None of it mattered.
Next, he dusted and vacuumed Anand’s eminently tidy room. When he lifted the reading chair cushion to clean under it, he found a Sports Illustrated swimwear issue and a bra page from a Sears catalogue. He sat in the chair and wept at history’s repetition, at the loss of so much of so little consequence. Under the mattress, though, were three ripped-from-a-magazine pages of women and men bound with black leather, hooded, orifices exposed. His mind briefly went blank, but then he thought, curiosity. Pictures, only.
In Suresh’s own room, his and Kritika’s, he expected to find a secret. He steeled himself for it: a diary full of complaints about him, or letters from an ex-lover, or expensive earrings she bought without telling him and only wore when she was alone. Nothing necessarily bad, merely secret. He had never assumed he truly knew her. That was okay. It was part of the deal.
But either she didn’t have secrets, or he never found them.
He had kept nothing from her.
Before I left the following day, we talked a bit further, about his work at the hospice, his meeting and marrying Lisette. I asked if they thought about having more children. He smiled and looked away—finally, I had asked a question he would not answer.
Changing tack, I asked whether he had attended any of the trial.
“I had no interest,” he told me.
“None?”
“Not enough to buy a plane ticket, take time off work, leave Lisette.”
“Why not?”
“Did you go?”
“Yes, for a day or two.”
“Wasn’t it a bit like entertainment, like those town square executions?”
“Not for those who lost their families.”
“It won’t bring them back,” he said. I felt the droop of his face in my own, felt how grief compressed his lungs, made of his body a trap. “And why are you doing this, this study?” he asked, reversing the line of scrutiny. “This is what you do?”
I hesitated. “It’s a bit of a departure. I assume you haven’t read any of my books?” He hadn’t. They were not widely distributed, and I didn’t think him the type to Google a guy, though I have been surprised by others. I cleared my throat. “I’m doing the study because … for one thing, this tragedy was not owned”—I cringed at this word, but when speaking to people you must make yourself understood on their terms—“by Canadians at large. Emotionally, they did not feel themselves to be assaulted.”
“It wasn’t owned by the government either,” said Suresh.
“No. That’s one question, the isolation of the victim’s families, though I don’t know yet if it’s the central one. The term I used in my letter, I hope you don’t find it insulting, was a ‘study of comparative grief.’ I want to know how have the families coped up? How have their lives progressed?”
“Surely that information must be out there, no? All the newspaper articles, pieces on TV?”
He had an intentness I didn’t remember. He truly wanted to understand.
“There’s media coverage, true, but no scholarship that I could find. Has anyone else talked to you?”
His expression suggested no one would want to. “I keep a low profile.”
“So you see.” I tried to sound convincing, but the more I talked, the less assured I felt.
“I don’t see, Ashwin.” He put his hand on my knee. “I’m happy to talk to you, if it’s important, but why dredge this up? Let it lie.”
It was only now that I realized: not only had I said nothing to my colleagues about my bereavement, I had said nothing about it in my letters to the victim families.
Okay, I thought, that was wrong. But I did nothing to correct it.
It wasn’t only the need for scholarship that was motivating me. It wasn’t only the desire to give the victims a voice. (As one grieving man had said to Mukherjee and Blaise, “ ‘We are so wanting to talk! That wanting to talk is in all of us … we who have lost our entire families. We have nothing left except talk.’ ” That was eighteen years ago, but so many were still wanting to talk.)
It was, as much as anything, my desire to understand what had happened to me. I had not recovered. Did anyone, from so severe a blow? Perhaps not, but I had, in some way, stopped my life. This, I suspected, might be less true for the others. It didn’t seem to be true of Suresh, or he didn’t feel it to be. How or why did some absorb loss into life’s flood-plains, while others erected a dam?
19 June, 2004
Lohikarma, B.C. Fourth town, seventh family.
I AROSE WITH THE DAWN, MY HABIT. Canada was terrible for me that way: despite many years here, I never managed to wake long before first light in winter, long after in summer. I cracked a window to fan out the fug of night gas and snore breath. That smell, akin to stale popcorn, can linger, even in a large room. A faint priapism deflated as my pyjama and kurta cooled in the morning air. Twelve degrees Celsius perhaps? Like October in Delhi. I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror, the double-bagged eyes, the beginnings of jowls to rival the cat’s. My cat. Had anyone—my widow, perhaps—taken over his feeding? I cranked the shower, pulled my kurta over my head, and was enveloped for a moment in the smell from my own pores, something dark and leafy, with the tang of iron. Cooked spinach? Lovely. I gagged a little, stepped into the coursing water, coated myself with strong soap, then antiperspirant, then aftershave. Sandalwood, bergamot, lime. By night the spinach would chew its way to the surface again, but then I would quell it with Scotch. The pleasures of a day fully lived.
I was accommodated in a self-contained suite at the top of a house. The owner rented it to holidayers, along with two suites on the ground floor; the middle was occupied by a dentist. At the back, where one entered my flat, off the fire escape, were two large windows. I took in the view before going out to find a newspaper: majestic mountains supporting an endless sky where the morning sun was carving mists away from the day’s clean promise, everything any visitor to Canada and particularly the beautiful province of British Columbia could want, but also (eyes dropping to take in a sweeping palette of industrial greys) back-alley-cum-parking-lot, chicken-wire fence, and dirt-dusted, supersized, aluminium Quonset. My guess: a curling rink. These ruddy northerners do love to sport on ice.
I eased the morning stiffness from my knees, descending the stairs of iron and air that climbed the back of the building. Walking around to the front and through the garden in the moist morning, toward the rising sun and the newspaper box across the street, I was entangled by a plague of green worms descending on sticky filaments. I should have backed off and found a way to bypass them, but instead I swore and flailed until all the strings were broken, the caterpillars all over me, then I swore some more and crushed and brushed them off.
Back in my room, I set the coffee to decoct, and opened the paper to search for a mention of the trial.
Last spring, the prosecution had opened dramatically, broad hints of intrigue and newly unearthed information setting the gathered families alight with speculation and hope. Then came weeks of hysterically banal minutiae: ticket purchase, baggage checking, details nearly universally known. Some heartbreaking, if irrelevant, moments, such as testimony from the stalwart Irish sailors who had fished bodies from their seas; as well as misleading ones, such as a suggestion that the Canadian spy agency had had a mole inside the terrorist cell until shortly before the bombing occurred, a mystery never solved. Then came a long summer break, occasioned by the prosecution’s attempts to shorten the process by presenting witness reports instead of witnesses. They could have pressed on. Instead, they pissed off.
The fall brought more testimony, more research, more witnesses, a growing weight of information. And so the trial sank down through the newspapers, off the front pages, out of the public eye. I could go days now and find not a mention in the press.
But look: this morning, Canada’s National Newspaper had published an article on the trial, a moment that might prove crucial—though who knew? A bookseller testified that h
e had given a book about the bombing to a star witness for the prosecution, bolstering accusations that the witness, “Ms. D,” had repeated what she had read, not what she had witnessed. As with all the trial news, I felt a detachment both familiar and disturbing.
Ms. D’s identity was masked by witness protection. She had been whisked away from her life years earlier. Death threats against those with inside information about the bombing were not uncommon. The publisher of a community newspaper, a man who had been part of the same Sikh-nationalist circles as the bombers but then began speaking out against them, had been killed.
In the courtroom, Ms. D’s identity was no secret. Plenty of those present knew her as the former employee of one of the accused. She said they were in love, although the affair had remained nobly platonic, with both of them married. When she testified, on October 31, 2003, she started with a description, under duress, of the hold he had on her. She loved him still, she said, though he had fully confessed to her his role in the bombing.
Her challengers, in cross-examination, said she was making this up. Wanting revenge for losing her job. How could she love someone as evil as he sounded? She stuck to her guns, but now, ten months later, the defence brought a witness who claimed Ms. D owned a book about the bomb plot, Soft Target, which contained all the details she was now regurgitating, including errors of a sort she couldn’t have made up on her own.
The sun was nearly above the horizon, and coffee was gargling up into the top of the mini-macchinetta I carried with me. I travel light, but this is one item I won’t be caught without, anywhere in the world. I had bought eggs and onions on arrival in Lohikarma the night before. Now I scrambled them, squeezed on hot sauce—I always toss a few packets in with my toiletries—and scooped them with improvised chapatis a.k.a. store-bought tortillas warmed in the pan.
Done with breakfast, I readied for the day’s interviews, taking out a fresh composition notebook and labelling it “Venkataraman,” the name of a man here whose wife and son had gone down on the plane. I would not be meeting him until Monday. Today, Saturday, I would meet individually with his closest friend, one Professor Sethuratnam, and Sethuratnam’s daughter, Brinda.
Dr. Sethuratnam seemed to be very involved in this Venkataraman’s affairs, and had told me that it was he who had first noticed my letter and encouraged his friend to open it. Whenever possible, I was interviewing not only direct family members but also other relatives and friends, if they volunteered. It would let me investigate a theory, that loss radiates, and also paint a fuller portrait of the survivors. Also, for Indians in Canada, family friends become the equivalent of family. I was never like this, needless to say, but most seek out those who share their language and their recipes, and raise their children in proximity the way we grow up with cousins back home.
I swirled my second and final shot of espresso into a pan of hot milk, and took it to drink in the window seat. The view: let us edit out the pavement, chicken wire, Quonset. See instead soft, low mountains surrounding Kootenay Lake, which stretched fingers into the landscape’s crevices and drew storms over the mountains as quickly as it drove them away. Three wispy clouds drifted against the black-green mountainside, as yet unlit by the rising sun. Two resolved into figures, so clearly that even I couldn’t miss them. I’m not like Asha, for whom one thing always became another, some crumpled paper a rabbit, her bitten sandwich a ship. The two cloud-figures danced, while the third galloped past beneath them. The uppermost rose, feet in the air, like Chagall’s wife in his paintings of the two of them, she upside-down, smiling, hands stretched toward him. Her limbs pulled apart and she vanished. The sun hit the top of the peak opposite and her partner, too, fled. The third figure ambled briskly forward, a buffalo from a cave-painting. Its hump grew as the sun crept down the mountain; it became a fish, a deer, five little v-sketched birds, then nothing. The sun shone as it had to.
I walked to the town centre, which lay between my apartment and the university. The Kootenay river valley descended to my right. To my left, High Street, where a stylish wine shoppe advertising B.C. vintages abutted a yoga studio with homemade beeswax candle displays that shared a wall with an upscale vintage furniture store. The air smelled as much of incense or baking as exhaust. Families of tourists occupied iron benches, unless they had been driven off by a homeless person parking a shopping cart in the curbside landscaping. There were a few of those, adding to the smells.
Brinda Sethuratnam had chosen a coffeehouse, Brewed Awakening, for our meeting. Tastefully restored art deco architecture; staff indistinguishable from patrons; lemon bars and Linzer squares baked in-house and cut to modestly sized portions suitable for modestly sized consumers—the type of place where Rosslyn and I used to pull apart the Saturday books section before tackling whatever work we had brought home for the weekend. An hour remained until my appointment. I did some reading. I prepared.
And then there she was: an attractive girl, thirty-five, I learned, though she looked ten years younger. Longish hair, clear complexion, fit and fashionable, though with a twitchiness that undermined her looks.
“I’m very pleased that I got to Lohikarma in time to meet you,” I told her as we sat. (I know how to make niceties, though I often don’t bother.) “You must be leaving day after tomorrow, is it?”
“Actually,” she said, “I’ve decided to stay on a few days longer.” She chewed her lip.
“Good, then. You told me where you live, in our correspondence. Saskatoon, is it?”
“Edmonton. I moved there for grad school, ten years ago.”
“Mm-hmm. In …?”
“Epidemiology?” She pulled the cuffs of her jersey down over her palms and gripped her mug. “I went to do a PhD, but it never really took. I’m restarting, this fall, not a PhD, an MA in science writing, at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. I’m still fascinated by epidemiology, but I want to write about it more than I want to do it. Part of the reason I’m home—apart from that I always come back in the summer for a week or two—is that I’m interviewing a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harbord as part of my thesis. The MA programme’s only a year long, so I thought it would be good to get started.” Her manner had shifted decisively, as though she’d crossed the beam of a film projector. Now she projected confidence. “I want to take a magazine-feature approach, four profiles of epidemiologists, two Canadian, two American. They tend to be attached to universities, right, which are increasingly corporate funded, but many of these scientists, including the one I’ll be talking to here, are effectively in the business of exposing corporate malpractice. Environmental cover-ups, for example. So I’m wanting to investigate some of those delicate balances in their work.”
“I can tell you’ll do well,” I said.
She looked both pleased and offended—about right. I hate it when people say that sort of thing to me. Presumptuous, as though to flatter, or worse, condescend. Was I trying to sabotage myself?
“We should talk about your project,” she said. “My dad showed me your letter.”
“I had the impression that you were as close as family to Dr. Venkataraman and his late wife and son.”
“It’s true. Well, we are distantly related—Venkat Uncle is my mother’s third cousin, or second cousin once removed. I never had a brother,” she said, and cleared her throat. She wore a mangal sutra—a wedding chain—with a smaller than usual pendant that she would lift onto her chin when she was listening or thinking. “So Sundar was like that to us. We spent a lot of time at their house. When we were little, his mom would even invite me and my sister for sleepovers. I remember her brushing and braiding my hair in the morning. I think she enjoyed having girls around once in a while. And Sundar came on vacations with us a couple of times.”
I was taking notes, and encouraged her to continue.
“We saw less of him once he got to high school. He wouldn’t always come when his parents came over for dinner and what-not. I would see him around sometimes, though, and there was still something kin
d of special. Like, I remember once a picnic for the whole Indian community, at this lake. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and he brought his lunch over to where I was sitting and talked with me the whole time, about novels and music. I had just started junior high, and my friends weren’t huge readers. I remember making some funny or sarcastic comment, making him laugh. I felt so proud, or included. Worthy. But maybe there was no one better than me to sit with!”
She laughed, then looked around the café self-consciously. “I had friends who were boys, but never a proper boyfriend, until I met the guy I married. I wasn’t allowed to date when I was in high school, and by the time I got to university, it almost felt like I’d never learn how. Indian parents seem to think that’s how it will work, that you’ll meet someone when it’s time to get married, and boom. My parents disapprove of dating different people. But where are you supposed to get the life experience to make a good choice?”
“Did you think Sundar might have advised you on this, or been a model in some way?”
“Hard to imagine, but he’s frozen in time, right?” She had a distinctive way of working her brow. Her expression often seemed at odds with what she would say. “Our relationship never evolved. I always felt I had a lot in common with him, and looked up to him. After he left to go to UBC, we only saw him a few times. Like my sister, I think he really wanted to get out of here.”
“You didn’t feel that way?”
She shook her head. “Sundar … I like to think he wanted to be … not famous, he wasn’t crass, but something huge. Real but huge. I think he could have done it.” She had become hunched, her torso concave. “It seems like an important drive, to want to leave. I don’t have it. Do you think it could be because of the crash?”
That seemed pat, and unexpected. I thought to flip the question back: How had the crash affected her? How might it have been different for her sister? But before I could, her eye was caught.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 5
