“What effect do you think it had on them?”
“It …” She angled her shoulders, crossed her legs, a defensive posture. Her collarbones stood out from her sari blouse like a boomerang, an accidental elegance. Admiring the smooth expanse of her décolletage, I noticed what must have been her mangal sutra, a thick gold chain, the pendant hidden in her blouse. “They managed. I always made a point of talking to them about their feelings. But there’s no way to make sense of it.”
“You are all Shivashakti devotees?”
A quick shake of the head. “No, not at all.” She seemed puzzled that I had presumed.
“I’m sorry. You’re not religious?”
She looked away, toward the window, which framed none of the stunning vistas I associated with this town, but simply the house across the street. “If you had asked me back then, I might have said I was. I believe in God, in some way. But I have no patience anymore with rituals, with any organized religion. I still meditate, but I believe that if there is a higher power, it is within us. Self-knowledge. That’s what I’m seeking. Of course, Shivashakti’s followers say he is helping them to find God within themselves. Our tradition says a guru is a guide like that.” She had included me in that “our.” “But I feel uncomfortable with putting that much trust in someone else, to lead you. Especially after nine–eleven, I …” At this point, I think she noticed my extreme and genuine interest and realized she had said more than she had planned to say. She snapped shut. Would she resent me for having gained her confidence?
But then she smiled a little. I wondered at the possible relief to her: being pushed to confide in someone, being given the means safely, harmlessly, to betray the iron-clad unity of her family. “Seth, as you can see, is a devotee. That came out of the crash.” She spoke slowly. “The rest of us, my daughters and myself, we let the deaths become part of who we were. We … grew around the losses, maybe? I’m not quite sure how to explain. Maybe it has something to do with being a woman. Others’ emotions are not so shattering to us. We’re taught, even while young, to deal with others on an emotional level. Seth needed something more, to be able to cope. He was so shaken at the idea of losing one’s family that we, his family, we weren’t enough to help him through it.” Her tone implied she still felt this inadequacy. “I couldn’t comfort him.”
She was ravishing. Crushes on both Seth and Lakshmi? What was wrong with me? No, I knew what was wrong with me; I thought about that all the time. This required a different question. What was the question?
In the other room, the singing-masters of the soul had finished. We rose to meet them.
Seth was struggling to straighten his legs, and making some joke about it, though the mood was sombre. Warm, though. I liked the faces, particularly, of two of the older, white devotees, men whom Seth brought forward to meet me as Lakshmi tried to usher us toward the buffet, handing each person a plate. One was a school principal, Kaj; the other was Nick, whose profession I didn’t catch. Nick was quiet and reticent, though with an air of leading from behind, as though he would not permit stragglers. Kaj had a loud, red face and bluff manner, and so generated in me some early suspicion, a bull in the china shop of sadness. As we served ourselves, though, he said to me, his Delft-blue eyes vulnerable beneath brushy blond eyebrows, “Seth told me about your project. Good for you. Must be wrenching, talking to people. It’s needed, though, with what Indo-Canadians here have gone through with that. It needs to be acknowledged.”
Lakshmi brushed away compliments on the food as we found places around the kitchen table or on the family room sofa, where I found a spot to eat, plate on my lap. On Seth and Lakshmi’s mantel, there was a clutter of family photos. I rose again to take a closer look. Seth and his siblings in formal portraits. Seth as a sturdy, handsome preschooler in short pants. Such earnest faces. Seth and Lakshmi’s wedding pictures, mid-sixties, to judge by his black-framed eyeglasses, her bejewelled ones. Flash exposure and tension made Lakshmi’s face look like a fawn’s in headlights. Barely out of her teens, my guess. A California sun bleached a seventies-hued shot of the Sethuratnam family group. Brinda’s little sister Ranjani held the hand of an outsized Mickey Mouse. Ah: and here was Sundar. Darker than the others, hair in his eyes, standing a little apart from Seth, whose arm was extended to include him. Graduation photos of the girls, and wedding pictures for Brinda: the couple framed proudly by parents; Brinda laughing with Ranjani; and Brinda and Dev alone, a casual, friendly pose, charged with meaning now that I knew their story. What would I see if I hadn’t? I glanced over at Brinda herself now, and she caught and returned my look, but sat on the steps leading down into the sunken family room from the kitchen instead of joining me.
You must change your life, I thought, telling her telepathically what I doubted I would have the courage to tell her in person. Rosslyn used to love Rilke’s poem on Apollo’s partial perfection. She was a much better reader of Rilke than I was or ever will be. A little preachy, to my taste. The poem’s ultimate exhortation rang in my head—You must change your life!—as Venkat’s gruff, indignant voice rose above the dinner chat.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he was saying, loudly. It was difficult to watch him talk, with that unsettling stillness in his face. I wondered how his students managed. He taught a dry subject, though, statistics. Maybe they didn’t pay too much attention. His voice rose. “What did the Americans do after nine–eleven? Leapt to the chase. Even Canada closed borders! Sent troops! All-out war! Do we not deserve this treatment? My son was born here and raised here, never lived anywhere else. My wife and I, citizens. Through and through. Not one phone call from them. No condolence visit. Nothing.”
Seth patted him nervously on the arm. “But now things are different, aren’t they?” he murmured. “Look at how much effort and money, this most expensive courtroom ever, bulletproof—”
“Sure, in case those guys’ thug friends try to shoot them out,” Brinda said, not seeming to address anyone in particular.
“Progress can be slow,” Seth said, ambiguously. Was he admitting this or making excuses for it? “Canada is timid. They did finally ban the Sikh Youth Federation and the Babbar Khalsa last year.”
“Under the post–nine–eleven anti-terrorist legislation, right?” A smack of mockery sounded in Brinda’s tone. “Convenient: the Americans want laws pushed through, and suddenly Canadians realized that the Air India bombers were targeting Canadians after all.”
“These things take time.” The stubborn cast of Seth’s jaw was animalistic and noble at once. “The wheels of justice turn slowly.”
Venkat raised a fist. “And now that the wheels have begun to turn, the deserving will be crushed beneath them.”
His declaration reminded me of the line … from Stray Birds? I think so. Tagore, not someone I am in the habit of quoting: I thank Thee that I am none of the wheels of power, but am one with the living creatures crushed beneath it. Venkat seemed to feel differently.
“I guess,” said Brinda, without looking over. “What about that bookseller, a few days ago, undermining Ms. D’s testimony?”
“Miss D-for-divorcée,” Venkat spat.
Brinda flinched.
“No morals. Attention-grabbing. Why did she wait until the trial to come forward, if she knew all this?” Venkat sneered.
She must have come forward before, I thought. Otherwise, why would she have been in witness protection?
No one was stopping Venkat and so he went on. “Trying to take her revenge on them. Those Sikhs always stick together except when they are fighting each other. A pathological liar. How stupid must she be, to be strung along by a married terrorist? Pathetic.” A light shone through his unfocused eyes. “Unless she came forward with the information in order that she could be discredited, and so support her lover’s cause.”
There is a particular sinking nausea I feel when confronted with conspiracy theorists, whether clients or taxi drivers. It triggers my flight response. I stood, took my leave of Bri
nda as I passed her, put my plate in the sink, pressed grateful farewells on my hosts, and in moments was out the door, inhaling sweet, fresh Canadian air. I steadied myself on the Sethuratnams’ veranda, looking down at the walkway. The mosaic tile-work was meant to be abstract, but as I stood there staring at it and breathing perhaps a little too deeply the rarified mountain air, images resolved out of the chips and chunks: a grouping of three hearts, a pink-eyed rabbit, some long-snouted creature with a voracious toothy grin.
Did they always simply let Venkat say whatever he wanted? Did they agree with him? Poor Ms. D. The truth of her life was probably unimaginably small, but now it—she—was magnified by mystery. The accused bombers, also, were subject to this: they had opted not to testify, not to tell their own versions, and their silence made them larger than life.
Gaps. Voids. Each track, each trail, yielded nothing. It was driving Venkat nuts. Not that he would have believed the truth, necessarily. Not that any of us was equipped to discern it.
But there was something else. Venkat doth protest too much, I thought. The way he spoke at dinner was the way he had spoken to me in our meeting: obsessively tracking command chains, purse strings, the accused not the dead. He thought about what happened in ways that allowed him to not think about what happened.
I met Seth for lunch in the Student Union the next day.
“I’m sorry for my hasty departure last night,” I said as we stood in line at a food kiosk.
“Did you feel unwell?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Lakshmi was concerned.”
“Not the food! It was wonderful. Hit the spot. A difficult occasion, simply. I suddenly felt I needed to be alone.”
“Can I ask you something?” Seth chose a table amid the clatter of brightly flashing youth, between industrial lighting and shiny brick floors, small matching tables joined by bent and painted steel pipes that also supported small matching chairs. “What are your impressions of Venkat?”
I used the business of unwrapping my sandwich to gain some time. “How do you mean?”
“I mean, as a professional,” he said. “You met with him?”
I waved my head, yes, still very busy with sugar, cream, the stirring of coffee.
“And then you saw him at our house, last night.” His tone was that of someone acknowledging the obvious.
I inclined my head again, but more cautiously.
“Does he give you the impression that he is stable?”
My neck stiffened.
“I’m not looking for guarantees,” Seth said, rushing into my silence. “You understand me? But he had seemed to have stabilized, over so many years. Now the trial …” He slurped his coffee. “He has us worried. I pulled strings to get him a summer teaching session this year. Get him out of the house, some structure, distraction. I was trying to make him see someone, a psychologist, you know? He’s very resistant. So when your letter arrived, I told him, if you don’t think you need help, at least you can perhaps help others.”
I felt a flush of annoyance creep up my face.
“At least he would be seeing a psychologist, right?” Seth seemed satisfied with this. “An eminent one.”
What is it with these people, waiting for a therapist to come from India and find them? Even I could tell, after less than a week, that Lohikarma was a hot spot for narcissistic mindfulness and spiritual questing, as well as uncertain self-employment. Therapists here probably outnumbered potential clients.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m not in a position to give an evaluation.”
“Even an informal one?”
A very strange position, all around. How resentful could I be? Seth, Brinda—they were grasping me, pulling me into their midst, across clinical distances. Even here, Seth seemed so at home in himself. Every line of his face and his body sloped outward, giving that sense of ready embrace:
OPEN!
I wanted to walk into his arms. I wanted to give him what he wanted. If Seth wanted to help Venkat, I wanted to help him.
But it wouldn’t do to respond rashly. “Last night was a very particular occasion,” I said. “It is not surprising that Venkat would be emotional. As for my meeting with him, I didn’t have diagnosis as an objective, and if I had, it would be a breach of confidentiality for me to tell you …” A thought occurred to me. “Do you have any medical power of attorney, for him?”
Seth’s eyebrows preceded his answer: “Perhaps I should back up.”
Sunday, June 23, 1985
SETH MOWED THE LAWN as the morning turned hot. He retreated to his recliner to catch up on recent issues of the American Journal of Physics. His children’s school had let out recently, and though he was teaching an adult education class, it was a lazy time. The house was quiet, kids gone off with friends. He found a response to an article that had intrigued him, “Rumors of Transcendence in Physics,” on “intimations of a real world beyond the natural order.” Seth never got to talk about this stuff as much as he would like. Students had enough trouble with the concrete.
As he read “We can never know more than the mind can assimilate and process, nor can we discuss any aspect of the world for which there is no language,” Seth nodded off. The line must have repeated in his dreams; he still remembered it twenty years later, though he had never made it to the end of the short letter.
The phone interrupted his nap. When he picked up, he might have thought it would be one of the children, asking to bring a friend for lunch. That part, he didn’t remember. He remembered the strangeness of the sound at the other end, and repeating, once, “Hello?” before making out what it was: someone’s sobbing, but not one of his daughters’, and his wife was at home.
“What?” he asked. “Enna’idhu? What is it?”
“It’s gone down.” Venkat’s voice, or some version of it. “Crashed.” And in Tamil, as he began again to cry, “Ayoh! My son! Sita!”
Venkat’s son and wife had left day before yesterday, for India. They had driven to Vancouver and their plane would have departed, what, last night?
“Lakshmi and I will be right there. Venkat? Venkat! We’re coming. Wait for us.”
There was no reply, but the sobbing receded as though Venkat had wandered away from the phone. Seth, too, left his phone receiver on the counter at first, not wanting to hang up, and then realized he had to try to locate his daughters.
He shouted for Lakshmi, trusting that she was within earshot. She came running at the emotion in his voice, saw the phone off the hook. Horror filled her eyes, and Seth had to say, “No, no. It’s Sita and Sundar. Their plane has crashed.” He saw two quick ripples, each effacing the expression that went before: relief that it was not one of their daughters, then horror again.
Ten minutes later, they were in the car. They had asked Ranjani’s friend’s mother to keep her there until they came to pick her up, but they hadn’t been able to find Brinda, who might have been at the pool or ice cream parlour. They left a note on the front door telling her to wait at the neighbour’s until they came home. Lakshmi had snatched their list of phone numbers from the telephone table in the hall as they left and now clutched it in the passenger seat, the names of everyone they were connected to.
Venkat’s front door was locked and he didn’t come when they rang the bell. After several tries, Seth went around to the patio doors and peered in. Venkat was sitting on the floor in the family room, his back against the sofa, not crying, after all, but staring as though being spoken to by an authority expressing grave disappointment and possibly anger. His was the look of a man accepting judgement. Seth never saw such a look on his face again.
The news was on, loud enough for Seth to hear it through the glass doors. He knocked twice, hard, before Venkat started and stood.
Reports from Cork, where rescue efforts were fully underway, squawked from both televisions as well as from the radio. Lakshmi took Venkat’s hands and his sobbing resumed. He withdrew his hands to put them over his face.
As Lakshmi led Venkat back to the family room, Seth turned off the radio and the kitchen TV, replaced the beeping phone in its cradle. He wanted so badly to see his daughters that he was tickled by a shard of resentment for Venkat, whose need was holding Seth here. Venkat’s need: first thing was how to find the survivors. The news from the TV sounded bad. He had to call Air India, but didn’t have a Vancouver phone book and they wouldn’t be listed in Lohikarma’s. Travel agencies here would be closed on Sunday. He settled on calling a friend in Vancouver, an Assamese chemist who had left Harbord for Simon Fraser University. He occupied a line on their list with three previous phone numbers scratched out, an immigrant academic’s history.
“Mukund? Seth here.”
“Seth. Are you … Were Lakshmi or the children …?”
“We’re all fine. So you have heard?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“Your wife?” Seth asked. Mukund had brought a young bride over a few years back.
“No, we are fine, but one of my colleagues, his whole family was on the flight: wife, children, mother-in-law.”
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 11
