His face turned ashen.
“Did you find the coffee?” she demanded angrily. “Well? Did you?”
He shook his head and blinked rapidly, a defeated look in his bleary eyes.
“Go on then, keep looking,” she snapped, yanking up her tube top so high that her tummy popped out. He nodded his shorn head obediently and shuffled off in the wrong direction.
Still muttering and empty handed, she clumped off towards the region of the cheeses.
Ajax had still not returned. I thought it quite sensible of him.
Keeping one eye on Blue Hair, I wandered over to the barrel sacks of loose grains and started fishing through them, mostly to hear the pleasing sound they made as they tumbled. Suddenly, Ajax popped up on the other side of the barrel, throwing me a hopeful look. With the prescience of childhood, he recognized I’d been playing a game.
I nodded. He beamed. We began a curious round of hide and seek.
Ajax, running off to hide behind a kiosk of berries.
Me, fleeing over to the fresh fish.
Mr. Blue Hair, on a doomed quest for coffee.
“Ajax!” Blue Hair screamed.
I looked around and spotted Ajax skipping past the iced fish display. He’d grabbed one of the fresh octopuses out of a bucket and was mercilessly shaking its tentacles in the air.
“Do you know that boy?” an elderly French lady asked me in aggrieved tones.
“Which boy?”
“The one with the octopus.” She gestured with her chin. She clearly thought I was his nanny.
“Nope!” I replied cheerfully.
She scowled at me. The pain aux raisins in her hands did not look convinced.
“He belongs to her!” I pointed nonchalantly towards the deli. As I did so, I realized that I’d been clutching a jar of pig pâté this whole time, and I brought it to my face, staring at it with a kind of wonder.
Blue Hair had trapped Ajax by a sack of couscous. She’d grabbed him by the back of his t-shirt and was dragging him forward with an air of dogged determination. His limbs were thrashing wildly but he wasn’t screaming at all.
My new friend harrumphed in disgust, and turned away to resume feeding her bosom. She was breaking off small pieces of the raisin bread and dropping them down her cleavage. I could only assume that she’d squirreled a toy poodle under her blouse and buttoned it all under a jacket. But I wasn’t sure, and there wasn’t a good way to find out. I wasn’t about to ask her to lift up her top and flash me, and staring at her chest until I’d resolved the matter seemed a very bad idea. No one else in the store seemed to take any notice, leading me to assume that letting pets ride around on your boobs was a perfectly Parisian thing to do.
Shrugging, I resumed my search for Blue Hair.
Blue Hair, Mr. Blue Hair, and Ajax had reunited and were headed towards the checkout counter. Ajax was still held firmly in Blue Hair’s grip. Her black lips were set in a grim line, and the top of her tube was sagging to dangerously low levels. Ajax was struggling like a cat fallen into the bathtub. Mr. Blue Hair was slapping the boy’s flailing fists away from his precious basket. Thrown off balance by the boy’s jerking limbs, he got tangled in his own feet, and his basket tipped over. A single bottle of tomato juice smashed as it hit the floor. He regained his stance and stood clutching his traitorous basket, staring in anguish at the mess. Blue Hair flung an angry arm at him, letting go of Ajax’s shirt in the process. The boy wasted no time: he broke loose and ran for the hinterlands.
The items that actually came home with me from the Bon Marché were a bag of basmati rice, a can of chickpeas, and a bottle of korma, an Indian sauce brought to France by way of Great Britain. When I’d turned away from Ajax’s Great Escape and redirected my attention towards the shelves, this bottle of sauce was resting right in front of my face. Buddhists believe that our spiritual paths in life are dictated by our karma. I felt like mine was being led by korma, the same thing only off by one letter. Korma is karma that came out slightly imperfect at the soul manufactory, dooming those who receive it with terrible timing and a lousy sense of direction. I’d never sampled korma because I’d never run into it before, a classic case of kormic delay rather than karmic convergence.
By cooking, I could contemplate my korma and then eat it, too.
If you believe in karma, you have to accept what life brings you, since you brought it on yourself. Karma is not the same as Destiny, which predetermines every action, wherefore nothing can be changed. Karma is also not Comeuppance, which is a plot device in movies. Karma means that you inherit your own past from previous incarnations. This is why some people put nothing but pain into the world, yet they lead charmed lives of immense wealth and opulence. The punishment for their evil—if there is one—comes in the next lifetime, after they are dead and thus quite unable to care about being reborn as cockroaches.
Each lifetime has a lesson, but some people are very bad students.
If you struggle against your karma, that is your karma.
Until you learn to stop struggling, you will never understand karma. However, it is some people’s karma that they will never learn.
Karma is very frustrating.
My jar of sauce stood off to one side, patiently waiting its turn. I picked it up and looked at it.
“KORMA,” the label announced. “A delicious treat from India,” it continued in English. A sticker on the back of the glass jar provided terse instructions in French:
Sauté meat.
Add sauce.
Cook for 40 minutes.
Serve with rice.
Under the rules of korma, life unfolds as a series of quirky accidents rather than important events. People who fulfilled their karma include world historical figures such as Elizabeth I and Marie Curie. People who fulfilled their korma include Alice B. Toklas and Pamela Anderson. Great kormic accidents in history include the apple falling on Newton’s head, the invention of Post-its®, and the discovery that sildenafil didn’t cure angina like it was supposed to. Instead, it gave men boners, and was remarketed as “Viagra.” It still doesn’t cure broken hearts, but men don’t seem to care.
The kormic ideal is Inspector Clouseau, the greatest of French detectives, who always solves the crime but does it by accident. The kormic mascot is the bumblebee. It’s an insect that can’t fly but does anyway. The bumblebee thinks it’s doing one thing when it goes questing for food, but as it dips here and there, happily humming to itself, it ends up accidentally pollinating flowers that couldn’t survive without it.
It’s quite possible that I’m doing something else when I think I’m doing another. Under my current formulation, that would be kormically correct.
Inside a universe governed by kormic principles, it makes perfect sense that I’m a terrible dancer. No matter how hard I try, the limbs won’t coordinate. I cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Talking makes my arms flap, in the manner of a light switch turning on a hair dryer. Because I am hopelessly bad at dancing, it’s one of my favorite things to do. I have enrolled in jazz, salsa, and tango classes around the world, and am doubtless known in three continents as the worst dance student ever. In a dance class one summer spent going to school in Seoul, my sister put on a hanbok, the traditional dress of Korea, picked up a fan, snapped it open, and began wafting around like she’d been folk dancing forever. I managed to jerk forward and then promptly fell over, allowing my hanbok’s wraparound skirt to flap open at the same time that a visiting group of diplomats arrived to appreciate the beauty of Korean culture. A full moon was enjoyed by all. The teacher was horrified. I was unperturbed, because that sort of thing happens to me all the