one tear, then another began to roll down her cheek. Biting her lip to stem the flow, she stopped petting me and reached into her handbag for a tissue. But it was too much. Within moments she had let out a great sob of emotion. Serena put her arm around her and gently guided her to the banquette.

For a while Mrs. Finlay wept quietly into her tissue. Serena gestured toward Kusali for a glass of water.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized after a while. “I’m so …”

Serena shushed her.

“We had a little one, just like her,” Mrs. Finlay said, gesturing toward me. “It took me back. All those years ago in Scotland, Sapphire was so special to us. She used to sleep on our bed every night.” She gulped. “Things were different then.”

A waiter arrived with a glass of water. Mrs. Finlay took a sip.

“They
are
very special,” agreed Serena, glancing at me.