The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  Was? “Mukund, I need a contact number for Air India. It’s Sita and Sundar.” He heard his own voice crack a little, saying their names.

  “Oh, no, no.”

  “Can you get the number for me?”

  Seth was writing it down when Venkat jumped over to wrench the receiver out of his hand. “Sundar might be trying to call. He always calls.” He choked, pressing the receiver to the cradle so hard that his palm looked waxen while the dark brown skin on the back of his hand crinkled. Lakshmi had had a Benares silk sari exactly that colour that tore on a door hook, once, before she even realized she was caught. Seth put his hand on Venkat’s back and looked over at her.

  She came and guided Venkat once more toward the family room, but Venkat peeled away, toward the stairs. “I’m going to pack a few things. It’s good you’re here, to stay by the phone. They’ll be in shock. I must go and bring them home.”

  This, at least, made sense to Seth. It was what he would do. They let Venkat go. “Lakshmi, kanna, maybe I should go call Air India from home, find out what is happening and also find out about flights to Ireland. I’ll pick up Ranjani on the way.” Though she was fourteen, Ranjani’s baby fragrance, like sweetened milk, had never changed. He still smelled it when he hugged her, especially where her neck met her ear. He wanted—needed—to hold her.

  Lakshmi wiped her cheeks, hard. “Maybe you should go with him, Seth. To Ireland.”

  She was right. He would have to go.

  He fetched Ranjani from her friend’s house, and found Brinda sitting on the doorstep with her friend Jenny when they pulled into the driveway. “Did you hear about the Air India crash?” she asked. “Jenny’s dad had the radio on in the garage. What’s going on?”

  He told Jenny she perhaps should go home.

  Inside, he looked at his daughters and quaked.

  “We went to Venkat Uncle’s house. Sweethearts.” He felt his face crumple and was filled with shame at seeing his daughters grow afraid, but he couldn’t stop his tears, not even for them. More shame: he may have been carrying Venkat’s pain, but he was crying for himself. It could have been his family. He told his daughters, “Oh, sweethearts. Sita Aunty and Sundar were on that plane.”

  The girls started crying.

  “We don’t know, whether they are alive or …” He could see they were crying as much out of fear as anything—fear of the possible impending grief, or of whatever else would come. He, too, had never faced such a thing, didn’t even know yet what they were facing.

  The girls wanted their mother. He told them Lakshmi had stayed with Venkat Uncle, and that they would go there as soon as he got through to the airline. He turned on the news. There was no way to protect them from this. Brinda comforted her younger sister on the sofa. He watched them, so glad to have two, and both girls. You can’t expect that kind of affection from boys, and affection is what counts in a family. He had thought this many times, but now his mind fled guiltily toward Sundar, such a good boy, very affectionate toward his mother. Where was he now?

  It took him hours to get through to Air India: an hour on hold, before he was cut off, another hour back on hold to learn that they had already called Venkat, though he couldn’t make them clarify whether they had called before Seth got to Venkat’s or after he had left. While he sat on the phone, Brinda made and brought him cups of instant coffee.

  The airline agent informed Seth that Venkat had been told he would be couriered a ticket to Ireland as soon as there was a compelling reason for him to come. When Seth pressed, they explained that “compelling reason” essentially meant if or when there was a body to be identified. There were not thought to be any survivors, but many bodies—and parts, the agent stammered, in a brief departure from his script—had already been retrieved from the sea. This Seth knew from the news anchors, who also kept mentioning the danger that sharks might get to the victims first. The agent also said that they would prefer no one come until all the bodies had been retrieved and identified. “You don’t want anyone sitting over there, sir, simply waiting …”

  The other big news that day was that there were not just one but two Air India bombs. A bag, from another plane originating in Vancouver, had exploded at the Tokyo airport, an hour before the jet flying the Atlantic route was blown apart. That bag was being taken off the plane, which was on the ground and empty by then, but it killed a couple of baggage handlers. What was going on? Would there be other bombs? Who was doing this, and who were their targets?

  After he hung up, he returned to Venkat’s house with the children. As they walked in the front door, they heard him shouting. “Goddamn Paks!” Lakshmi cowered against the kitchen counter while Venkat roared at her. “Since day one they’ve had it for us. Show India who’s who. Let us give them jihad!”

  “Venkat. Venkat!” Seth got between them and gestured behind his back for Lakshmi to go to their daughters, who were frozen at the front door. “That makes no sense. Pakistan could have bombed India if they wanted: why bomb a jet flying from Canada?”

  “We are chosen ones, Sethu. We made it out. Jealousy.” Venkat patted Seth’s cheek, a little hard. “Pakistan is a poor nation, because …? Their nation itself was born in a deal with the white devil. They are paying for it ever since.” This was a familiar rant. Pakistan was one of Venkat’s stock monologues. Daily life depended on the suppression of a person’s worst fears. Bereavement kicked open the doors to let the demons swell, stretch their tongues, show their fiery eyes.

  “Whoever it was, we’ll find out soon. Venkat, did the airline call you?”

  “I’m all packed. Let’s go.” Venkat moved toward the front door, where his suitcase sat.

  Seth went after him. Lakshmi still stood there, arms around the weeping children, clearly tempted to open the door and run away, dragging her kids with her.

  “Air India said they would send you a ticket,” Seth said after him. “If necessary.”

  “You think I’ll get on one of their goddamn planes?” Venkat picked up the suitcase. “So you have not made any arrangements?”

  “I think you should wait a bit longer.” Seth thumbed sweat from his eyebrows, wiped his forehead and upper lip. “Wait for a call. It’s not as if we can go, what, on the rescue boats ourselves.”

  Venkat’s brow folded. “Are you going home?”

  Seth looked at Lakshmi, who telegraphed her desperation to get the kids out of this house. Venkat’s grief put him in mind of that turning-point passage in the Gita, when Krishna, a little reluctantly, takes his true form for Arjuna. Divinity revealed. The mortal quakes. Here, they were being shown the infinite depths of human vulnerability. The void. No need to dangle the children above it.

  “No,” he said.

  “Seth will drop us at home and come back to spend the night with you.” Lakshmi let go of one of her daughters and patted Venkat’s arm. “You should stay here in case of a call, but Seth will be right back.” She let go the other girl, took hold of Venkat’s shoulders, and then hugged him, a gesture permitted, even mandated, by their life in Canada. She never would have done that in India.

  Seth and Lakshmi didn’t talk much on the drive home, except for agreeing that she would call their circle of friends. Others would want to help, and they had to arrange a substitute for Venkat’s summer session, and for Seth to have the next few days off. More, if he were to go with Venkat to Ireland. They were thinking of the five other Indian families who had been in Lohikarma as long as they, families from Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra, as well as a man from Kerala with a white Canadian wife he had met in graduate school.

  The Sethuratnams had multiple bonds with Venkat, little as they fundamentally liked him. Sita had clung to Lakshmi on the younger woman’s arrival in Canada. Venkat insisted on speaking English to her during the day to help her learn—puzzling, because while she was perfectly fluent in English she had never in her life used it at home. Lakshmi had been taken aback at first by the intensity of Sita’s need, but soon came to understand
, even as she and Seth fell in love in a way that she thought Sita and Venkat must not have done.

  Seth packed an overnight bag and containers of frozen sambar and rasam to defrost for their supper, although, as he did so, he realized Sita likely had filled the deep freezer before she left, to cover her three-week trip. He and Lakshmi parked the children in front of a VHS movie. Out of sight of their daughters, finally, they embraced.

  Seth’s arms closed around Lakshmi’s body, whose shape was starting to change, the upper back curving slightly into what might someday be a stoop, her waist growing broader. Her breasts pressed against him through his thin summer shirt. She had cut her hair off when she went back to school, a couple of years ago, but it still reached her shoulders. Seemed it got shorter every year, though, and his view of her, his bride, his love, the only woman whose bare skin he had ever caressed, whose body he had ever entered, was changing too. Their marriage was comfortable, and not infrequently romantic, but distant now from the raw obsession of those first years, when he would unthread her plait, her hair fanning down to brush her bottom, when they would make love every afternoon when he got home from teaching, and sometimes again before sleep. The tresses would wind around her as she sat naked on the bed, afterward, talking, singing a bit of a movie song they both knew, and he would run his fingers through its silken lengths. He had thought her a goddess. It did seem that assimilation, or perhaps merely time, had made her less divine, even a bit mannish in the way of many Western women.

  He had an uncle who had once spent a couple of weeks in the U.S. and felt, on the basis of that visit, qualified to make all sorts of pronouncements on Western culture. “American love marriages are a hot pot on a cold stove,” he would declare. “These Americans, they get bored. They divorce. But our Indian marriages”—a finger held aloft, lips smacking—“a cold pot on a hot stove.”

  Seth was not so sure, not that he needed or wanted, in his forties, the intensity he and Lakshmi had enjoyed before having kids. But what would he do without her? It was one of his few certainties: he would be lost.

  Lohikarma’s chill, closed beauty spread below him. He drove down into it, toward Harbord Avenue, a wide cut alongside the narrow arm of the lake. He could have taken the residential streets, each tilting at an angle to the next; anywhere in Lohikarma could be reached by multiple means. But the avenue, practically a highway, was the most efficient, the most impersonal.

  He didn’t think the Pakistanis were behind the bomb; that made no sense. White supremacists, that was his guess, lowlifes like the ones who had recently attacked a couple of Sikh kids in a Vancouver suburb—Surrey, was it? The Sikhs, who had been the earliest Indian arrivals in Canada after the Ice Age, actually might be competing for jobs with those undereducated, under-motivated types. Fourth-generation lumberjacks and farmers, that early brown sub-population now also mixing uneasily with the wave of Indian post-grads and post-docs that had washed Seth up on these shores. The late sixties had seen quota restrictions on non-white immigration replaced by a “point system” to let Canada skim the cream off the post-colonial churn. The previous policy reluctantly allowed a small, set number of “undesirables”—i.e., Asians—to squeeze in each year; now, the professionally assimilable were separated from the horde. “We need teachers and preachers,” the border guard had told Seth with a tight smile when he first entered Canada.

  There was racism everywhere, wasn’t there? It was just more elegantly masked in educated or moneyed circles, say the upper echelons of the university’s administration. Seth pictured Harbord’s Dean of Science. He wouldn’t be one to bomb an airplane. He just wrinkled his nose in amusement at the curry smell coming off your suit, and made his jokes and other derogations later, when he was alone with his cronies, all of them pink, pink, pink with rosacea and drink. No, it would have been a mechanic, someone good with his hands, in the thrall of some evil mastermind.

  He held the wheel tightly as he passed the buttery, benign facades of the houses on these long-familiar streets, their inhabitants locked away in unconfessed murderous fantasies. The parents of his children’s friends—who knows? Hate was illegal here, not to mention frowned upon, so people hid it. That was why you didn’t see it coming. That was why Venkat didn’t fit in: he’d never learned to hide it.

  When Seth came in the front door of Venkat’s house, the smell hit him—grey, fuggy, miserable—the afternoon’s dread giving way to the decay of grief. Seth realized that Venkat understood now that his family was dead, whether or not he was ready to admit it.

  The phone rang as he was walking down the hallway. Venkat, running to answer it, bumped into him.

  “Sundar?” Venkat’s look of anticipatory relief, which didn’t contain any hope—he was faking it—shut down and he hung up.

  “But who was it?” Seth asked, leaping to pick it up again, uselessly.

  “Singh.”

  “You cut him off?”

  Venkat was returning to the family room, but the phone rang again and he came back at a run. Seth intercepted.

  “Venkat. It’s just Singh calling back.”

  “Make it quick, man,” Venkat said as he turned away.

  “Jaskaran?” Seth said into the receiver.

  “Ah, Seth. You’re there. Lakshmi just called. Did he hang up on me?”

  Professor Jaskaran Singh was the most cosmopolitan among them, graduated from Delhi and Edinburgh; stint in Halifax before being hired at full prof standing into Harbord’s economics department, of whose inadequacy he never ceased to complain. He was brisk and snobbish, but not unkind. Seth speculated on Singh’s inferiority complex—even joked that Jaskaran had fabricated his British accent—but that didn’t dent his own slight deference to the man.

  “He’s convinced Sundar is trying to call,” Seth said.

  “Ach, poor fellow.”

  As Seth talked to him about arrangements to be made with the university, Venkat returned to the kitchen, where he opened the doors on a closet that would have been, for a Western family, the pantry. Here it was a shrine. The shelves had been removed and pictures of the gods hung on the walls. The accoutrements of prayer—beads, incense, holy ash, coconuts—were strewn on and around a pretty kolam of a lotus that Sita had painted onto a board and lain on the closet floor. Pride of place was given to a large photo of Shivashakti, Venkat’s guru, whose eyes crinkled humour and benevolence from beneath thick bangs.

  Venkat seated himself before his gods, crossing his legs and laying his wrists on his knees. “Om …” His voice, quavering but insistent, rose into the air.

  Seth’s attention was pulled entirely away from Singh.

  Practical matters, logistics: these were Seth’s way of keeping chaos at bay. When he prayed, it was in the orderly, formal way he had been taught as a child. The beliefs he had formed then, vague and therefore unchallengeable, had changed little.

  “Om …” The immortal syllable expanded, bubble-like, to fill the room.

  Venkat began chanting the Gayatri Mantra, his voice gaining sonority as he completed the first iteration, sounding markedly clearer as he began a second.

  “Om bhur bhuvah suvahah. Tat savitur varenyam. Bhargo devasya dhimahi. Diyo yo nah prachodayat …”

  Seth extricated himself from the phone call.

  Gayatri Mantra, the Sun Invocation, whispered into the ear of a Brahmin child at his second birth—the ceremonial induction into caste and scholarship. Seth had not heard it spoken aloud in years. He took his place by Venkat’s side and began to chant with him, their distinct tenors blending and bringing back the lost years, of priests fogged in aromatic smoke, of funerals, of weddings, of long-dead fathers and grieving mothers left far behind.

  “Om bhur bhuvah suvahah. Tat savitur varenyam. Bhargo devasya dhimahi. Diyo yo nah prachodayat …”

  Oh, universe, with your heaven, your earth, and all the unknowable, unseeable realms surrounding them; and, oh, that sun … lost! The sun-filled mangoes, sun-baked streets, sun-burnt skins, lost! B
ut still … we sit as our fathers taught us, seeking illumination … hear us, especially, in this hour of need. We are opening ourselves to your radiance, God, with expectant and willing minds.

  The sound did not hide the void, but it filled it with a kind of light: nothing that would stop you from falling, but maybe stop you from being so afraid.

  Venkat faltered, felled, he told Seth, by a recollection of Sundar receiving his holy thread in Shivashaktipurum, the ashram his guru had founded in India. Venkat and Sita had taken Sundar back home for his coming-of-age ceremony. In the land of his ancestors, surrounded by his relatives, their beautiful boy slouched between them, covered by a silk cloth, cowed by the grandeur of the ritual, his rebellions still incipient. Seth felt the knife in Venkat’s ribs at the memory of that adolescent cheek slightly glowing, his lips brushing his son’s ear as he whispered these words.

  A poonal ceremony back home. Venkat was that kind of Hindu, full of orthodoxy and energy, sincere in devotion both to the old gods and this new guru who had revivified and reinvented the ways Hindus practised their faith, the ways they believed.

  He and Sita conducted a special puja on Sundar’s birthday each year until he left for university, at the Shivashakti Centre downtown. Seth recalled the last one, Sundar’s seventeenth perhaps. He had started shaving the peach fuzz from his cheeks and lips. It made him look younger. He had come to Seth for help around then: he wanted to go on a school ski trip, and had had a massive fight with Venkat over it. Seth talked to Venkat, who said that skiing was dangerous and that he had heard from a colleague about kids on such trips drinking, doing drugs. Seth couldn’t, in good conscience, push. Sundar stayed home.

  The episode now clouded Seth’s consciousness in a single black burst—no start, no finish, self-contained and sodden with loss. Why not let Sundar go, be with his friends? So he might have drunk alcohol, maybe even been tempted into s-e-x. But probably not: he was a sensible boy. You have to trust them at a certain point.