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 time. After she finished apologizing for my bad manners, I was trussed firmly into my hanbok and made to sit in a corner, where I was given a stick and a drum to bang slowly. This, too, was a task I failed miserably. All the other students began stumbling to my irregular beat, and my sister started glaring at me. This was not the proper flower-like expression for dancing, and it was my fault for putting a frown on her face. I was sent to another room to practice the Big Bow by myself. This involves prostrating yourself face down on the floor and staying there until you’re told you can get up. I took advantage of this unexpected quiet time to take a nap, which merely confirmed that I had once again learned the wrong lesson from my punishment.
While all the other expats in Paris were doing yoga, I was belly dancing. Back in 2002, I’d watched the French television program, Popstars, a fifteen-minutes-of-fame series that managed to hook me despite the fact that I loathe game shows. Five girls were eventually chosen for a pop music quintet fabulous enough to overcome their dismal name, “L5.” In English, this is medical shorthand for “Lumbar vertebrae no. 5.” When pronounced in French, L5 (“elle cinq”) sounds like “Hell sank.” But the real star of Popstars was the woman with the thankless job of teaching the girls to dance. Mia Frye was a half French, half American expat who had an inimitable way of expressing herself in Franglish, barking orders like a drill sergeant and muttering curses under her breath. There was such pain on her beautiful face as she watched them floundering around the dance studio, their limbs jerking stiffly like defunct windmills. Their ineptitude was wounding her very reason for being, and she regularly told the five wannabes, in no uncertain terms, how severely disappointed she was with them. The Five glowered back at her in their baggy clothes, looking tired, sullen, and hungry. Madame Frye did not care. “I cannot comprendre the laziness!” she’d declare in astonishment. “You’ve only been practicing for five hours and you are behaving as if I am ordering you to go out and milk a herd of vaches.”
In the U.S., Madame Frye would be labeled a bitch, and made to play nice in order to avoid lawsuits from their parents. In France, she was simply an artiste, and thanked for keeping up standards.
Despite my natural gifts at looking tired, sullen, and hungry, I was
