Venkat flew to India, with Sundar’s ashes, destined for the Kaveri River. Seth, from Ireland, returned home.
SETH DROVE VENKAT’S CAR from Vancouver to Lohikarma, seeing now the rolling hills and rocky shores of B.C. as though through the Irish coach window. Lakshmi radiated relief at the door. He knew she would ask him later about what he had seen and what happened, but she seemed uncharacteristically glad to defer her questions. Brinda brought him a cup of instant coffee and she and Ranjani crowded him on the sofa.
“What was it like, Dad?” Brinda asked first, attempting to mask the extent of her curiosity, making him wonder if she would repeat what he said to her friends. “Mom said they found Sundar’s body but not Sita Aunty’s. What’s happening now?”
Seth looked into his coffee and crossed his legs. The sight of the morgue rose in his head, with its smell, medicinal and sweaty, of a damp mop never properly dried. He put his nose to his coffee and patted Ranjani’s knee. “I don’t know what’s happening now. Only about a third of the bodies were recovered.” He checked their faces. Were they upset? Brinda, the clinical one, was frowning and listening. If ever she became upset, she would tell you. Ranjani was harder to read. She was frowning too, but not looking at him.
“Many never will be found. But some still might surface. I convinced Venkat that he should go on to India with Sundar’s ashes, that the chances of finding Sita’s body were too small. The Irish police would be in touch if they found anyone that looked like her. They seemed very sincere.”
Lakshmi came in, wiping her hands on a towel, and Seth felt sickened by the sense that perhaps he had not yet arrived home, that there was a gulf between him and his family that he hadn’t yet crossed. His mind was filled with impressions he couldn’t properly share: He had seen a boy they loved, puffed and mutilated and dead. He had slept in the bed next to that boy’s father, prayed with him and heard him weep at night. He didn’t want to cross the gulf, didn’t want to share what he had gone through. He even thought Lakshmi might prefer to be spared that burden.
The void: he couldn’t seem to retreat from the verge, from staring down into it, even when he and Lakshmi made love that night. He was desperate to return to her, and she pretended that he was merely ardent and tried to respond, but it didn’t work and they stopped, unsatisfied. She held his face in her hands and looked at him hard. He permitted himself to be scrutinized. He wondered if she was annoyed and whether they might fight, and he had started to think—think!—that he might welcome the distracting anguish—there was nothing worse than fighting with his wife—when she patted his shoulder. “You need to rest.”
She kissed him, and they lay back in the midsummer half-dark, her head sliding from his shoulder to the pillow beside him, though she still held his hand. He felt angry, a bit, at her easy abandonment, at how she sighed and drifted away.
The next night, he and Lakshmi resumed their customary after-dinner walk. The tradition had started years earlier, when their children became old enough that they could be left alone for an hour in the evening. When summer began, either Seth reminded Lakshmi, or, according to her, they both remembered at the same time, and they resumed. Eight months of the year, they trod the treadmill and cycled the bike in front of the basement TV, but in this brief warm time, they strolled, conversationally or in silence. That evening, silence prevailed.
As they left the house, Lakshmi checked her peonies. One bush showed half a dozen open blooms in a cheerful if unexceptional middle-pink, but filled the air with a delicious fragrance, oddly reminiscent of tea. The two other bushes bloomed later, their tightly wrapped globes barely starting to open into a deep, meditative red. They gave off no smell—worse, when Seth stuck his face in deep, he got a whiff of dead fish. Her irises were finished but the lilies were about to arrive. In the yard’s coldest corner, a last stand of poppies wobbled to the breeze from the lake, their frothy heads dropping a few petals. It was a competent garden, nothing compared to Sita’s grand passion. As Seth retied a shoe and frowned at their lawn—unmowed for weeks now, glorified by an ambush of orange hawkweed—Lakshmi snapped off a few dandelion puffs and slipped them under the lid of their garbage bin at the curb without disturbing the seeds. What would become of Sita’s heirloom roses, her perennial beds with their precisely timed bloomings, her incomparable herbs and tomatoes, which each friend received, at the end of the season, essentialized into a gift-pack of homemade chutneys?
They headed down a set of concrete steps at the end of their street, crossed a road to another set of steps, and repeated this until they landed up at a small street that led directly to the walking path along the lake. Ten days since the solstice, and still hours to dusk. Sailboats, kids playing along the shore, a couple of evening swimmers though the water was always a bit chilly. On the opposite bank, a familiar mountain stretched, low and passive, reminding Seth, as always, of a book he used to read his kids: Danny and the Dinosaur. Its shape resembled nothing so much as the dinosaur, head lowered, like a dog’s, for a nice scratch behind the ears. As they walked, Lakshmi told him about a drama that seemed to be developing around her new supervisor. Seth lost the thread. She accused him, half joking, of not paying attention, but didn’t try to go on.
These things kept happening, for days. Seth felt depressed and uncomfortably distant from his family; every time his heart leapt toward them it was backhanded by a racket of fear.
Finally, Lakshmi erupted. “I’m thankful you were available to help Venkat, I am. But Venkat has gone to be with his own family now. You have to come back to yours.”
Where was her terror—of grief, of death, of the risk of love itself? He had wondered that even before going to Ireland to confront death in person, its putrid colours and livid smells. Why was she not paralyzed? He didn’t know how to ask her—it would sound like an accusation, as though he thought her unfeeling. He didn’t: it was the opposite. She knew how to feel. He didn’t. No one had taught him how to live with these emotions. Who could teach him now? The only time he had felt at peace in these last two weeks was when he was praying.
Lakshmi accompanied him to a satsang the next night at the Shivashakti Centre. It was on the second floor of a two-storey building on High Street, above a yoga studio and an office of three accountants, one of whom, Seth would learn, was a Shivashakti devotee. When they arrived, at 6:20, a white woman dressed in a salwar kameez was unlocking the doors; Seth recognized her from Venkat’s house. He could almost feel the hairs on the back of Lakshmi’s neck rising. Perhaps he should have come alone, but he had felt compelled to ask his wife. Perhaps she had felt compelled to agree.
Daisy—that was the name of the devotee who let them in. She bade them sit while she lit incense in the largest of the three rooms. Several other acolytes arrived while she was doing this, one carrying plates of snacks to the kitchen. Others took places on the carpet, facing the shrine. By six thirty, some fifteen people were assembled in a state of cross-legged readiness, filling perhaps a quarter of the space. Most of the devotees from Venkat’s house were among them, and a few nodded at Seth in recognition.
A young, ginger-bearded man stood at the front and did a short puja to the large photo of Shivashakti on the shrine: illuminating the picture by moving a ghee lamp before it in circles and then offering the flame to each of the assembled devotees, who waved hands over it and took its blessing by covering their eyes and gesturing over their heads with warmed hands.
The young man set the lamp on the shrine and took the blessing himself, running his hand through his long, orange-marmalade curls and adjusting Shivashakti’s sandalwood garland, which had gone slightly askew. He pressed a button on a tape player: Shivashakti’s weekly lecture, delivered in person each Sunday afternoon in India, in the Great Hall of Assembly at Shivashaktipurum, then transcribed and sent out to every Shivashakti centre in the world, along with an audiotape of the original and a spoken translation.
The theme this evening, Seth would never forget, was “Confession.”
Confession: You may wonder, why do I need to speak my doubts? God knows all—so why must I put my guilty things into words, the devotee asks, if God understands? Yes, God understands, but do you? It is through speaking that you come to know your own doubts and the sorrows of your life. You must do the work of understanding. God knows you, fine, but do you know yourself?
He felt the guru—God—was speaking directly to him.
It is the same for the Christian man, the Hindu man, the Mussulman—“Listen to my soul and hear it crying from the depth!” This is what the great Christian sant Augustine, he said. “Listen to my soul and hear it crying from the depth. For if your ears are not present in the depth, where shall we go? To whom shall we cry?”
“The night is yours and the day is yours.”
Seth felt small and safe, a child in a parent’s arms. The night is yours and the day is yours.
The congregation sang bhajans, followed by Shivashakti’s mandatory acknowledgement of non-dualism: each person present turned to another to say, “If you are God, so I am God,” a reminder of the light their guru shone at the end of the tunnel of ignorance.
A chanting meditation emerged naturally out of this ritual, then faded into a silent meditation, out of which people retired subtly to the kitchen where coffee had begun to perk.
Seth loved the sedate procession from each level to a deeper one, as though from one subterranean pool down to another, no stop too long or too short. He loved how he and Lakshmi, nearly complete newcomers, could so easily fit in and follow along. And the snacks and coffee were tasty, especially following the rigours of spiritual exercise.
Afterwards, he felt calm and uplifted. How had he never seen how this would suit him? He supposed he had never attended a normal satsang, only the special occasions, and he recalled having been a little turned off by the fervency.
But now that the blood-dimmed tide was loosed, and the ceremony of innocence drowned, Shivashakti’s method was a rope to take hold of and follow, hand over hand, toward introspection and faith—it was just the thing. He found a schedule and other information on a table by a bulletin board. Satsangs were Monday and Thursday nights at six thirty. There were quarterly sign-up sheets for various duties and details. There was a phone tree for such matters as the volunteer and charitable activities that Shivashakti prescribed for his followers.
As Seth and Lakshmi ate pastries, some of the others introduced themselves. The young man who read the lecture was called Carsten. He asked what had brought Seth to the centre, the question proving mainly to be an opening for Carsten’s own story: he was a ski instructor, who first came with a friend. He was saving for a one-way ticket to India, which seemed synonymous for him with “Shivashaktipurum.”
Daisy, who had let them in, was in her fifties. She wore a crystal over her unfashionable salwar kameez, and her speech was larded with the language of healing and non-denominational spirituality that marked the town’s New Age Tribes. She introduced a friend, Irene, younger, in her thirties, perhaps. Seth noticed Lakshmi had disappeared from his side. Irene was small and bubbly—they were talking about a visiting lecturer and volunteer opportunities, unfunny topics, but she laughed after each thing she said. Her cheeks looked painfully red and flaky. She kept pushing thick bangs ever-so-slightly out of her eyes; they would immediately fall back in.
“I remember now,” said Daisy. One woman was at each of Seth’s elbows, while Lakshmi, across the room, was talking to an Indian couple. “You were at Venkat’s house, when we came there, on the grief vigil. How is he?”
They listened with interest to how Venkat had taken Sundar’s ashes back to India, and would stay some weeks in Shivashaktipurum. Other devotees gathered in. Nick was one, a man of about Seth’s age who ran a copy shop and stationery business, not talkative, but with a warm and ready smile. And Kaj Halonen, the principal of a junior high school, big, balding, a bit hearty in conversation, so you weren’t sure how closely he was listening when you talked. But Seth had looked at the other devotees while they were praying, and thought he had glimpsed on Kaj’s face a true loss of self in the divine, depths of peace beneath the bluster, exactly what he himself desired.
He surged home, enclouded, almost inappropriately buoyant. Success! He had found his guru—so quickly! Who knew it could happen like this? Never mind that Seth had known about him for years. It was a common story, and an old one, that God could only be seen when the mind of the devotee was ready and open.
As they were getting into bed, Lakshmi asked him, with careful neutrality, “You liked the satsang? You thought it was good?”
He hadn’t given a thought to what his wife had felt since the first word of the lecture. Confession. He almost drifted back, but, instead, forced himself toward her. “It was just what I needed.”
She nodded and they said nothing more, spooning into sleep.
He resumed summer teaching the following Monday, and went to the satsang that night. Lakshmi went with him, but then declined to come on Thursday, and the week after, and the week after that.
Seth was enveloped by a quality of ecstatic awareness, a sense of pure feeling—what feeling? Feeling itself. How long had it been since he had really felt in this way? A long time.
Was it like this when he and Lakshmi were first married? He’d been consumed by her presence, their communion, all that was so surprising and delightful. It was spurred by erotic discovery but reached quick tendrils into every part of his being.
His children, also, provoked surges of emotion. His family’s beauty still made him heady at times. But ecstasy? No. Not after years of chores, bills, backtalk. His love had deepened—it underlay all he did—but he was not, usually, aware of it.
So, now: not only had he found his guru, he’d become infatuated.
He felt more energetic, and more attentive to the small charms of life than he had in years, yet when he cut himself on the screen door, he didn’t notice until Ranjani pointed out that he was bleeding. The colours of sky, sunset, trees and stones were intensified, but also appeared distant, as though seen through a veil: devotion. He lost weight—food held no interest for him—and had difficulty focusing on teaching and remembering such mundane matters as groceries. Yet he had the sense of being hyper-alert, flooded with lost memories and exhilarated by insights.
One evening, as he was singing with the other devotees, some with finger cymbals, others, like Seth, clapping hands, he had the feeling that he was walking back from the market with his mother, stopping by a roadside shrine, where one would clap hands to call out the god. An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress … He was back in the classroom with dear Father O’Sullivan, his bulby red nose, his joy at his students’ voices. So many dead.
Seth wrote poems, something he had not done since writing one for Lakshmi in the first weeks of their marriage. It seemed there was no other action adequate to all he needed to express, as he immersed himself in Shivashakti’s writings, and stories by fellow devotees. He learned that Shivashakti sometimes appeared as a woman, sometimes as a snake, embodying both the male and female energies, which is why he had the names both of Shiva and of Shakti, the god’s wife. He was a man first, and claimed that the male power was superior. (Seth was aware this would rankle Lakshmi deeply if she learned of it, but she was not asking too many questions and he found it easy not to talk to her about all he was learning.) Yet he encouraged his followers to call him MataPita—mother and father.
Shivashakti was born Shanmugham, a Kannada Brahmin boy of some intelligence and secular promise. When he was in his early twenties, just finished engineering college, he went on a trip with friends to the western ghats. They had taken their morning bath in a waterfall and had plans to go to a cave temple in the afternoon. Shanmugham was a small distance away from his friends, drying off, when he saw, on the path, a cobra. Its head was raised, its hood open, but for some
reason, he was compelled to go toward it. The cobra slithered through the woods and he followed, until suddenly he saw, on a rock, an old woman. The cobra was on her lap, her hand raised and slightly cupped, much like the snake’s hood, as though they both were blessing him. The snake spoke: “There is no more man or woman. Shiva and Shakti are one.” The snake slithered up through folds of the woman’s sari and around her neck to enter her chest through the dip of her clavicle. The old woman opened her mouth to speak. A snake’s tongue darted forth. “There is no more man or snake,” she hissed. “I am the cobra.” She bent into a circle and he saw she had no feet, but rather a snake’s tail. She began to swallow herself.
Shanmugham felt dizzy and fell to the ground. His friends found him there, weak and barely sentient. He had a snake bite, but recovered, took his new name and began the life of an ascetic. He was married but now took a vow of celibacy. (He did not cast out his wife; she became his first devotee.) After travelling the “length and breadth” of India, garnering knowledge of its peoples, languages and holy men, he started an ashram close to Mangalore, in 1973. His intention was never to promote himself as a god—“I am not here to say I am God—Aham Brahmasmi. I am here to prove that you are God—Tat Tvam Asi,” he famously said. But he had achieved Samadhi, a conscious union with the divine, and could not deny the many who hungered to feed from his light.
Seth consumed this information, though there was also a part of him that knew the history and testimonials were irrelevant. He remembered, early in his marriage, playing with Lakshmi’s fingers while she talked to him about her childhood, when suddenly she pulled her hand away to slap his. “You’re not even listening!” she had said, but it wasn’t true. He hadn’t registered the words, but he was listening with every atom of his being to the sound of her voice. Like that, he now wanted to know everything about his guru, but not for what he learned. It was simply another way of basking in his presence. Bhakti—love of God as though he were a lover. This is what it was, for Seth: honeyed wonder. He was drenched in it.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 16
