The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
Page 6
I looked where she was looking: at a young man of about her age, black hair flopping into his eyes. I looked back at her. Her face was suffused, some soft burst of oxygen radiating from her. He came over to say hello. They chitchatted, gym or shopping or coffee-to-go, and she introduced us: Adrian, an old school chum, now in medical school in Toronto but home for a month or so to help his parents on the farm while his father underwent cancer treatment.
“A good friend?” I asked after he left.
“An old friend.” The tremulousness returned and she began steering our meeting toward the exit. “So you’re meeting my dad and Venkat Uncle today?”
“Your father this afternoon, and Dr. Venkataraman day after tomorrow, Monday morning. They both asked me to come to their offices.”
“What about my mom and my sister?”
“Ranjani, your sister, she’s in Vancouver, yes? I haven’t had a confirmation from her. Your mother hasn’t responded yet either.” I waited a moment and then said, hesitantly, “I would like to talk further, if you have time in your remaining days here.” She had withdrawn so dramatically that I felt aggressive. “Perhaps if you don’t know your schedule yet, you could call me? I am quite open.”
She agreed, but I watched her with a kind of fear as she left. Not that I wouldn’t see her again—if I wanted another interview, I would get it. She hadn’t the strength to decide against me. No—I was fearful for her. Was she ill? The therapy room is better for detecting nuances in tone of voice, or scent. Fever, for instance, hits me in the back of my sinuses, fur-like, medicinal in its own distorted way. Emotional states alter body chemistry, and so alter a person’s smell. Although I’m most acute with people I already know, there are patterns, and I have been doing this a long time.
I stayed and transcribed as I always did, immediately and exhaustively, expanding on my scribbled notes while her words, inflections and pauses were still fresh in my mind, and then began to annotate: her clothing, her posture, my speculations on her state of mind. She was charming to talk to, but an image came to mind: a piece of paper that could eternally be folded, to become a SWAN! fold-fold-fold; BOAT! fold-fold-fold; ORCHID! while only ever showing its outside. I could see the hands doing the folding, but not the person they belonged to.
Looking up in the midst of this, I noticed a woman of indeterminate age in a purple wool coat lumber in to take a stool at the counter. She lifted the veil of her hat to order an apple juice, and opened her beaded clutch. Gazing with childlike pleasure at her image in a small mirror, she retraced and reinforced her already racoonish kohl with a stubby eye pencil. Thirsty work. She ordered another juice, rummaged again in the purse and took out a pair of tweezers.
It was both performance and not. She would look around from time to time, as though pleased to be seen. But where did she imagine herself to be, as she began plucking her chin and upper lip, wiping the tweezers on her napkin, leaving little orange stripes of makeup?
Lohikarma, I would learn, held a special attraction for eccentrics. Its founder, John Harbord, was a remittance man and visionary who arrived in the Kootenay mountains in 1895 after seven years of travel from west to east to west again. His diaries zigzag the landscapes! ceremonies! hallucinogens! of the Urals! Orissa! Ürümqi! as he speculates on entomology, etymologies, and other subjects he had no real means to penetrate. While sojourning among Finnish utopians on an island off North America’s northwest coast, Harbord had chosen a name for the place he sensed he would shortly discover: Lohikarma, his pronunciation of the Finnish word for “dragon.” He cites the word as final proof of his theory of the Finnish language’s Sanskritic origins. Many cultures compose their dragons from the parts of other animals, reincarnating them: the dragon’s karma is to inherit their qualities. Harbord’s mission was to found a New World university on the traditions of “the many cultures the tides of history had washed up on these verdant shores.” The town was named for the dragon. The university was named for him.
In the hundred years since, Lohikarma had grown, mostly in the usual ways. Gold had brought the first white men here, but lead, silver and zinc attracted further waves of entrepreneurs. Mines, mills and money fertilized an ecosystem of hotels, transport, provisioners and traders. But the town also attracted three other populations in greater concentrations than any other place I’d been. One was renegade or persecuted religious and ethnic groups, fleeing czars, dukes, generals. But while conservative and conformist Hutterites and Mennonites can be found in various places, the anarchist Doukhobors—a.k.a. Sons of Freedom, a.k.a. Spirit Wrestlers, setting fires to protest personal property and shedding their clothes to protest war—are found only here. A second was the followers of various spiritual leaders who had chosen this area for their ashrams, attracted by energy centres or some such, in the rocks and earth. Funny how such vibrations are rarely discovered in the wastelands of northern Saskatchewan, say, but rather only in the prettiest areas of the continent. The Kootenays ranked—rolling hills and rocky outcrops, flowering meadows and sparkling lakes. And that was likely what attracted the third group of note, much smaller, but one that had influenced the landscape and culture of the town as much as any other: wealthy eccentrics who chose Lohikarma as the place where they would build their follies and live their visible or invisible lives. I was most taken by stories of the French-Spanish fop who built here a miniature replica of his family’s castle and the lesbian heiress who serially seduced rich and famous daughters from Victoria to Regina, assisted by her boat-driver, a Marseillaise dwarf.
A barista pled in undertones with the Tweezer, who stood, declaring, in a flat Canadian accent, “Bug off. I’m not your stepping-stone!” As she made her way regally out into a hard rain, I imagined how her wool coat must have smelled, the rain releasing odours of a domestic menagerie: guinea pigs and rabbits, urine and wood shavings, and the oddly fresh scent of fur itself.
I finished my notes, and ate a ciabatta sandwich as the rain eased. I walked on damp but warming sidewalks toward the university to meet Brinda’s father, Professor S. P. “Seth” Sethuratnam, following High Street from its lowest point, in the centre of town, straight up toward the university, which is on a rise of its own. The sidewalks dried as I dampened. Pale clouds lifted and dissolved off the tops of the purple mountains. If ever you visit Lohikarma, huff and puff up to one of the many high points to take in the vista of the lake accompanied by the sound of your own laboured breath. I should not assume you and I are alike in this, dear reader: I am a grizzled old fart and perhaps you could run circles around me. Still, allow me to press my point: while Lohikarma gives a marvellous view of the mountains from almost anywhere, for no work at all, only when you climb do you get the full effect. Trismegistus, I came to call it: lake, mountains, and long, low sky.
I was grateful to stop a hundred metres or so from High Street’s summit. I could see it ahead: the quad, with its eight or ten neo-classical, Canadian-Edwardian facades, always featured on the covers of Harbord U’s brochures, as if to demonstrate that the colonies’ inferiority complex was far from resolved. Physics was in a newer science facility closer to downtown, a modernist structure typical of the early seventies building boom in Canada, unfortunate materials but lots of light.
In the atrium, I detected an organic chemistry lab by its unnatural, tart-and-sweet smell, chemical (I suppose it goes without saying) and burnt, but not in the comforting way of woodsmoke. It was a smell I had not encountered since leaving medical school, but the olfactory cortex is well-protected from the ravages of time, unlike, for example, the knees: my own, already complaining about the climb, confronted a wide brick staircase with anticipatory discomfort before I spied the elevator behind it.
I found Dr. Sethuratnam’s name on his third-floor office door and knocked.
I liked him from the very first. He was a small man, though not so much so by the standards of his origins. I, too, am South Indian, though of taller stock. In a gathering of our fellows, I, not he, would have stood
out. And I am only five-foot-ten.
I held out my hand. “Ashwin Rao.”
He shook it and gestured me in, lifting some papers off a chair that faced his overflowing desk. “No student came to office hours today. My desk starts to colonize my chairs if they’re unoccupied.”
“The impulse of empire,” I said, as he tried to find somewhere for the papers, ultimately stowing them on top of some others on a low shelf.
He laughed. “I know it! At home, my wife confines my mess.” He found his way back into his desk chair. The spot on the green plush where his head rested was shiny and worn. As it was a Saturday, I had been surprised that he was teaching, but he explained that summer school ran six days a week.
He wore a new-looking suit, conservative but not unfashionable. Chartreuse silk tie dotted with tiny purple fish. A hint of cologne and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. He was clean-shaven, with hair thinning on top to expand a forehead dominated by a pair of remarkable eyebrows. If they were still, they might not have been so notable. But they were never still. His voice was pleasant, his face well-shaped, but his eyebrows were his defining feature. (These were also Brinda’s eyebrows, though she used them so differently that further comparisons were useless.) Seth’s brows spoke as he spoke; gestured when he did. They made me think that this man could never lie: his eyebrows, shooting like arrows from his third eye, would shout the truth even if he fought to suppress it.
“Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?” It was the usual first question, sprung from that human desire to identify one another by clan. What is your place, your people?
“Hah, originally, yes. My father was from Nellore, and we spent holidays there, though I was raised first in Hyderabad and then New Delhi. I did graduate studies at McGill, though, and lived in Ottawa for some years.”
I imagine he might have liked to know my caste, to add that stamp to my resumé. But such questions are no longer the done thing among the educated classes.
“And you live in Delhi now?”
“That’s right,” I said. There was a slight brightness to his eyes that conveyed genuine, relatively untainted interest. He struck me as a man concerned with bonds of affection and community. He might like you; he might even, somehow, someday, help you.
“And you would like to hear about our involvement with Venkat?”
“If that is what you want to talk about. Also your own experience of the disaster.”
He sat with elbows on the armrests, hands in his lap. I waited for him to ask more about the focus of the study, as others of my interviewees had. Why are you doing this? Or, as Suresh had: Why dredge this up?
“And your experience?” he asked instead.
“I, mine?”
He cleared his throat. “Did you not lose loved ones in the disaster?”
To this point, none of my other subjects had asked me this, and I can tell you now that none but Seth ever did. They were caught up in their own grief and their own stories; they must have figured they would have known my name if my wife or children had died.
Since this was not a therapeutic relationship, and since I had withheld that information for no reason I could name, it seemed wrong to deflect. “My sister and her children.”
I watched Seth’s face. Not much changed, except for a shift of those eyebrows. And yet I distinctly felt that my pain was filtering through him, and that he had no sense of how vulnerable this made him.
I elaborated, my mouth dry. “My brother-in-law, who still lives in Montreal, was my first interviewee. His wife, my sister, Kritika, and my nephew and niece were coming to India for their summer holidays.”
His eyes looked steadily into mine. “Your parents are still alive?”
“No, not anymore.”
He hadn’t moved, nor had I, and yet it was as though some column connecting our chests was collapsing, drawing us toward an unseen centre.
“And your own family, is anyone travelling with you?”
“I don’t have a family. I …” This, too, is always an awkward thing to say, particularly to men of my own age and station in life. “I chose to remain unmarried.” I broke his gaze. Too much. I was short of breath. Looking around the office, I saw a PhD from Indiana State University, framed on the wall, together with several teaching awards. Jumbled into the shelves, physics toys: a drinking bird, a Newton’s cradle, wooden blocks in a Roman arch.
Seth looked out his window. “The sun is out! Perhaps let’s go sit in the, what do you call it, gazebo sort of thing, in the garden. There are comfortable chairs that stay dry.”
“That rainstorm was quite something.” I don’t make small talk. It really was quite something.
He swept some untidy stacks of papers into a briefcase and closed his door behind us. “It’s the lake. Pulls the freak rainstorms in.”
“You are a professor of physics?” I asked as we descended.
“Everyone has to profess something. I profess physics and God.” Sly and harmless delight.
“Ah?” I said. The G-word raised my arm hairs a little.
“Associate Professor only,” he said.
He was approaching retirement, not as a full professor but one rank below. Some halt in his career? “What is your specialty?”
“I don’t specialize, as such. I like to think my specialty is making people love this subject.” He cleared his throat. “Let me put it to you this way. Every scientist sees the world through his discipline’s teachings. When people learn about physics, the world expands for them. The Big Bang, I like to call it: if a man continues to learn, his universe will be constantly expanding, isn’t it? So I teach Introductory Physics, Physics of Chemistry, Physics of Biology, Physics for Non-Majors. Courses that might typically rotate among faculty, but I like to teach them. I have never gone in much for research.”
“And yet … teaching here?” We found seats in the garden, very nice, an outdoor student lounge. “Harbord is a research institution, isn’t it?”
He cleared his throat again. “When I first came to Harbord, the physics department was not the best in the country. If it was, they wouldn’t have hired me! Maybe they didn’t know that, then. Not much resources. Very little equipment, not too many graduate students. My area of research was elementary particles. I worked on muons, for my dissertation. You know much about …?”
I’m sure I looked quite blank.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I got married in the summer between completing my PhD and coming to Lohikarma. After I arrived, and got settled, I started to see how competitive it could be to get research funding. Such a big part of your time, competing for grants and prizes and publications. Competing, competition … it’s not really my thing.”
Seth used his hands when he talked—we all do that, Indians—but in concert with his eyebrows, as though one pair were conducting the other.
“My wife, Lakshmi, arrived about six months later, in the middle of a Canadian winter, poor girl. I had to get her settled. I was the junior man on the totem pole that year, so I taught all the introductory classes. And I very much enjoyed it. Especially the classes for non-majors. I enjoy the feeling of bringing them into the field. Initially, students are fearful. They think they will be bored; they think they might feel unintelligent. But they come to love physics! It’s truly satisfying, truly so.
“So. There was no real opportunity for me to continue my research that first year, and without my dissertation director, I felt a bit lost. I had enjoyed my research, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking I was the most brilliant physicist that ever walked the earth. Have you read any Richard Feynman? Now there’s a brilliant fellow. A very dedicated teacher, also. He used to say that if we can’t explain it to an undergraduate, we don’t know enough about it. I try to keep up. I read the journals, try to incorporate the new research into my courses. Keeps it interesting. You know? So many people out there are driven to do research, to write. I ride on their backs!”
I smiled, still waiting for an answer to my question.
“My children came along, and I kept on teaching—but research?” He shook his head. “Not for me. I never tried to advance beyond Associate level.”
I would learn, in time, what a popular teacher he was, both among undergraduates and with his students in an adult education course, which he taught almost entirely using examples in nature and real-world experiments, rather than in a lab. He was beloved as a teacher, even while remaining a figure of some ridicule among his more ambitious colleagues. I was struck, then and later, by Seth’s having shaped his seeming lack of ambition into a professional niche, justifying his tenure by being both popular and indispensable: teaching courses that higher-reaching professors might feel were beneath them while also providing them with a gratifying sense of superiority.
“I talked about it with Brinda, my eldest, when she was deciding whether to quit her PhD.” He leaned back in the lawn chair, put a hand in his blazer pocket as if to reach for cigarettes. I made a little note: smoker? Former, maybe. I would have smelled it. No one in Canada smokes anymore. “She did Biochem here, then took a break, a year or two off, then joined the epidemiology programme at the University of Alberta. An excellent programme, and I think she could have done very well, but the drive wasn’t there. She’s a brilliant girl. You are meeting her, this week?”
“I met her this morning,” I said.
He smiled as if to say, So then you know. “She seemed to think it wasn’t what she was meant to do. She stopped, took a job with the alumni magazine. Within a year, she was writing half of the articles. No training! Now she wants to take it further, so she is entering this master’s course, at Johns Hopkins: Science Writing.” He looked off at groups of students dotted in the half-sun. “She would have made an excellent prof.”