“French, you say?”
“Half. He grew up in Brazil.”
“A finishing school for libertines.”
She snorted. “Yeah. It’s not as though I would want to be rebounding to, say, Adrian.” She crumbled into tears.
“Oh, dear girl.” Where were the tissues? Dear, dear girl. “Are you in touch with Adrian?”
“He’s sticking it out with his girlfriend, for now. His father died, in October, right when the worst hit me with Dev.” She blew her nose. “I think he was back and forth quite a bit, through the fall. I e-mailed him, after I arrived, a couple of days ago, wondering if he’d be here for the holidays. We hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months.”
“And?”
“He’s in Vancouver, meeting his mother at his sister’s house.”
“Ah.”
“The wierdest part is how terrifying it is. Dev never made me feel all that secure—he was always threatening to leave his job for God knows what, and spent most of what he earned on music and films and eating out. We didn’t own a house. But we had a home, a life. Now I have no home, no job, no real relationship. It’s like the earth cracked open under me.”
And yet, she was having a wonderful year, in all other ways. She talked to me: the thesis, hard but exhilarating; Baltimore, different from anywhere she’d lived; new friends, their writing, their escapades; her professors, their opinions, their mannerisms—she was on fire with it all. And yet. The doubt and insecurity were real, and justified. She would get over it, but now, she was shuffling one foot forward through very interesting terrain while the other toed a crevasse so deep she was scared to look down. (Yet another laboured metaphor, but surely you are accustomed to them by now?)
I rubbed my neck as she spoke, and tried to hide the stiffness in my back. She would be here some four or five weeks; Johns Hopkins had a long winter break, lots of time to work on her thesis. Her sister, about whom Brinda had spoken little, would be home in a week. I couldn’t tell how Brinda felt about her, but had grown too tired to ask. I walked her out—we would meet again in a few days—and bought a paper across the street. The trial was back in the news: it had ended. Everyone, including me, had nearly stopped paying attention. The justice, one Josephson, had announced his intention to reveal his verdict on March 16. I would have to return to Vancouver to hear it.
Back in the flat, I lay down. I had called Seth the day I left Ottawa, and we had an afternoon appointment. Would he ask any further about my abrupt departure in the fall? Would I be able to avoid Venkat? I realized I didn’t care much whether I did or not. My last thought, before I snoozed, was how asinine, how ridiculous, I was still to be so excited, four days later, at having talked to Rosslyn.
SETH’S SKIN WAS GREYISH. Surely, he couldn’t have developed wrinkles in six weeks, but I had not seen before this downward-pointing pattern in the lines of his face. His eyebrows, particularly, seemed on a collision course, as though destined to squeeze shut the third eye. He rose to greet me, then sat again behind his desk.
All I could think to ask was, “How are you?”
“I am—we’re fine,” he replied. The Newton’s cradle was on his desk and he set the balls a-clack. “Brinda, my elder daughter—you met her? Last summer.”
I indicated that I had.
“She has come home for the holidays, earlier than expected. Her husband has not come with her. My second daughter will come next week, with her, er, her husband. She is expecting.” The steelies swung in two-two time. He watched them for a long time, then spoke while still looking at them. “One of many mysteries, in physics, is why it is that all the atoms of any given substance configure identically. Their size, their weight, their behaviour—at least in limited circumstances—will be uniform. And if we try to change them, they will act so as to return to their initial state. Conservation of momentum, static states, conservation of energy—resistance to change seems to be a universal law.”
“Even with people?”
“Feynman—you ever read Richard Feynman? Genius. He said, ‘what animals do, atoms do.’ We are a mass of interlocked systems, from our atoms to our organs. No system wants to break or change, so when you seem to see such a break, you look for what else changes to accommodate it, so that the overall effect is still equilibrium.”
“Or you examine the laws to see how your theory fails.” All this was equally applicable to therapy.
“Exactly. You know anything about quantum theory?”
Oh God. I searched my recollections but quickly realized I wanted only to hear what he had to say. “No,” I answered.
He settled back in his chair, knees and elbows spreading slightly. “It’s the most elegant set of developments in physics since classical times.” His eyebrows had crept back into positions of repose. “Essentially, quantum theory is based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says we can’t know where an atom is and how it is moving at the same time. We can only know one or the other. Yes?”
I gave an ambiguous nod.
“Either way, the existence of the atom, at a place, or at a speed, is confirmed only via the observation. Until it is observed, in other words, it effectively does not exist, except as a possibility, a sort of ghost. I take much longer to develop this in my classes, you understand.”
Some mechanism clicked or whirred in the recesses of my mind. “Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.
He beamed and slapped his knee. “Excellent! What is the paradox?”
I had gotten myself into this. I worked in hopes of another smile. “That, uh, the cat is neither, or both, alive or dead?”
“Very good. And this is not the cat’s experience, obviously.”
“But how is the paradox resolved?”
“This continues to be an area of exploration. Niels Bohr speculated that, in a sense, reality occurs at the point of observation, that many related possibilities remain equally real or unreal until observation separates one from the others, causing the others to vanish or fall away. Me, I like to think about the multi-verse proposition, that each time an observation is made, the universe splits. So that in one universe, Schrödinger’s cat lives; in the other, it is dead.”
In one ramified universe, Sundar and Sita are alive; in this one, they have died. In one universe, the Sikh pogroms happened; in another, the rule of law prevailed. In some universes, humans never evolved, while elsewhere in time and space I sit on a branch of a branch of a branch of reality, playing Monopoly with Asha’s children and talking John Coltrane with her Bosnian-émigré husband.
Whereas in this one, I talk to Seth.
“Physics supports this?” I asked, then. “You believe this?” This theory seemed wildly improbable and unproveable and simplistic. And it wasn’t even comforting.
“Science, I think, need not prove anything,” he said. “At times it has appeared to, but some say a theory’s value is in its usefulness: if it can describe or explain a set of phenomena, it is good as far as that goes.”
I thought I was catching on. “As one Canadian therapist put it, stories used to be considered true because they were meaningful, not meaningful because they were true.”
“Precisely. This eliminates dualism, just as in Hinduism we are trying to eliminate the separation between self and God, matter and consciousness. We understand the world to be an illusion. Heisenberg said, ‘The division of the world into body and soul, inner world and outer world, is no longer adequate.’ In observing the world, we create it.”
I have read that once people didn’t speak of belief in God so much as behave in a way consistent with such a belief. When I was young, when my parents wanted to go to the temple, I went, I bent, I prayed as needed. No one asked whether I believed. Was Seth saying that every thinking person is an agnostic? Bring God into being through worship; no need to try to prove God’s existence. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
“I am not a scientist, however,” he said. “I am mere
ly a teacher, parroting laws, like Mandy. ‘E=mc2!’ ‘E=mc2!’ Bloody smart, for a bird!” He chuckled, a sound more like a hiccup, with the pressure of his distress.
Unlike most people, Seth is most himself when joking, and the room let its breath out. But then he gave me a different smile, and started again to age, the lines in his face unsmoothing and pointing once again in accusation at his elongating nose and drooping mouth. The transformation—from professor alight with the beauty of ideas to man bent under a burden of worry—was profound and touching.
We said our farewells. He turned, reaching into his jacket pocket, turned back. “Where are you spending the holidays?”
“I—here in Lohikarma, in fact.” Caught off guard. “I have a lot of work and I thought I might have the peace and solitude here to get it done.”
He appeared to accept this, then to remember something. “Our daughter’s velaikappu, bangle ceremony. Does your community do this? The ceremony for a pregnant woman.”
I nodded vaguely. I might have heard of such a thing.
“Traditionally only women attend. But our daughter refused to have a proper wedding. They married in a secret civil ceremony, no guests, totally private. Ridiculous,” he said apologetically, even though my reaction was to admire her. “But finally we have a chance to celebrate the marriage, the baby! You must come. December thirtieth. Most of the Indians in town will be there!”
To anyone else I would have said this was the best reason to avoid it, but how, when one daughter’s future weighed so heavily on him, could I refuse the opportunity to celebrate the other’s?
“Thank you,” I said.
“You have a mailing address here? I’ll send you an invitation.”
His hand had slipped back into his pocket as I wrote it on a Post-it on his desk. I left, Seth’s loop of rudraksha beads clicking softly through his fingers as he counted time in units of God’s name, the door clicking softly shut behind me.
’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS when Ranjani and Greg arrived. Seth and Lakshmi went together to fetch them from the Castlegar airport, so that all four tumbled into the house a bit giddy, what with Ranjani flying barely under the pregnancy wire and the incipient holiday-party atmosphere generated on the hour-long drive. Brinda, who had spent their absence on the couch, curled around the cat, let them in.
She had called Ranjani a week earlier, to break her news, get it over with and spare her parents, who talked to Ranjani every couple of days, the agony of concealing it. They would start telling relatives and friends across the globe after the holidays.
Ranjani had been rigidly thin since late adolescence, never having recovered from the rigours of losing her baby fat. Now she looked cheeky and appetizing as she twinkled in on shiny boots. Earrings fanning her face like excited maids. Her beach ball, as she called it, draped in black. Handsome, solicitous Greg followed her in with the baggage.
The sight of them made Brinda want to stab someone, any anonymous person randomly passing behind her. Turn, slash, turn back. Don party face.
They greeted with hugs. Greg carried the bags up to their room and descended to receive a beer from Seth’s outstretched hand, while Ranjani arranged herself on the sofa with ginger ale.
Seth offered Greg his recliner, but Greg sat instead beside Ranjani, a hand on her knee.
“I’m nervous about you flying.” Seth pointed at Ranjani. “And I said you shouldn’t be driving in Vancouver.”
She rolled her eyes. “Is this just while I’m pregnant? Or d’you want to come out and chauffeur us till the baby’s, what, twenty-five? Or maybe forever?”
Seth tinkled his ice. It would take three lifetimes to learn how not to offend his daughters, mostly because he didn’t see why he should learn such a thing. What did it matter? Ranjani was so much warmer these days, calling to chat about fetal development and delivery options, sounding happier and acting more open toward them than she had since she was a child. In truth, he could feel he was becoming reconciled to it, her refusal to marry. As Lakshmi pointed out, they themselves might not ever have gotten legally married, had he not had to bring her to Canada. He wondered if Hindu priests back home were now legal officiants. He and Lakshmi had never even had birth certificates, but that didn’t mean they weren’t born.
Ranjani said she and Greg were legally joined, common-law, emphasis on “law,” saying it made no legal difference. Seth didn’t quite trust that—if it was true, why were there separate categories?—but he trusted Greg. He and Ranjani were settled. That was the important thing. A child, a child, Seth chorused to himself. Long, warm fingers encircled his rib cage and he glanced over at Brinda, who looked as though similar tentacles gripped her, less affectionately. He and Lakshmi had longed for a grandchild ever since Brinda’s marriage. Why had it not occurred to them that they would have one from Ranjani? Mostly because Ranjani, through the long years of never quite becoming the film artist she had aimed to be, had never mentioned motherhood. Brinda had. Brinda married. And then she rolled off the rails of stability, even while Ranjani’s bile and disillusion turned some corner and receded. Ranjani found a steady job, as a videographer with a consulting company. Greg’s work schedule, though still erratically freelance, became full, as did his wallet. They were no longer struggling artists; they were yuppies.
He looked again at Brinda, the daughter he had thought he understood. No house, no husband, no babies. What had happened to her?
The sound of his mantra filled his ears as though he were holding conch shells to his head on a crowded beach, shutting out the holiday chatter to pretend to listen to the sound of the inexorable ocean. Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai.
When Brinda had showed up in distress, Seth called in sick, missing his last classes of the semester, since Lakshmi had already used up her holiday time for the year. He put off his grading, as well as piled-up duties for the Shivashakti Centre of the Kootenays, on whose board he served (now Past President), to show Brinda he had all the time in the world for her. After a few days, though, she made it clear that wasn’t what she wanted.
His wife had always been the one to speak with their daughters when they were upset. She would then tell Seth what was wrong. The arrangement suited them all. This time, when Lakshmi asked Brinda to tell her more about what had happened, Brinda had said she was still working it out herself. Lakshmi had pressed a little—she wanted to know, as he did, about the affairs—who how long when such a shock—but Brinda had reacted badly, saying it wasn’t her responsibility to mitigate that shock. Lakshmi told him later, pressing her thumb and forefinger into her eyelids, “She’s right, of course. What difference does it make?”
After that, they tiptoed. At dinner, they would talk about the news, about family friends—others’ weddings, others’ babies, subjects that fizzled quickly—and about Brinda’s thesis, the only topic on which she grew animated and assured.
Given that there was practically nothing, nothing practical, that Seth could do to help Brinda or to assuage her pain, he had filled every spare moment with prayer, sitting at the shrine whenever possible and, otherwise—at traffic lights, at the photocopier, at the kitchen sink—filling his thoughts with the name of the Eternal One.
Which was practical in one sense: it kept his head from popping off in a mortal scream, and so meant that if ever there was anything his family needed, he was still alive to do it. When he was distracted from both prayer and worry, say, in a student conference, it was the worry that returned first, in a fist-biting rush, a million tiny pickaxes.
“I can very well see that I’m in a fix,” Brinda yelled at them in a rare moment of open discussion. “Thirty-five, no job, home, marriage. I don’t need you to worry. I’m doing plenty of that.”
She was asking them to buoy her up with faith in her abilities, her decisions, her future. But that’s exactly what they had done her whole life. They hadn’t opposed any of her decisions. And she seemed no more pl
eased than they were at the result.
Was he praying for Shivashakti to help his daughter? He had never prayed in that way before. Could Brinda be helped by a god she didn’t believe in? Seth believed: perhaps Shivashakti would show him once again which course of action to take.
Thinking that he might, Seth grew irrationally afraid, once more reminded of Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, in the moment when Krishna, to convince the warrior of his own puniness, reveals himself in his full divinity. He thought about it now, that almost too-familiar passage, as he watched his women talk and ran his palm along the family cat’s bony back. It was the passage that J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted, or misquoted, or was said to have misquoted, even mentally, at the moment when he saw his bomb explode.
Seth used a 1965 video clip in his Intro Physics classes, of Oppenheimer, looking like a heavy-browed elf with his bald head and pointy ears, his eyes aimed away from the camera, recalling that moment twenty years before. “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”
Of course, one can quibble. The god in the Bhagavad Gita is never called Vishnu, but rather Krishna—one of Vishnu’s incarnations, Prince Arjuna’s charioteer. The god doesn’t merely “take on his multi-armed form” but reveals the full radiance of his divinity—containing multitudes, not only of arms, but heads, bodies, consciousnesses. It is more than mortal sight, mortal understanding, can bear. And he doesn’t do it merely “to impress” Arjuna, he does it because it seems the only way to make Arjuna understand that whatever he does or doesn’t do, everyone on that battlefield is destined to die—as is the Prince himself.
Most importantly, though, the word in Sanskrit that Oppenheimer translates as “Death” is also “Time.” The translation Seth and Lakshmi used to read with the kids says, “I am the mighty world-destroying Time …” Seth would use this in his class for an anecdotal break in the sessions on fusion and fission, but would return to it at the end of the course, when he talked about time as perceived by the average person—inexorable, linear, constantly vanishing—then as conceived by most physicists—as another dimension, as with space, and subject to all those limits and freedoms, an elastic and explorable territory of existence.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 28
