The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  She reacted to something in my face by raising her hands, palms up, and dropping them.

  “It just never happened. I would get frustrated, and try to talk about it, but nothing ever changed. He gave me excuses, got defensive. But everything else was still, I thought—this was a year or so in—great.” She lifted the pendant of her mangal sutra onto her chin, looking mournful. “He was my best friend.” Past tense. “As I said, though, he was getting tired of commuting from his folks’ place and didn’t see why he should get his own place in the city if he was spending four nights a week with me, anyhow. Somewhere in there—I’m not really sure how—we agreed that maybe it would be best if we got married. Big weddings have always made me a little squeamish, but—compromise: that’s adulthood, right? The parents were all thrilled. We had a proper Hindu wedding in Lohikarma and a Christian one in Edmonton—his mom is Christian, pretty religious, but his dad is Hindu. And even on our wedding night—no sex. And still, no sex.”

  “Never?” I paused in my note-taking to ponder this.

  “Not one time.” She was looking at my steno pad. “Sexual-type activities, up to a point, but, no, our marriage is unconsummated.”

  We were interrupted by the screaming of cats, seemingly on my roof. It was a metal roof, slippery and overhung with a great many branches, so that there seemed always to be creatures falling onto it or off it or trying to scramble across it. Sometimes I would glimpse a crow or a squirrel through one of the three (three!) skylights. And where there are birds and rodents, naturally there occur cats, and where there are cats, catfights. The yowling was heavily disturbing, particularly since they came on that ominous note in Brinda’s narrative. Unless they didn’t and I’m putting them there for dramatic effect.

  Brinda blinked and checked the time. “Maybe we should break there for today? Listen, are you really sure this is okay? I’m in town such a short time, but I …”

  “No, I had no plans for today, nothing at all. I’m quite available.” My stomach growled—bodily functions resuming. I took a sip of tea.

  “I can’t tell you how I appreciate it.” She stopped, breathed. “The chance to sort it out.”

  “The obvious question I must ask is whether he isn’t homosexual.”

  “Naturally.” Slight impatience. “He has rare moments of candour, when he’ll admit he might have a problem, but he has never thought he was gay. He says he has never been conscious of an attraction to men. I believe it.”

  “Has he ever said what he thinks the problem might be?”

  “No. He seems mystified.”

  “Has he seen a doctor?”

  “I begged him until he finally went.” She rolled her eyes. “He came back and told me he’d been given a clean bill of health. The doc had suggested a tensor bandage for his trick ankle. I asked, Did you tell him why you made the appointment? Did you ask him about our problem? No straight answer. More often, he blames the situation on me. He says he never had this problem with his previous girlfriend, implying I somehow make him impotent.” She crunched her pretty brows. “All the evasions, the contradictions. He’s got to be lying about something, but I can’t tell what, and it’s like with a child: I think he won’t confess unless he’s caught and I’m getting tired of trying to figure it out. He is a child in lots of ways, actually. I have to beg him to cook. He’s gotten competent with laundry and dishes, but acts so bewildered and is so inefficient that I feel almost guilty. Can’t drive, which made the commute from his parents’ place particularly tedious. So I do the errands, shopping. I pay all the bills. Every single time he has to write a cheque, he asks me how. Every. Single. Time. It’s like a campaign to demonstrate his need. And his devotion to a life of thought.

  “That’s the thing. He’s always interesting to be around. Always reading some great-sounding book or tracking down some long-lost classic film. That’s what his mind is filled with, while the rest of us have to think about cleaning the toilet and making supper.

  “I admired that. I want to live a life of the mind, too. Except that life has necessities, and, because we live together, I do more than my share. Years ago, I made my peace with the daily, regular incompetence. But there were still all the problems in bed.

  “Finally, toward the end of last year, I realized that to stop feeling tortured, I had to renounce any hope of change. I love him. He understands me in a way no one ever has before. This is who he is. This is what I’ve got. I stopped trying to ferret out the problem, stopped putting pressure on him. I didn’t say anything about it, though, and neither did he. I couldn’t tell if he noticed, but I thought I sensed some relief. It had to be a relief, right? Not to have that expectation from me.

  “That was December or so, when I was applying to grad school for writing programmes, and my view shifted again. It was like a Rubik’s Cube. You know that stage lots of people get to, one side of the cube all nice and uniform and all the other sides a scramble? That’s what it’s like: I’m finally totally clear what I want to do professionally, but nothing else in my life is coherent. It was easier not to think about, though, while everything was unresolved.”

  Pitch the yahoo! I thought. He doesn’t deserve you!

  Her face—I hadn’t said anything, I swear—changed. Back to something like the haunted little thing who had first come to see me. “The big elephant in the room, of course, is babies.” Her eyes were large and dark. “I’ve always wanted children. Dev knows. But anytime I’ve brought it up recently, he’s balked. I’m thirty-five! The window is nearly closed, but now Dev says he’s inspired by my example, that maybe he wants a change, too. You know he’s a lab technician. Lab director, now. The job’s beneath him, and he doesn’t love it. I kept thinking, in the early years, that he was getting ready to move on. It seemed normal: he took this job his dad got him because he was getting ready to apply for academic jobs or whatever, maybe private industry. But he never got around to applying for anything else. He hangs out with his friends from undergrad. One works at the Film Wagon, and he and Dev started a film series at the public library. They have a little following. Now Dev says maybe he’ll write a book about film music. Maybe he’ll start playing music. Can’t think about kids when he might make this huge life change. But he hasn’t done anything about it.”

  A lull. I had been distracted from my headache, but now it began to distract me in turn.

  Brinda must have seen. “I should go.” She rose. “You must have tons of work. You’ve been so kind to see me.”

  “Talking can help.” I pressed my forehead. “Come again. You still have more, is that right? The other problem?”

  She pursed those Sethuratnam brows, as if in apology. “Yes.”

  “The day after tomorrow? We may not have the chance to meet again after this week—you are going to Baltimore straight from Edmonton, is that correct?”

  It was.

  “After you go,” I told her, “I will try to put together your narrative and send it to you. Ideally, we would meet to talk it through and revise it together.”

  This time, her brows went up. “Ideally, you would be licensed in Canada and I could pay you for all this.”

  “Ideally, we would both be different people than we are,” I responded, and we laughed. “But perhaps I can at least give you an external record of your story, help you to see it a bit more objectively. Let me try.”

  “That’s how you work?” she asked. “You write your client’s story, and then work from what you write?”

  “Essentially, yes. It seems likely I will make similar narratives from the stories I am collecting for this book, the one about the bombing. I haven’t quite determined how it will work.”

  “Day after tomorrow, then. Here?”

  “Yes. Very good. Oh, and I may see you tonight.” I had forgotten this when she came, and was still ambivalent, but now thought it prudent to mention it.

  “The memorial?” She looked wary. “My dad invited you?”

  “I repeat: I will say nothing. You
r parents don’t even need to know we met today.” I mimed zipping my lips. She didn’t look happy, which made me sad, but how many ways could I promise not to talk?

  As she descended my fire-escape stairs, a blur of two cats in a chase rounded the end of the alley. I thought of Old Mangy in my parking garage and wondered if he was dead yet. Why did I cultivate his trust knowing I was likely to leave so soon? I needed the guilt. I hoarded and treasured it. It had been so long since I had been close enough to anyone to cause pain.

  I raised a hand and smiled at Brinda as she looked back up at me and waved.

  I wanted nothing so much as to go back to bed—or to bed, since I never reached it the night before—but my method is too ingrained: I went across the street to buy Tylenol, then returned, made more coffee, and transcribed.

  What is one girl’s love life against terror, mayhem, massive governmental cock-ups? “First-world problems”—a phrase I heard recently, the sort of assessment I would have agreed with when I left Canada, twenty years ago. But I thought differently now.

  Brinda’s worries, my own worries—that we might never have the chance truly to love, or to love again—these are the ways we best understand the effects of terror: someone’s father killed in a falling Twin Tower, someone’s fiancé blown up at a checkpoint in Afghanistan. First-world problems? Statistics are well and good, but names, faces, stories make us understand, pay attention. Who are the victims?

  Transcription took no more than two or three hours. The best thing for pain is work. It settles me. The lives of others.

  I ate half a cold rotisserie chicken with leftover naan, and followed it with a three-hour siesta and another shower, during which I considered the gathering at the Sethuratnams’ house that evening, which I wanted badly to attend and was simultaneously dreading. Reading this over, now, I see this is identical to what I said about the trial. It seems I learn as much about myself through my writing as I do about anyone else.

  The memorial would be as valuable to my book as it would be painful, no doubt. Observe it, I advised myself, and write an account of it in your journal. Make yourself an actor in your own life, see yourself as you see the others. It was enough to get me out the door. Seth lived about a half-hour on foot from where I was staying.

  The streets grew slightly wider toward the lake, and evinced a beach town’s smugness and desolation. It reminded me of San Francisco. There was a bridge across the lake’s narrow western arm, literally a pale imitation of the Golden Gate: a crooked little thing painted two shades of rusty apricot. There was even a tram, just one, retained for tourists after the rest of the circuit was replaced by buses.

  In the months I would eventually spend here, I never tired of trolling the residential districts, where each house differed markedly from the next, evidence of the personalities within. Several blocks from where I was staying, for example, was a house whose deck resolved into the prow of a ship. A mast rose to hoist a Jolly Roger, watched over by a gargoyle rusting contentedly on a peak in the roof. Another shabby housefront had balconies in which each vertical rail was half a bright-coloured fibreglass ski. In another garden, a shop mannequin dressed like Dorothy of Oz served as a scarecrow.

  Seth’s house did not stand out among these: a modestly pretty pale-grey facade, dark-grey shingles, and a patio with pillars and red-painted concrete, curiously like verandas in our villages back home. The single exceptional detail was a multicoloured mosaic tile abstract that formed the walk from garden gate to front door, a project of one of the children perhaps, or of Lakshmi.

  As I approached the door, I felt myself fill with a dark heavy slowness that made it difficult to continue. There were cars parked in the driveway, and I had turned to go back when one more pulled up to the curb. Seth got out on the driver’s side, Venkat on the other. Seth came around to greet me, and took me by the arm to lead me again up the path. No turning back now.

  Venkat followed a little behind: he lifted a large covered birdcage out of the back seat, which he carried to the door. He said nothing to me. If he looked at me, I didn’t catch the glance. No question of rudeness: on this day, anything could be forgiven. Still, I doubted whether he would meet with me again. I had shuddered on seeing him emerge from the car, and so thought I might be glad if that was what he decided.

  Brinda herself came to the door. I gave her the grocery-store bouquet I had picked up on the way. I could hear bhajan songs already underway, and she led me to the family room, where a small group of people, more than half of them white, sat in a semicircle facing a shrine. It occupied one side of a gas fireplace hearth, and crept up the wall: pictures of Rama, Sita, Krishna, Durga, and Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and namesake of my hostess, as well as a large portrait of Shivashakti, Seth’s guru, saffron-robed and hooked-nosed, with his famous signature hairstyle, a long, silvering pageboy, taking up much of the picture. A sandalwood garland was hung on the frame.

  Incense had burned already to the stub and its faint remnants were being overtaken by smells from the kitchen: basmati rice, mustard seed, cumin and coriander. I don’t cook, but the nose knows.

  Seth brought his wife over and we made our introductions, palms together. The devotees’ strident singing made conversation with them impossible—a relief I appreciated even as I forcibly lowered my hackles at the God-glorifying. Venkat had already slid onto the floor to join in and Seth did likewise, while Lakshmi gestured that I should follow her.

  Seth’s cologne and Lakshmi’s perfume curled away from each other against what I recognized as a whiff of recent sex. Seth, you devil! She wore a white sari with a tangle of flowers along the hem. Some fluttery fabric—not silk. Kritika would have known what it was called.

  In the kitchen, Lakshmi gave me a glass of savoury lassi.

  “So you met with my husband and daughter this week?” Her tone put me on my guard.

  “I did,” I answered. The lassi was lemony and cool, made from homemade yogourt, just the thing after a hilly walk under the still-high sun.

  “Collecting our stories.” There was something girlish in the way she looked down at her hands, spread on the counter, but nothing timid in her tone, which had an edge. Skepticism? She looked up again.

  “I am …” I wanted to add something but not to give her anything more to react to until I knew where she stood. And in this pause, each gazing at the other, locked in mutual expectancy, I was further disconcerted by the realization that Lakshmi was beautiful. And in that moment she, too, either felt some current between us or realized that I had noticed her. She looked away.

  I plunged ahead, foolhardy perhaps. “Would you like to meet with me?”

  She narrowed her eyes a little; her lips tightened. “I’m not sure I will have much to add.”

  “Does it bother you that Seth and Brinda have been talking to me?”

  She raised her chin slightly. She was in her late fifties, with some lines around her eyes to prove this, and perhaps a softening of the skin around a high forehead and pronounced cheekbones. Full lips, curving nostrils: classical Dravidian features. Large eyes, in a defiant mood. She was curvaceous, a woman who had borne children, but with a self-containment, something like pride, evident in her figure. I suppose there was nothing inappropriate in my noticing her attractiveness, though the force of this noticing was unusual, at least for me. I have never been a great pursuer of women.

  “I’m so sorry if you feel I have imposed …” I really was.

  My apology softened her, or perhaps she felt sorry for me.

  She waved a hand as if to restart. “It’s simply that I am not comfortable talking to anyone outside the family about our private matters.”

  “You understand that I will not quote you without your permission?” I asked.

  “I understand that, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.” She smiled. (A first!)

  I smiled back. “I appreciate what you are saying.”

  “Seth wants me to help you.”

  Ah. “You re
ally have no obligation.” But I was curious to hear what she would have to say.

  She looked over at the devotees, her husband among them, and then indicated the living room, in the opposite corner of the house. I followed. She waved me toward the sofa and took a chair herself.

  “I don’t want to seem ungenerous,” she said, playing with her pallu, which was wrapped around her back and pulled across her hip. “I recall trying to find some books on grief, back when it happened, when we were trying to help Venkat and to deal with our own shock, and there weren’t any, really, that applied to the situation. A book like yours could help people, I suppose.”

  “Did you seek the advice of a counsellor, back then?”

  She looked mildly appalled. “No, I, we were fine. Venkat, of course … well, but I’ll let him tell you about that, if he chooses.”

  “May I ask, how did you cope up? I don’t mean how well or poorly. I mean, what means did you use?”

  “For my own sadness?”

  “You have also mentioned shock.”

  “Yes. It was all of that. The fear.” She leaned forward. Her eyes, as I have said, were large and liquid, kohl-lined on the inner lower lids. “Because, to us, it came out of nowhere. A bomb. A plane exploding! How, how do you even start to think about that? I was very concerned about Venkat. He is my relative. He’s not … strong. And poor Sita and Sundar. They were some of our oldest friends here.”

  “You were close?”

  “Oh, yes.” She hesitated. “Well, Sita confided in me occasionally. I think you could say we were close. She knew she could talk to me.”

  I could imagine that a friendship with Lakshmi might be one-sided, that she would be firm and loyal, a good listener, but not a person to reveal much. It could leave a friend wondering how close they really were, if the friend paid attention.

  “It was hard, for her, being in Canada. She had miscarriages, one before and one after Sundar. She was always very quiet, especially at gatherings, but every once in a while, she would say she wanted to talk to me, and she would tell me things. Like after the second miscarriage. Venkat didn’t seem to understand at all what she was going through. And then, much later, when Sundar was a teenager, he and Venkat had some very bad fights. Sundar came to Seth for help, once or twice. But he went into engineering, in the end, the way Venkat wanted him to. He was a super kid. Always good to my daughters. I worried most about the effect on them. They were adolescents, not babies, but still. Or maybe I knew it would have more of an effect because they weren’t babies.”