“You said goodbye to Adrian last night?” I asked her gently.
She thumbed a tear from the corner of her eye and twitched unhappily. “Guess what else? My younger sister, Ranjani, called yesterday afternoon, to tell us she’s pregnant.” Her voice tore a little on the word. “We had no idea she wanted babies. She never gave in to a big wedding, the way I did. She does what she wants—she knows what she wants—and it turns out fine!” Urgency entered her face. “Tell me what’s wrong with me.”
I felt a tremor of caution. “There’s nothing wrong with you!” I had no real way of knowing this, but I was now her friend, or hoped I was. This is the sort of thing friends say, isn’t it?
“I’ve been with Dev for ten years. Why did I put up with it? Did I want it this way?”
“You and I have known each other such a short time …” I was hedging, as surely she could tell.
“Give me something.”
When the child asks, it is hard not to give, even against one’s better instincts. I had so little practice resisting.
“Okay,” I said. “I have known you only a week. You understand?” She nodded. “You must take whatever I say with great skepticism. This is going to sound simplistic.”
She tried to appear circumspect, though her eagerness was clear.
“Dev, as you already know, may be in many ways the more vexing and intriguing case.” Now she looked hurt. “Not a more interesting person! You seem to be the better thinker, more gracious, more complex.”
“You only have my side.”
“Indeed. His problem sounds more complicated and more difficult to unravel.”
“One of the reasons I thought to talk to you is that you’re Indian. Although Dev grew up here. Do you think that being Indian has anything to do with it?”
“I can hardly begin to guess. I have never encountered another case like this. Homosexuals married to women, yes—but you’re quite sure that’s not his problem?”
She scratched her head. “I caught him.” She looked away. “Masturbating. Once. With a lingerie catalogue that had randomly come in the mail.”
This seemed convincing. Unless he had been trying to convince himself. “How did you react?”
“He was embarrassed, but I was relieved. Evidence of interest in sex! I tried to talk to him, but it never really went anywhere.”
“You mentioned some immaturity, in other areas?” She affirmed this, but I raised my hands—I could say little more about Dev. “I would have been curious to talk to him.”
“What about couples therapy?” she asked.
“Have you tried this?”
“I could never get him to go.”
“It could be good.”
“I’ll try again when I get home. But you were going to tell me why you think I stuck with him.”
I was. “With a grain of salt, yes? Your first and most significant erotic attachment—after the parents, of course, but we’re not speaking in those terms—was to Sundar. His death, at the moment when you were coming into a sense of yourself as a maturing sexual being, at sixteen, a rich age, in more ways than I need to enumerate—his death made you terrified of forming a similar sexual attachment to anyone else. You idealized Sundar. How could you possibly find a replacement? You can’t, and perhaps you weren’t sure you wanted to. You stumbled into this relationship that was structured, by Dev’s inadequacy, to hold you back from the deepest levels of attachment and intimacy. But now time itself has worked on you, through your frustration, through these years of giving love. Now you want, you are ready for, a full sexual relationship, for babies, with all the emotional risk that entails, terrifying as it may be.” I wasn’t positive of that last. I wasn’t positive of any of it. I just wanted to give her what she wanted. I changed tack. “So much in our lives is governed by strange forms of luck—how on earth did you happen to find this puzzling man, Dev, among so many others who surely would have been happy to find themselves in his place? Adrian, to name one?”
“Adrian was doing his own thing, then.”
“He was. Again, luck, destiny—we cannot make choices until life presents them to us. And this level of pathology, yours, what I have described, this is not at all unusual. It doesn’t need to hold you back. Whatever the sources—here, we depart from orthodoxies—they needn’t govern your behaviour from here forward. And perhaps I’m entirely wrong in my hasty, forced“—I raised my eyebrows at her and she smiled—”‘diagnosis’ of your problems. Perhaps there are myriad, small, forgotten factors in your history, too many and too minute to be retained, much less recounted, and these are what made you vulnerable to such a marriage. I don’t know you well enough to know.
“The reasons you stayed were also good ones. Loyalty. Hope. Dev’s own virtues, the way you enjoyed one another’s company, the way he made you feel comfortable until you were—as I think you are now—able to feel comfortable without him.” I winced. I had gone too far.
She jumped at the opening. “You think I should leave him?”
I looked at her reproachfully, and she apologized.
“My parents will be heartbroken,” Brinda said. “They thought this marriage was perfect for me. What if he can still change?”
“That would be wonderful,” I said. I reached to take her extended hands—a gesture foreign to me, nearly artificial—yet I did it.
“It’s been so useful talking to you,” she said, and I was deeply discomfited, then, by a sexual buzz. Something like transference, but disturbing and hateful in a way it never was in therapy, where it was natural, expected, contained.
I took a little breath, acknowledging now the degree of denial I had invoked to get me through these intense days. A blooming rose such as Brinda, baring herself—figuratively—and I, racked with deprivation and longing—could I admit it now? Desire was felt. Nothing to fret over.
I shook it off. Withdrew my hands.
“I admire your loyalty,” I told her. Her eyes were burning and impenetrable. Was she angry? At me? “The love you have given him sounds like the sort you might give a child, the indulgence, the patience. You are very strong.”
“Maybe someday I’ll have a child to love like that.”
There was something fierce in her. I longed to know the particular brightness of her future, to be in it. As an uncle, only that.
“Will you keep in touch with me?” I asked her.
We stood and embraced, but it was not so fraught, so ambiguous, now. The moment had cooled and this was a simpler affection, easier on an old man’s nerves.
FALL 2004
Death will come and will have your eyes.
—CESARE PAVESE
FROM LOHIKARMA, I CONTINUED on to the west coast, did my interviews there, and made another attempt to drop in on the trial. It had vanished entirely from the “Glib and Stale,” as Brinda called the Globe and Mail. “Canada’s National Newspaper,” the masthead declared, but everyone knew it would be better called “Toronto’s National Newspaper.” The Globe’s coverage of the trial confirmed—and cultivated—a national indifference to the events transpiring in the Vancouver courtroom.
I admit that I had been craving information. But after only a day back in that courtroom, I started to fear both saturation and addiction. A team of defence lawyers was working to seed doubts about whether the accused could have been in Vancouver at the time the plot was being hatched. The witnesses—drug dealers, thugs, informants, FBI agents, illicit lovers—were both banal and fascinating to me. But did I need to know what was happening in the courtroom? I went back the next day, feeding my rage and helplessness, and also my desire to hear more, more, more. This time, when I left, I resolved not to return.
The bombers’ code phrase for the plot still echoed in my head, as it had for years now. “Ready to write the book?”
“Ready to write the book.”
I stayed in Vancouver and started drafting The Art of Losing: Narratives of the Air India Disaster. I also wrote up Brinda’s story, frettin
g over it much more than I would have if she were a client I would see again and work with. But perhaps I thought I might draw her back to me, that way. The glow I had felt in her presence, the warmth of her parents, the spell of Lohikarma, it was starting to fade. Work was going well, but as the weeks passed I felt increasingly unmoored. Grey. Static. A drift back to the way I had felt in the year before I began this project.
Brinda’s thanks, when I finally sent her the document, were brief and uninformative. Had she moved on? Was she in the throes of a decision? I didn’t want to ask, not by e-mail. I wished her well, and again encouraged her to call on me if ever there was anything I could do.
I wanted to go back to Lohikarma. Why? I had done interviews in eight cities, all rich and emotional, but only in Lohikarma did I feel that other spark. You must change your life. People went west to change their lives. Go west, old man! I was even farther west now, but in Vancouver—a big city, where I was anonymous, alone, and life was little different from my life back in India. I wanted to change my life. I could do that only near Seth. There—I wrote that down.
Nonsense, I thought, reading it in my journal immediately after writing it. What did Seth have that could make me feel that way? Gracious forbearance. It didn’t matter what. It would give me courage.
I would go back. He and I would meet, regularly. Coffee, lunch. We would become friends—real friends. Over time, his daughters would be like nieces to me.
And Lohikarma made sense—it was a place many people went to change their lives. It was a good place to do that.
I arrived back in October. I called Seth and we met, putatively in order for me to ask questions that had arisen in transcription, clarify a few points. He asked how long I would be staying this time. I said I wasn’t sure, perhaps a month. A week later, he invited me to have a coffee. He invited me.
We met at the mall, where we were surrounded by Halloween paraphernalia. I mentioned that, although I love to see the children dressed up, my apartment in Lohikarma had no front entrance, so that I could not distribute candy. I further broadly hinted—okay, I said bluntly—that October 31 had unpleasant associations for me.
He asked if I wouldn’t rather spend the evening with him and Lakshmi. So it was that at 5:30 p.m., October 31, 2004—the twentieth anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination—I was traversing Lohikarma’s scenic avenues in a multicoloured afro and a red rubber nose, carrying a bag of lollipops, thinking, Indira G.: R.I.P., with uncharacteristic lightness.
Lakshmi was holding the screen door open when I arrived.
“Two-by-twos,” I said to her, indicating the crowd pushing past me down her walk.
She looked at me quizzically.
“Two years old by two feet tall,” I explained. It was not quite dark, still the hour of Baby’s First Halloween, children knee-high-to-a-grasshopper, as Rosslyn’s mother used to say, bumble bees and Ninja turtles.
Lakshmi looked as though she still didn’t understand, but it wasn’t that; she didn’t recognize me. I pulled my nose out by its elastic band; it made a wet, sucking noise as its interior humidity released.
“Ashwin?” I said over it. I proffered the sucker sack, wishing I had that hand to pull off the wig. Lakshmi was not in costume. “Seth invited me to …”
She gave a quick sigh, and blinked her eyes wide open as though to keep from rolling them. I looked past her, trying not to seem rude: Where was Seth?
She had a chair set up in their foyer and brought another from the dining room for me. She had left her paperback open and face down on her chair seat: Rohinton Mistry. The cover: a photo of a man facing away. See? I gave my own quick sigh.
“Seth is staying with Venkat tonight,” she told me as she went to give more candy to children too young to eat it.
“Don’t choke on that!” I told one, and popped my nose at him.
I wiggled my wig by working my eyebrows, and glanced sideways at Lakshmi. Disapproval or amusement? Her face was not nearly so expressive as Seth’s.
“What happened to Venkat?” I didn’t really want to know.
“He had an outburst of some sort.” There was a lull in the trick-or-treaters and she sat with a sharp outtake of breath.
“Bad?”
“He’s been put on leave. Perhaps permanently.”
Another crowd, old enough to know what they were doing, shouted, “Halloween apples!” from outside. I waved at her to stay in her chair while I did candy duty. “You didn’t know I was coming?”
“Seth didn’t come home from the office today. We talked, but it must have slipped his mind.” She was rubbing her forehead. “It’s fine. Stay.”
I kept her company for an hour or two. She told me what little she knew, or perhaps less, about the incident in the classroom, and then, as the Hallow-baloo decreased, I excused myself.
The next day, at a downtown diner, Seth filled me in. “I suppose it was only a matter of time, with the trial, the trial, the trial. It’s been going on so long, it’s become a trial for everyone.”
“What happened?”
“He was teaching a class. The economics professor who teaches in the same room, next period, was waiting outside but it was getting late, the door wasn’t opening, and then she realized she was hearing something that didn’t sound quite right. Finally, she peeked in. Venkat was shouting at the top of his lungs, all kinds of nonsense. The kids were too scared to move. Then he starts insulting this professor. There might be a lawsuit.” He rubbed his neck, looking tired.
As Venkat had ranted on about betrayal and misplaced faith, his colleague waved his students out and went to find help. By the time she returned, he had gone.
What was the trigger? It was not clear. His students were interviewed by the university’s counsellors, but most gave the impression that they had, for all practical purposes, been drowsing in their chairs. They woke to find him in full flight.
The colleague, who talked to everyone about it, thought Venkat was a step away from bringing a gun into the hallowed halls of academe. While I saw Venkat as too harmless a fellow for that, it did not escape me that this incident came one year to the day from Ms. D’s testimony, and twenty years after Indira Gandhi’s death. I never would have put much stock in this sort of thing—surely the date could not consciously be meaningful to Venkat; he wasn’t even in India at the time of the assassination—if I hadn’t seen the workings of such seemingly distant associations in the lives of my clients.
“It would be such a favour to us if you would talk to him, Ashwin,” Seth said.
I had seen this coming, and dreaded it. “Yes,” I said. “I will. But I have questions. Last time I was in Lohikarma, I asked you if you had any legal status in his medical care. You never answered. Is there anything I should know?”
Seth hesitated.
“If he were referred by his employer, his doctor, I would receive a file,” I insisted. “I don’t like to feel I am going in blind.”
He took a breath and let it out heavily. “Okay. After Venkat got home from his time in India,” he began, “all seemed to be going fine, as far as I could tell.”
“You had set him up, his routines, his teaching.”
“Exactly.” Seth had a mannerism sometimes, small, jerking motions of his neck, as though the weight of his jacket on his shoulders was too much. “Venkat was distant, but otherwise normal. Uh, except …” He digressed. “Except sometimes, when we were on campus, or once when I took him shopping, he would think he saw one of them.”
“One of them?”
“Sita or Sundar. He would become lively. All of a sudden. A startling kind of change. He would stop and stare, at the campus, or the mall, looking very happy.” Seth showed me, half standing, agape. “And then, phoosh, he would deflate again, his cheeks sinking, his shoulders going down. Once he explained it to me, so then I understood the other times. He was thinking he saw one of them.”
“Not uncommon.”
“Oh?” The eyebrows went up. “You hav
e heard this from other family members, research subjects?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “And also clients, in my therapeutic practice. Although they know, intellectually, that their loved one is dead, they will go on for years thinking they spot them, here and there.”
“But he, he got Sundar’s body. With Sita, I could have understood more. No closure, and all.”
“I’ve seen it in cases where the death was unambiguous, not even sudden.” Seth seemed to accept this. “But he appeared to be adjusting?”
“I suppose. I was worried. Every once in awhile, I would wake up in the night and be so worried, and I would go and see him.”
“Worried? Had he said something to worry you?”
“No. Well, I don’t think so. One thing he said, but I don’t really remember if this was before or after …”
“Before or after …?”
“I’m getting to it. He told me he could still remember the sound of Sundar’s voice, but he couldn’t think of what Sundar would have said.” Seth looked at me, questioning, I think, whether I understood. “I knew exactly what he meant. It was because he lost Sita too. When our daughters were small, I would come home from work and my wife would tell me the things they said. I would make her repeat them; I could never remember exactly how they went. Even when I was there, with the children, she would repeat to me what they had just said. You’re not trained to notice those things, as a man, or to remember them. So I knew what Venkat meant.”
“And so you would go to see him, in the night?”
“The door was never locked. He was always awake, often sitting on the family room sofa. Most often, we would pray. And then I would make him go to bed, and I would sleep on his sofa, go home in the morning.” Seth swallowed. “On this night—I guess it was late October? There was a bit of snow already. I woke up, like I said. Cold chills. I had been feeling fine, but now, it was like a fever. A fever of dread. I rushed into his house but he wasn’t on the sofa, not in the bedroom, bathrooms. I ran through the house, calling his name, but I didn’t hear anything. I thought, He went somewhere? In the middle of the night? He didn’t come home from the office? I had this fear. I knew I had to keep looking. I opened the front door, but there were no footprints in the snow. Suddenly, it hit me. I rushed to the garage. He was sitting in the car.”
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 20
