The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  He looked over at Venkat, whose mouth hung open, almost panting, and who was swaying a little, at least in Seth’s strained vision. He himself was only functioning for Venkat’s sake. Otherwise, grief could easily have unhinged him.

  Seth resumed chanting, and Venkat, when he regained his breath, did too.

  A half-hour later, the doorbell rang: it was a group of other Shivashakti devotees, mostly strangers to Seth, a mix of whites and Indians. Venkat didn’t rise, nor pause in his chanting. The devotees greeted Seth at the door with their customary phrase, “Jai Shivashakti” (“What’s wrong with them?” he had joked to Lakshmi, once, at an ashram event. “They can’t say ‘hi’?”). Here, they seemed to show, in contrast with what he had seen in devotional sessions, far less emotion than was appropriate. Moving with clear purpose toward the kitchen, they sat in a circle around Venkat and joined the chant. Then, as if they had received a cue from some distant conductor (all their eyes were shut), they began to sing together, a Shivashakti bhajan. Westerners’ Sanskrit pronunciation always grated on Lakshmi like nails on a chalkboard. But she wasn’t here.

  Its tune was one Seth knew well, from the traditional repertoire, but just as Gandhi had rewritten religious lyrics to deliver pacifist messages, Shivashakti’s people had turned songs for other gods into songs for him. But really—and this was their point—all gods are One. It’s simply easier, especially if a god has been so kind as to manifest in your lifetime, to conceive of the Ultimate Reality as embodied in a particular man.

  Seth stood and watched them from the kitchen entrance. The devotees’ faces radiated a confidence and certainty he had never felt. They had wordlessly enclosed Venkat in their protective circle. No sobbing, no chatter. It was as though each had carried here a piece of a one-person-size geodesic dome, and they unanimously and simultaneously put their pieces in place with the first note of their song, enclosing Venkat, along with his grief, his regrets, his love and hate. They didn’t pretend to share what he was feeling. They didn’t try to relieve him. They just reminded him, as if by prescription, that there was something more.

  Something more. Seth stood on the outside, watching a moment longer, and then began to sing. No eyes opened. Nothing changed. He seated himself amongst them, and he sang. He felt a sensation akin to what he had felt while praying with Venkat, but greater and clearer. The words and whatever they signified dissolved in their own sound, each syllable striking at that rigid cloud of grief that kept blowing up and obscuring Seth’s vision. The relief, sitting shoulder to shoulder, a sense of warmth and solidity from sacrum to sternum, his own voice only as audible as all the others, no more no less, but made greater by the joining—it wasn’t joy, don’t think that, but it shrank the pain of grief.

  Among their friends in Lohikarma and Vancouver, one in ten was a Shivashakti devotee, as were half their relatives in India, to some degree. But then, for Indians, and Indo-Canadians, religion was more general and informal than it was for whites. Hinduism was full of options—which god? which form? pick a favourite—and the finding of a guru a respected, even mandated, path. In this way, to attach to Shivashakti was no radical act. He was a teacher in all the old ways, though he also brought something new—a greater comfort with modernity, internationalism, a disregard for barriers between cultures and belief systems. The fervent light in the devotees’ eyes, also, was new. None of the anonymous, itinerant teachers of Seth’s childhood had had the charisma to attract such a following. He and Lakshmi had visited the Shivashakti ashram when it first opened here. Lakshmi, both a skeptic and a seeker, found it lacking, as she had all the local ashrams. Seth wanted a temple: formal prayer followed by food. He had been hopeful about Shivashakti’s establishment, but its new style of worship didn’t fit his bill, and the fervency had made them both uncomfortable.

  Seth felt its draw, now, though, a craving answered.

  When the phone rang, as it did every fifteen minutes or so, he would answer it. Other families and other friends came, with or without notice, most bearing food. They would sit for a time, and Seth would talk with them, while Venkat would not. The Shivashakti devotees continued to sing throughout, keeping Venkat under their protection, for some three or four hours.

  Each time Seth was interrupted, the spell broke a little. He thought that if Lakshmi had been here with him, he never would have joined the circle, and when friends came to call, the devotees’ behaviour seemed a little rude to him—they were keeping Venkat apart from his closest friends in Canada, his surrogate family, those who had known Sita and Sundar the way Lakshmi and Seth had. Calling Lakshmi to check in, he mentioned this, wanting to criticize them to her, unable to tell her how moved he had been in the singing-circle, or even that he had joined in at all.

  “Venkat shouldn’t have to play the host,” she said. “Everyone will understand. He is doing what he needs to do.”

  Seth felt bad. “It’s true. That’s not exactly what I meant.” She waited for him to explain. “I suppose that’s why I’m here.”

  “Yes.” She was quiet, and he wondered if she was crying. “Though I think we were closer to them than anyone else.”

  That evening, after everyone else had gone, Seth heated some food. He and Venkat ate in a vast and liquid silence. He didn’t know when the TV news had been turned off, but they turned it on again at eleven. The second day of the search was beginning in Cork. There were still no survivors, and every reporter, every report, repeated the unlikelihood of finding any.

  Seth made Venkat go to bed, actually tucked him into the bed he had shared with his wife, pulled the covers up to his chest in the bluish heavy air of the room. The slack of Venkat’s neck against the pillow, the thin hairs spread on his large, bald head, his bulgy reptilian eyes with their yellowish whites—all were grotesque and made it seem as if his body was some discarded casing with a small creature hiding inside. Seth was glad to leave the man.

  He thought of calling Lakshmi again, but it was past midnight. He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee and walked out into Venkat’s backyard. This close to the solstice, the northern sky retained some hint of light just gone or light soon to come. Tat savitur varenyam. The familiar silhouettes of fence and trees projected a sinister air.

  In India, people died easily and without much fanfare. Canada had so many resources dedicated to keeping every single person alive. And yet, in India, even on their visit last year, Seth felt safe, irrationally so, in the bosom of country and family. Home as he might never be here. He pictured his loved ones in their beds. He always felt nervous away from them. Was this because he thought he could keep them safe? That was part of it. He was a man, after all, and they were his charges. Or was it that in such a time of separation, something might happen to them and not to him, so that he could be left, alone, with nothing?

  Nothing.

  Bomb. Terms and facts associated with explosions cascaded in sheets through his thinking, his physics mind activating in self-protection. Detonation: a supersonic, exothermic shock front accelerating through a medium, solid or liquid. Dynamite: composed of nitroglycerine and …

  He saw a plane breaking apart over the ocean, bodies and people flying out, sailing away into nothing, children falling down through clouds, lungs collapsing, passing out from oxygen deprivation or fright before hitting the steel grey water—or worse: seeing the water ascend, as ungiving at that speed as steel itself, who knew what awaited you at the bottom, flying out and falling, falling, flying out and falling.

  The chanting, and the visitors, had crowded out the images that the mild, chill night now sent at him, as though these peaceful heavens, the sky he could see, were discharging legs, heads, pregnant bellies. Is that what Venkat saw, circling in his hollow eyes, as soon as the chanting stopped? Nothing and no one could survive what they knew had happened.

  No one.

  He sat on a bench enclosed by Sita’s rose bushes, breathed in their scent and felt his body heave and sob, at last. Sundar: a funny, sunny child, curiou
s about Seth’s own babies when they came along. He had continued to be one of the few kids in their circle of friends whom his daughters genuinely liked: not square, nor pretentious. He had developed a brooding side as he got older. Once or twice Seth’s girls had been hurt by his seeming standoffishness. But then he would make it up, once letting Brinda help him build one of his model airplanes. (Oh God.) Some of them flew: he used to fly them in Willard Park.

  Sundar was now between his third and fourth years of engineering at UBC. He hated engineering, which they guessed from the way he refused to talk about it when they saw him, but Sita had also confided to Lakshmi that it was Venkat’s insistence that kept him there. He was doing well despite devoting an inordinate amount of time to outside interests, particularly improv comedy and friends’ films.

  Seth, Lakshmi and the children had gone to Vancouver for spring break, just a few months ago. They had taken Sundar out for dinner at a vegetarian place near the water. He seemed excited to show them around the city, his city, and was open and candid in his dad’s absence. Slightly self-centred perhaps—he was only twenty-one—but he did talk to the girls. He had had the same Grade 8 Language Arts teacher that Ranjani had now; they agreed that she was very cool. He asked Brinda how she was liking high school. She said anything was an improvement on junior high.

  Afterward, Sundar took them to a rinky-dink theatre, a black-painted box off a back alley—not a place Seth ever would have sought out, but Brinda thought it was “so cool” and Ranjani echoed her, faintly and perfectly.

  The actors would shout questions to the audience, and improvise sketches based on the answers: “A fruit?” “Pomegranate!” “An animal?” “Gila monster!” “An illness?” “Kwashiorkor!” Kwashiorkor? It seemed nothing was off limits. Sundar and the others would leap onto the stage, already speaking, competing to see who could get funniest fastest.

  When Sundar had come home to Lohikarma—only a week ago, could it be?—for a quick holiday and to drive his mother back to the coast with him to get their flight, the girls had repeated back to him some of the lines from the show. He had already forgotten, having done so many shows since, while the jokes were now part of their private repertoire. “Crazy!” Sundar had laughed. “I’m sure it wasn’t as good as you’re making it seem.”

  Earlier memories began to surface. One of their basement dance parties of the late seventies. Sundar was holding Ranjani’s hands—she must have been, what, five? He would have been eleven or so. He was clowning, and she was hanging off him, laughing so hard the gums shone above her baby teeth. He whirled her in circles, her feet rose, and Jaskaran Singh’s disco ball glittered over them as the grown-ups backed off the dance floor and watched. With all their degrees and their accomplishments, the families they had abandoned to seek their fortunes and send money home, these kids, with their shiny hair, their wisecracking English, and all their other mysteries, these kids were the best they had to offer. To offer … offer to whom, to what?

  Seth wiped his eyes and stared past the blurry stars. What had Sundar seen, felt, thought as the plane cast him out, up, down into the Irish dawn?

  An earlier memory still: Sundar at four, playing Hanuman, kitchen towel for a tail, jumping off sofas, inspired by the Amar Chitra Katha comic books that taught all their kids the Hindu myths. Seth’s own kids were yet to be born then, so he was fully available for Sundar to monopolize. Seth felt again the restless pressure of those small bones bundled against his arm as Sundar crouched on the sofa beside him, holding his breath for the story to start, but maybe he was remembering his own girls, their own little ghosts. How many times had he read the opening page of Hanuman’s story to that little boy? It held a single image, Hanuman as a child, and the text: Hanuman, thinking the sun was an apple, leapt toward it.

  Tat savitur varenyam.

  Did death interrupt some banality? When on earth is the bathroom going to free up … then nothing. Or was it gradual—an explosion—what the hell?—and the plane opening in parts to the sea, the sun, the thin, thin air?

  Seth began praying, in the old, familiar way of his childhood, praying for Sita’s and Sundar’s souls to be sped on their journey, praying that they had no fear nor pain, even as part of him thought as if. He realized, with a prick of self-hatred, that he was praying to comfort himself.

  Seth dozed on the family room couch and rose to broad daylight at six thirty. He went to get the paper: the crash was all over the front page but the headlines only repeated what they had heard on the late news. When he turned on the CBC morning show, though, he learned that people were starting to say this was the work of Khalistani nationalists: radical Sikhs, terrorists. Ah. He cast back in his mind, the gurudhwara politics, the celebrations after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The assassination itself. Savages. Hypocrites.

  On TV, they were interviewing a reporter who said she had been following this movement’s Canadian adherents for years, and that she and many others, including police, had suspected that the separatists would try something this summer, on the first anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assault on the Golden Temple. Rumours, she said, had been afloat for months that Air India was not safe. Obviously the rumours weren’t that widespread or the plane wouldn’t have been full. But what would the Sikh community—which was, the talking heads hastened to say, predominantly peaceful—say now that their self-appointed representatives had taken their ire out on 329 innocent bystanders?

  Professor and Mrs. Arora, the only observant Sikhs in Venkat and Seth’s immediate social circle, had come to the house last night. Amandeep Arora was six-foot-three, but stooped humbly under his royal purple turban. He liked to say that his passions were physics and metaphysics. His wife, whose eyes lined up with his solar plexus, would giggle. They were devout, private people. Unassuming. Vegetarian. Seth couldn’t recall Amandeep ever having expressed a political view. It would be awkward when next they met.

  At eight o’clock, the Shivashakti devotees returned. Venkat still had not risen. One of the men offered to help Seth check on him, but Seth waved him off, knocking and entering the bedroom to find Venkat just as he had left him, on his back, eyes open. Seth pictured, for an instant, closing them with a hand, as one would those of a corpse. Venkat’s chest rose, then sank in a long shudder and he got up and went into the bathroom. Five minutes later, he emerged, dressed, from the bedroom. He sat again in front of the kitchen shrine and his fellow devotees took up their song.

  Seth made a percolator of coffee and put bananas, boxes of cereal and a carton of milk on the table. He tapped on the back of a fortyish white man who seemed like a leader. When the man stopped singing, Seth whispered, “I have breakfast for all of you. Perhaps you could get Venkat to eat something?” The man rose and put a gentle hand on Venkat’s shoulder, another on one of his companions, and urged the group toward the food.

  Seth was about to check on Lakshmi when she called to say she would be over shortly. By the time she arrived, the devotees had resumed their singing. After taking in the scene for a few moments, she went to the living room to sit with a Tamil Brahmin family who had arrived a few minutes earlier.

  When friends were present, Seth would always sit with them, away from the singing. Mere manners, yes, but it was also that he would have felt embarrassed to have witnesses beyond the circle itself, whose members seemed reassuringly indifferent to whether he stayed or went.

  When the family left, Seth gestured toward the singers with his head and asked Lakshmi, “Do you want to sit with them?”

  She shook her head quickly, and he didn’t press. She could be so obnoxiously non-traditional, he felt, and yet when he asked her later why she wouldn’t consider singing, she said it felt contrary to their tradition. “I know what you mean now, what you said yesterday. I was expecting, you know, to sit around and talk, talk about Sundar and Sita, and console Venkat. The singing, by these people, who—how well do they even know him? Or Sundar and Sita?”

  Seth shrugged. “It seems to calm him d
own.”

  She nodded. “I am not saying it’s wrong, but it—it’s not what we are used to.”

  She asked him to go home for lunch, check on the girls. He went but returned in early afternoon. By then, all the Shivashakti devotees were gone. Lakshmi said most of them had jobs or families they had to get to, but that they had said they would return each evening until Venkat was up to coming to the ashram.

  Seth asked, “Do you still think I should go to Ireland with him?” There had been no call from Air India and he had done nothing about booking a flight.

  “I don’t know,” she said, frowning.

  He watched her eyes, which were large and a little bloodshot, beautiful the way courtesans’ eyes were in poems. She still lined her inner lower lids with kohl; at least she hadn’t given that up. She looked around Seth, as though checking for Venkat.

  “I think you should go if he does, but if there was reason for him to go, they would have called, wouldn’t they?”

  Seth nodded.

  Venkat’s packed suitcase still stood by the door. And when Seth walked back into the kitchen after saying goodbye to his wife, Venkat asked him, “When are we going?” Venkat’s jaw was set and his eyes narrowed.

  “I think we have to wait to hear from them, Venkat. They’re not going to let us anywhere near the site unless they have asked us to come.”

  “My son was on that plane! My wife!” Venkat came close to Seth, gesticulating, his breath smelling of yogourt, coffee, plaque, his teeth betel-rusted, his pores large. He was not beautiful, but he had loved, and Seth saw himself in the other man as he never had before.

  “I know it,” Seth said. “But there are procedures.”

  Venkat narrowed his eyes and walked to the kitchen. “I’m going to book the tickets. What kind of a man sits at home like this? I don’t need your help.”

  “Venkat, Venkat, let me do it. I’ll call now.”

  “Ha.”

  “I’ll do it. Now. See, here’s the number.” Seth took it from his breast pocket. “But stay with me. I’m sure they’ll want to talk with you.”