Free The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Art of Purring by David Michie Page A

concerns. Over the past weeks, I’d watched her greeting old school friends who came to visit with their husbands and children. Each time it seemed to me that she was feeling pulled in a very different direction.

    The next morning, Gordon Finlay arrived at 10:30 A.M. From the moment he entered the café he looked like a man unburdened. Making his way to his banquette, he ordered an espresso and chose a copy of The Times of India from the newsstand.
    After flicking through the paper and finishing his coffee, he got up and approached Serena at the counter. “My wife tells me she came in yesterday and you were very kind to her,” he began in his Scottish burr. “I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate that. Just as I appreciate your … discretion.”
    “Oh! You’re welcome.”
    “This place has been like an oasis for me,” he continued, glancing at the Buddhist thangkas hanging on the walls. “We’ve decided to go home. No idea what I’m going to do, but I can’t sit around drinking two bottles of wine a day. My liver wouldn’t last long.”
    “I’m sorry things haven’t worked out the way you planned,” said Serena. Then almost as an afterthought she added, “I hope there was something about India that you enjoyed?”
    Gordon Finlay looked thoughtful for a moment before he nodded. “Funny, the thing that immediately springs to mind is helping that kid down the road get his act together.”
    Serena laughed. “Happy Chicken?”
    “He’s doing a roaring business,” Finlay said.
    “Are you a shareholder?”
    “No. But I was only too glad to set him up. He reminded me so much of me when I was starting out: starved for capital, surrounded by competitors, and no product differentiation. All it took was a couple of hundred pounds and a bit of training. Now he’s acing it!”
    As he spoke, Gordon Finlay seemed to grow taller and stand straighter. For the first time there was a glimpse of the commanding CEO he had been until so recently.
    “Perhaps,” suggested Serena, “you’ve just described what you might do next.”
    “I couldn’t rescue every street vendor in the world!” he protested.
    “No. But you would change the lives of the ones you did. You obviously got a lot of satisfaction from helping just the one. Imagine the satisfaction from helping many!”
    Gordon Finlay stared at her for the longest time, a glint illuminating his dark, observant eyes, before he said, “You know, you just might be on to something.”

C HAPTER F OUR
    Boredom. It’s a terrible affliction, is it not, dear reader? And as far as I can tell, it’s an almost universal one. On an everyday level, there’s the boredom of being wherever you are and doing whatever task lies ahead, whether you’re an executive with a dozen dreary reports to produce before month’s end or a cat on a filing cabinet with a whole empty morning to doze through before those deliciously crispy goujons of sea trout—perhaps with some clotted cream to follow—are served for lunch down at the café.
    How often I overhear tourists say, “I can’t wait to get back to civilization”—the very same visitors, I expect, who for several months earlier were eagerly crossing off the days on their calendars in keen anticipation of their once-in-a-lifetime trip to India. “I wish it were Friday” is another variation on the same theme, as if we must somehow endure five days of oppressive tedium for those precious two when we may actually enjoy ourselves.
    And the problem goes even deeper. Raising our heads from this particular batch of month-end reports or this specific empty morning on the filing cabinet, when we think of all those still to come, our boredom slides into a more profound existential despair. What’s the point of it all? We may find ourselves wondering, Why bother? Who cares? Life can seem a bleak and endless exercise in futility.
    For those beings with a broader perspective of Planet Earth, boredom is sometimes accompanied by