The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  While he was caught in the beam of a personal sun, though, Lakshmi grew more sombre with each passing week. They acted normal—meals with the children and rides to the pool–library–mall, along with discussions of Venkat’s fast-approaching return at the start of the academic year. But on the nights when he went to satsang, he would return to find his wife quiet.

  On one of those nights, perhaps in the fourth week, he came home with Shivashakti’s 1984 lecture compendium and lay reading it in bed.

  She came into the room with a basket of folded laundry, paused, and put the basket down to open the closet. “So that’s it. You’re a Shivashakti devotee now?”

  He closed the book on a thumb. “I, uh, it looks that way, doesn’t it.”

  “Yes, that’s how it looks,” she said, putting the clothes away, her face to the closet.

  “You go to the Vedanta Centre,” he reminded her.

  “But I’m not a devotee.” She sat on the bed, the basket dangling from her hand.

  “No,” he agreed.

  Lakshmi had, more than once, questioned the value of gurus, which were fundamental in their tradition. Before the bomb, he had thought, in some vague way, of trying to find a guru someday, when he was in his sixties, maybe post-retirement, some proper age for renunciation and seeking. Lakshmi was more of a true seeker than he was, so he had thought, but repeated disillusionment or her native non-conformity seemed to have turned her off the quest. He realized now that she believed that the two of them had rejected Shivashakti bilaterally, years ago, she in her typically intense way and he in his typically joking one. Now, she felt betrayed. Perhaps even jealous. She had been waiting for an explanation of some sort. He, too, felt he owed it to her, and so he tried.

  “It … it was so scary, Lakshmi,” he began. “Terrifying, the idea, losing your family. I realized …” Was he making sense? “I realized I would have nothing, if that were to happen to me, to all of you.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” she said, putting a hand on his leg.

  He didn’t mean to, but he gave her a look. She took her hand away.

  “The fear, Lakshmi, what I saw there, the broken hearts. You’ll understand, maybe, when you see Venkat again. Horrible.”

  Lakshmi was silent.

  “You want to love us less?” she asked, finally, with a detectable note of what sounded to Seth like ridicule.

  “The opposite,” he said. “Devotion to God would mean I can also be devoted to you.”

  Had he detached from them? Not exactly. He had pulled back, but that didn’t mean he loved them less. The scriptures preached love without attachment but didn’t that ultimately mean detaching from those you loved? His love for his wife didn’t lessen when he had his first daughter nor did his love for his first child dim when the second was born. In fact, his attachment to his family increased. He had to admit that his devotion to Shivashakti hadn’t had the same effect, so far. And yet, he still felt it was what might enable him to love without fear of being destroyed.

  “That’s like having an affair to save a marriage!” Lakshmi said.

  Seth laughed.

  “No, it is!” she said. “You might feel more content at first, maybe even more loving toward your spouse, maybe because of guilt. But then eventually that other love eats into you and makes you discontent or the lover becomes more demanding, and then you have to choose.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot, kanna!” How was it he had been given this excellent girl? “Are you sure you’re only making a comparison and not really thinking I am having an affair?”

  “You would be if it were up to that Irene woman.” Lakshmi sniffed. Irene, Seth’s fellow-devotee, worked in the municipal government building, as did Lakshmi. That week, she had come up to Lakshmi in the cafeteria and talked at inappropriate length about what a wonderful man Seth was. “So gentle, she said. And brilliant. Oh, and handsome? My, my!” Lakshmi, impersonating Irene, emitted a vacuous yet evil giggle.

  Seth covered his blushing ears with his hands, laughing harder. “Oh, Lakshmi. The poor woman.”

  Lakshmi, too, laughed. “It’s her own fault, don’t pity her. Pity me, having to listen to her. And what’s all that flaking and cracking on her cheeks? She needs to see a doctor.”

  They laughed and laughed and laughed. They went to bed in a peace that was not uneasy, the air cleared. Still, each also knew the other would prefer a closer agreement, and that neither would budge.

  I DIDN’T EXACTLY GET ALL OF THIS from Seth in that one afternoon. True, we talked for some hours. True, he covered much of this period of time. I went back to my apartment and transcribed—that, dear reader, you’ve heard before. But I waited to write. Seth was not strictly linear when he talked; more a charming digressor. The information filled in, the narrative filled out, over the course of this year. The writing came, in time.

  I, too, may have a linearity problem, and must admit now to a small detail I have so far failed to include in this narrative:

  Ottawa. En route east from Montreal, I interviewed a family there. I stayed three days, in a hotel, with a phone book. Where Rosslyn was listed.

  Thank goodness for Maureen McTeer, the anodyne P.M. Joe Clark’s feisty First Madam, who refused to change her name upon marriage or even, à-la-Hillary-used-to-be-Rodham, upon ascension to Official Helpmeet. Thanks to her, a whole generation of Canadian girls, Tory, Liberal or NDP, were inspired to remain Ms. from birth to death. Rosslyn was listed under her own name.

  I Googled her: still with Ottawa public schools, but also teaching in the College of Social Work. She had published a few papers, co-written. I drove past her house, barely able to bring myself to look, but in any case, I saw nothing of note and drove away not quite understanding what I had done.

  I had seen her shortly after the bombing, but not since.

  June 1985. After the bomb took my sister and her children, I went on an indefinite leave from IRDS and, though I had finally got my own apartment, went back to stay awhile with my parents.

  I was at work on my book about the pogroms, but the bombing stopped it cold. Who Are the Victims? I thought, in the sleepless nights I spent pacing, hearing my mother wail, sensing my father’s cavernous grief from the chair in his room where I knew he sat, awake, too. Could I now count Kritika, Anand and Asha among the victims of the Delhi riots?

  Suresh, my brother-in-law, came to India a couple of weeks after the bombing. He stayed with his own parents, and would come to pay his respects to mine. You can imagine the scene. The magnitude of grief in our house. Once or twice I went out when Suresh was expected. My father looked disappointed, but didn’t stop me. I couldn’t tell that my mother even noticed.

  Back in Canada, Rosslyn saw Kritika’s name on a list of the dead. She called me at my parents’ home. She got the time wrong and the phone rang at two in the morning. In normal circumstances, the household would have been thrown into alarm. Now that the worst had already happened, no one blinked an eye. Her voice was like warm sand, and yet I felt pierced, all over, with shards of longing—endless distances—and regret.

  She asked if I might come to Canada, if there wouldn’t be a funeral. It hadn’t occurred to me until she asked, but when she did, I said yes.

  After Suresh returned to Montreal, I came to visit him. He and I had never established much more than a formal warmth, so I didn’t pretend I was going to comfort him. I hadn’t known if there would be a funeral—there was, though I never would have attended it if my father hadn’t asked me to do so on his behalf. My mother asked me to bring back keepsakes from Kritika’s home, although Suresh would have been a more reliable person to ask to choose something. I’m too unsentimental about objects to be counted on for such a wish. But my mother had a stubborn, tribal quality that meant she would never ask an in-law, no matter how devoted, but only a blood relative, no matter how dismissive.

  In any case, Suresh seemed genuinely glad for my company and my help in reorganizing the house. Despite his s
appy taste in poetry, he was not one of those who clung to material reminders of the departed.

  He sorted through their things methodically, using the process to work through his grief. I came to admire him, in those days, more deeply than I had before. He kept only what was of genuine value to him, and asked me to help him get rid of the rest.

  He never went to Ireland: he waited for the official word, but said he felt in his blood that his family were gone. He didn’t know how or why he was better able to recognize this than so many others.

  I would have met him there, but my sister’s remains, and Asha’s and Anand’s, were never found.

  One day, I went to Ottawa to see Rosslyn. Hazel eyes flecked with concern. Gilded brown hair in a style slightly different from before. Freckles accentuated by the sun. Pregnant, she looked curvier, and happier, than she had with me. She had walked to our rendezvous, and now fanned her blouse and blew down her neckline, glowing faintly as we waited for a table.

  “Marriage, is it?” I asked, once we were seated. She had suggested one of our favourite old places: informal, but with heavy wood tables and big windows; all original recipes, several named for regulars.

  “The wedding’s in a little under a month.”

  She wore an aquamarine stone on her left hand. I remarked that her nails, while short, were not ragged.

  “I’ve been using something to help me stop biting them.”

  “While planning your wedding? Don’t tell me you’ve started smoking?”

  A smirk. “Yeah, yeah.”

  She was marrying a teacher, someone she had known for years. He must have made his move as soon as I left—and why not?

  “Ashwin, I’m so sorry.” She put her hand over mine. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  The sensation of her hand was softly electric: it had been so long since I had been touched. I had never been so intimate with anyone, and I wanted so much to talk to her, about the bombings, the pogroms, my confusion, my book-in-progress. I tried a little, but like most Canadians of her age—generations away from the old countries; never seen war or riots; barely seen poverty outside of native reserves—she couldn’t hold the personal and the political together for too long. That really is a first-world problem. Her concern was for me, as an individual, a friend, and she couldn’t fully fathom the bigger picture.

  I let it go, but there was nothing further I could say about my own emotional condition. I could see she was perhaps hurt by this, as well as a little frustrated by her own inability to ask the right questions or offer me comfort. She was in love with another and her life was a far country.

  I asked what she was reading and she told me, and said how our favourite bookstore had changed owners, and how the school where she used to work was being torn down. I told her about my new apartment, and she noted down the address. It was a decent, easy means of paving the way to goodbye.

  Back in Montreal, I asked my old mentor and analyst, Marie Chambord, for her thoughts on my book. That was to be the last time I saw her, though she continued to advise me on my work until her death in 2002.

  “My anger will show,” I told her.

  “It won’t,” she replied, and pursed her narrow lips at me. She picked up one of the many small steel sculptures she kept, brightly polished and randomly arranged, on a low table between her chair and the client’s. “You did your project with those families, those people. You wrote their stories. Now, a year later, you are injured by a revenge. Would you sit and tell such things to your patient? Je pense que non. You tell your analyst. This is why every analyst has an analyst.”

  I, too, palmed one of the figures—weighty, cool, Brancusi-esque. The metal absorbed the warmth from my hand.

  “Bon. Write the book.” She opened her hand, balancing the thing, shaped like an Egyptian cat, on her palm. “Your opinions go in. Your story, it stays out.” Though her hand seemed not to move, the little figure rocked and rocked, merry-seeming at first, and then increasingly autonomic, back and forth without ceasing.

  When I returned to India, I had a vasectomy. In Canada, if you say “never before,” they won’t let you say “never again.” This is the difference between a staid young country with an aging population of 3.2 persons per square kilometre and an old one careering toward the billion-person mark and trying to find the brakes. If you so much as mention the v-snip in India, they clap a sweet-air mask on your face and scalpel-pop your scrotum before you can change your mind. There may be monetary incentives, for doctors and patients. I’ve had no reason to regret it.

  I brought my mother back a bag of doodads—a jewellery set she had given Kritika, some crafts the children had made. A few photos. She was not content—had I chosen wrong? Was it too little? I don’t know. I hadn’t expected her to be pleased, so I hadn’t tried very hard.

  Rosslyn sent me a birth announcement for her son. I threw it away without responding. Were there subsequent children? If so, I wasn’t notified. There may have been a Christmas card. We had no contact after that.

  But—I wrote the book.

  IT WAS, WHAT, my fourth or fifth day in Lohikarma. Only that? All I say in my journal of that morning is how deeply I had fallen into this place, these people. Brinda would come to see me again, late that morning.

  True confessions: the more I thought of her, the more I saw her as some sort of reincarnation of my niece. Nothing literal! But Brinda appeared to me as Asha’s figurative re-embodiment, and the prospect of listening to her, helping however I could, my undeniable small tender wellings of paternal feeling, these were in some way serving my lost little girl.

  Did I let Brinda in as a way of changing my life to preserve the bond? I wasn’t so articulate about it at the time. We never act authentically if we have this level of self-consciousness. And yet, looking back, that doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

  When she arrived, there was a short, quiet interlude, but as though under pressure. My guess was that she felt that she should show some interest in me and my project, out of politeness, rather than plunge straight away into her own story, even if that was what she was most eager to do.

  “I can’t remember,” she said, gathering her hair back off her shoulders, “was the other night the first time you met Venkat Uncle?”

  “I had a long interview with him, on Monday.” I didn’t want to think about Venkat.

  “Was he like he was the night of the memorial?”

  “He seems to need to follow a train of thought without interruption.”

  “He spends a lot of time alone.”

  That could also be said of me. I needed to move the focus to her. “Are you anxious, about the trial outcome?”

  She chewed her lower lip, though her nervous mannerisms had decreased slightly. She emanated a thoughtfulness, now, more than anxiety. She wore a purple summer dress, pretty on her.

  “I probably was, right at the start. Excited, maybe, more than anxious. I thought it was an open-and-shut case! So naive: nearly twenty years to come to this point—it’s got to be complicated. I’m not sure the outcome will prove much. But they have to convict them, right? After all this time, why would they bring it to trial unless conviction was a sure thing? How would the government live it down?”

  I nodded. This was how most of us felt.

  “And I think it might help people like Venkat Uncle to feel some small measure of resolution.” Her eyes suddenly looked huge and strange. “I feel bad saying this. He lost everything. But he’s a pathetically sad person.”

  “We should talk about you,” I said, bluntly, but it was what both of us wanted.

  “I suppose, eh? I leave day after tomorrow.” She smiled and sighed. “So problem numero uno is Dev, everything we were going through. And then I came to that resolution, this spring, told myself to stop hoping against hope that anything about him would change.” She bit a cuticle, looked at it, sat on her hand. “And then, last week, here in Lohikarma, I ran into an old friend. Adrian. You met him, remember?”
/>   The young man at the coffee shop.

  A high school buddy from the smart kids’ crowd: school newspaper, chemistry club, skinny wiseacres, quasi-misfits. Adrian had gone west, after high school, apprenticed as a boat builder while ambling through an undergraduate degree. Now he was finishing medical school in Toronto. He was to have spent this summer in Europe with his girlfriend—he referred to the girlfriend at their first meeting, while Brinda somehow didn’t manage to mention Dev—but now she had gone on the trip without him while he came back to Lohikarma to help his parents. His father, a fruit farmer, was dying of cancer.

  It had been ten years since he and Brinda had last seen each other. He had the same curly hair and green eyes, but the solidity of adulthood suited his frame, which had been gangly and awkward when they were teens. She recalled a little crush on him back then, but she had little crushes on lots of boys. Doubtful that many turned out as nice as this.

  Initial conversation was easy, bridging topics old and new, and he asked if they might get together sometime. He had left Lohikarma so young that he had only a few friends still in town.

  The next night, they met at an old drinkers’ haven that Brinda had frequented in university, The Minter’s Arms, one of the last High Street strongholds. The bar was brightly lit; the carpet red and gold with themes of empire.

  Adrian looked across the room as he sipped his beer. “Play pool, by any chance?”

  “I have done,” Brinda said with a note of calculation.

  “You’re probably really good,” Adrian said.

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said, and thump-tha-thump she felt she had to wreck this, now, wreck it!—at least a little. “My—my husband and I play sometimes.” Her mouth felt tense and she folded her lips in and pursed them. “I really am not very good at all. But then, he’s a bit of a sore loser.” She breathed through her nose.