And anyway, according to Oppenheimer’s brother, whatever Oppenheimer may have thought, all he actually said when the bomb exploded was, “It worked.”
AN ASIDE. I HAD THOUGHT, on this visit to Lohikarma, of telling Seth what Venkat was doing. On our first meeting, I was prevented by his distress. The longer I waited, the harder it was, but it wasn’t only that. I feared that Seth somehow knew, and, worse, that he would approve.
This is what I think: Oppenheimer believed he had usurped God. With the bomb, he and his co-creators could control Death–Time, the destroyer of worlds. They had moved outside of history. Oppenheimer was not without humility and public sentiment, but I believe this is what he thought. Seth may have understood that moment in the Gita as the one in which Arjuna sees he is powerless to affect the course of history, but I don’t think he thought beyond that to question the hubris of those who would wage war in God’s name or America’s.
My guess is that Seth, like practically all of our countrymen, felt proud that in Oppenheimer’s moment of great glory, when he had a vision of what the world might become as a result of his genius—I am become Death—the scripture that best served this self-awe was Hindu. I have known many who have wanted to use this as evidence that Kaliyug, the destruction of the known world, will culminate in a Hindu raj.
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has an essay, “The Anger of the Damned,” concerning the fact that most of us in poor countries know we are condemned to shorter and harder lives than people in the developed world, that our countries are not as wealthy or as well run, and that we feel this is, in some way, our own fault. Colonialism is now almost three generations past, we say, in our conferences and coffee shops. What is wrong with us? Pamuk speaks of the “overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world’s population.” What he doesn’t mention is that this feeling is not limited to the poorest strata of these vertiginously vertical societies. My country of billions is as steep as it is broad, and those teetering at the top also feel a rage-making shame at our national poverty.
This is how Sudhir Kakar (the writer and psychoanalyst I would be if Kakar weren’t that person already) puts it in his groundbreaking analysis of Hindu–Muslim violence in India: “For the elites of the non-Western world, there is an additional humiliation in their greater consciousness of the defeat of their civilizations in the colonial encounter with the West. This defeat is not merely an abstraction or a historical memory, but one which is confirmed by the peripheral role of their countries in the international economic and political order of the post-colonial world.”
The governing classes’ ongoing failure to provide for their poor is held up to them at meetings of the UN–OPEC–IMF. It is a blade idly and perpetually scratching their testicles. And this is why I worried that Seth, even if he would never profess a politics of sectarian violence, was not likely to disagree with it. How could he be a devotee of Shivashakti’s for so long and not know that Hindu nationalist groups recruited on the ashram grounds, insinuating themselves into conversations with the vulnerable, particularly those with connections to Western money? I could only think that he must know that, even if he didn’t know—or didn’t want to know—that Venkat had succumbed.
What if I revealed Venkat’s secret and Seth was not disillusioned, not even disapproving? Could I love him anymore? Perhaps. I could not yet risk it.
CHRISTMAS MORNING, AFTER PRESENTS and brunch, Seth showered and made one more cup of coffee for the road. His daughters loitered in the kitchen. “Are you coming, Brinda?” Seth jingled his keys in his pocket.
“Time to go, already?” She rose from her chair and stretched.
“I like to be there by eleven fifteen.”
As Seth backed down the steep driveway to the equally steep road, Brinda said, “And how is Venkat Uncle?”
Seth raised his eyebrows and grimaced. “My guess is that he’s lying in bed with the goddamn birds flying around. He’s going to catch avian flu. When I was there yesterday, one of them …” He stumbled into the trap of his daughter’s amusement. “It went … potty. On the table, while he was eating. While he was feeding it from his plate.” He shuddered.
“You’ve been complaining about that for over fifteen years, Dad.” Brinda’s voice bounced back to her from the car window, her breath dimming the pane, the cold taking it back. “It didn’t go in his food, did it?”
“It could have. Scary.”
Venkat didn’t deserve to be smitten by anything so protracted—and ironic—as avian flu, Brinda thought. A nice fat lightning bolt, though, or a quadruple-ventricle cardiac arrest—picture the fist of his heart unfurling as his mottled soul ascends—might offer him deliverance.
“Scary.” She mimicked her father’s tone almost without thought. “It could have gone in yours.”
“I don’t eat anything there, unless I’ve taken it out of the box and microwaved it myself.”
“I’ve seen that on microwaveable boxes: Full Complement of Daily Vitamins, and Neutralizes Bird Poop!” Brinda grinned in adolescent triumph, but then the cheer and normalcy of the moment made her self-conscious, her depression rising again, a veil between her and life.
They reached downtown within five minutes of leaving their house. Seth turned left along High Street, her hometown’s heart, six short blocks hammocked between low purple mountains. So different from when she was growing up: brick sidewalks now curved up to fudge shop doors; scrawny young trees guarded wrought-iron benches to host tired tourists’ bottoms. Historic buildings had been restored, though almost none for its original purpose.
Brinda did miss the ratty Dairy Queen, the saggy-ceilinged Catholic bookstore where she bought votive candles for self-consciously kitsch undergrad parties. But tourism was insurance that her hometown wouldn’t disappear. So many other boom towns became ghost towns. Even her parents’ villages in India were returning to dust: a few old people on verandas grinned through betel-blotched teeth as their houses literally crumbled behind them, walls pitted for lack of whitewash, bricks washing away in the rain, kids and money washing away to the cities.
There was a new WELCOME TO LOHIKARMA sign at the edge of town, with the ouroboros, a dragon biting its own tail. When she was little, the town logo had frightened her. It looked like self-obliteration.
Then, when she left for Edmonton, she had a tiny ouroboros tattooed around her navel. Friends, and Dev, had thought it was an expression of loyalty to her hometown. She didn’t correct them. To her, it was about Sundar, but how or why wasn’t clear. She never told her parents.
Her father was still talking about Venkat. “He’s on leave, because of that breakdown, or whatever it was. Terrible. No teaching for the rest of this academic year.” Seth rolled his head from side to side. His winter coat was new, looked stiff. “The Dean told me they’re going to ask him to retire.”
“Does he still come on Fridays?” Brinda realized he hadn’t come last night.
“Oh, sure. We postponed yesterday. He’ll come tonight.” He gave her an uncertain smile and then found a spot and began to parallel park.
Brinda stared ahead as he bounced the car forward and back a few times—unnecessarily, in her view. “I’m not looking forward to seeing him.”
“Tch.” He finally put the car in park and got out, put his hands to his lower back and stretched, then bent to squint at the meter. “Poor fellow.”
She followed her father to the entrance, each of them cradling a large bag of tomatoes. Mealy though tomatoes were at this time of year, the chronically vitamin-C-deprived homeless would relish them.
The Welcome Centre was located in the old Hudson’s Bay building, vacated when the chain’s stores across the country went down, the economy a giant game of Whac-A-Mole. The homelessness advocacy organization, a strong one with branches throughout the lower mainland, had signed a cheap lease, with the condition that this would not be a shelter but rather a place to provide a meal, counselling, and other daylight-hour resource
s to the region’s homeless, a population that had always been large but burgeoned during exceptionally bad or good times. The soup kitchen was set up in the old cafeteria. Various community groups and individuals provided volunteer assistance, but the Shivashakti devotees were a mainstay, staffing lunch every Saturday and donating much of the food they served.
Seth and Brinda signed in at a desk manned by a security guard with a crewcut who was densely highlighting a battered paperback. Brinda checked the multi-creased spine: The Fountainhead. The Welcome Centre door opened behind them, blowing in the fragrance of spices heated in oil.
“Oh, Brinda, you have come! To help also.” Mrs. Arora, the wife of Seth’s colleague in the physics department, waddled toward her. She had lost a two-year-old grandchild, a swimming accident, as Brinda recalled, about five years ago. “Hello, Dr. Sethuratnam. All right?”
In the kitchen, they put on long, white aprons. Mrs. Arora surveyed the lunch counter and got bread out of the fridge. Seth greeted the cook with familiarity—he was the kitchen’s only full-time employee, and they took their orders from him—and put a colander in the industrial sink to rinse the tomatoes. Brinda shuffled along beside him, unsure of what to do, until the cook gave her some wilting heads of iceberg lettuce to slice.
There were two other volunteers already there, both of whom Brinda knew slightly. One was a nervously energetic academic—an Indian man with a high voice, younger than her parents. He had arrived a couple of years back, a new hire in Chemistry, but a Shivashakti devotee since childhood. He didn’t do conversations, only harangues, mostly non sequiturs on Western immorality. Lakshmi couldn’t stand him, but still, he had come to their memorial last June.
The other familiar face was that of a white man in his fifties, soft-spoken, with a beard—Bill? Jim? Hmm. He had struck Brinda as intelligent, compared to the general run of Shivashakti adherents. She had even heard him crack a mild joke once. Her dad told her that Bill? Jim?—Ah: Nick!—owned a graphic design company and printed the organic food co-op’s newsletter.
Two new volunteers crept into the kitchen as the chatter of clients intruded from the dining room. One was a young woman with stringy brown hair, a pilly black sweater and fabulous boots of parti-coloured suede. She was called Addie, followed instructions quickly, said nothing, and smiled only, briefly, at Mrs. Arora. Anytime her trembly hands were not occupied, they would fly to her mouth so she could bite her cuticles with unselfconscious violence, as though trying to reach the bone. Though it was a habit Brinda shared, the biting struck her as unhygienic in this context.
The other new volunteer was quasi-useless, which was fine, since six in the kitchen was too many. They always scheduled one extra, Seth had told her, in case someone couldn’t make it. Or was useless, Brinda imagined saying to him after, when they might laugh about this guy: in his early forties, shaped like a Weeble. A meandering cloud of beard divided the slope of his cheek from his neck. Told to portion cheesecake into small bowls, he did, but only as long, apparently, as the instruction reverberated in his head. He decelerated through the filling of eight bowls before taking up his meditation wheel to stand, spinning it, a conspicuously still centre amid the increasing activity. As though he’s superior to the work he volunteered for, Brinda thought, as though he’s teaching us how to live. The harried cook got him back on task twice, and then finally assigned the cheesecake to Addie and asked the Buddhist to go stand on the far side of the industrial freezer.
In the minutes before the cook declared that lunch was served, he ran pots to the lunch counter. Brinda peered at the alternative universe dimly sighted through the Sterno-scented steam now rising from lentil soup, pasta, egg fried-rice: the haphazard vegetarian menu negotiated when the Shivashakti-ites offered to do the Saturday meal on the one condition that they not be asked to serve meat. This was the only thing about her father’s faith that impressed her: that it had led him into regular, friendly contact with the dispossessed, now lined up, joking through missing teeth.
Brinda dished up rice and smiled timidly, conscious of trying to show how non-judgemental she was, and feeling falser for it. Her dad knew many of them by name. A grubby white man with Down’s syndrome reached awkwardly beneath the glass hood to shake his hand. A native man with a merlot scar bisecting his face, forehead to nose-tip, leaned toward Seth and muttered something that sounded threatening. Seth pointed a ladle as though it were a gun, and said, “Hey, who’s the real Indian here?” The two of them laughed, holding their guts in an oddly similar way.
The clients were perhaps 60 percent native. There was one Sikh man, in a turban and beard, who nodded solemnly to the servers and ate by himself. Two men looked Chinese—or Vietnamese? Migrant workers who somehow got shut out of their own communities? The rest were white. There was a couple who only reluctantly stopped embracing to join the back of the lunch line, though the woman held onto her man’s ski jacket at the back while he got a tray of food. When they sat at one of the long tables, they locked their legs together and hunched protectively over their single tray. They ate from the same plate and drank Hawaiian Punch from the same cup.
As Brinda speculated on all that couple might have lost and on what had brought the others to this pass, she felt a familiar awareness of the futility of wanting to know them, of knowing anyone. She had been given so many clues to Dev’s character, and still had no idea who he was or what he thought. So, essentially, there was no true intimacy, or not for her. It might be different for those who were better at extracting information or who were less trusting, or whose judgements were more accurate … No, in this mood, she would have to believe it was the same for everyone. You could only know what a person told you or what you witnessed, and the person could deny what they said, and you could completely misinterpret what you saw.
The thing Dev seemed not to understand was the currency of confession, the way weakness could endear you to someone. Until it made them despise you for all you could not give.
The soup kitchen line was through. Apart from a minimum of clean-up, the servers were done their shift. The cook told them to help themselves to lunch, but none of them did. Mrs. Arora and the young professor said their goodbyes. The Buddhist stood and spun his wheel in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, as if alerting the others to a portal between worlds. Seth and Nick, who liked to get a cup of coffee and hang out among the lunchers, had to squeeze past him, as did Brinda. Addie of the harlequin boots, who looked panicked when Mrs. Arora left, followed them, middle finger to mouth. Although the kitchen was then empty, the cook came and whacked the wheel-spinner’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Buddy. Get outta the way?”
Seth sat down at a table with a few empty chairs, pulling one out for Brinda as she watched Addie and the Buddhist leave. “That guy was unbelievable,” she said to her father, sotto voce, as someone came up to him with a chessboard.
Seth looked at her and back at his chess partner, who was setting up the board on the table in front of him. “What?”
“The Buddhist? Spinning his little wheel like it was a party favour?”
“It’s a form of meditation,” Seth said.
“I know. Why did he have to do it when he was supposed to be working?” The clatter in the dining room was like a sound screen, and anyone close to them was interested only in the chess game.
Seth shrugged. “Maybe he needed to. You can’t know.”
Brinda gave him a look of undisguised exasperation. “Why did he sign up to volunteer if he needed to meditate?”
“You can’t know.” Seth realized yet again, with pity, that Brinda had no idea what he felt, all the time, in and out of Shivashakti’s presence. His faith was not monolithic, but even his doubts sustained him. Her arrogance, and Ranjani’s, was almost impressive.
Brinda sighed. “It felt holier-than-thou. Literally.”
He sighed, too, and frowned at the chessboard.
“It looked,” she went on, and he so wished that she wouldn’t,
“as though he signed up to serve poor people because he felt he should, so he would get dharma credit or whatever, but then was double-timing it with public prayer to be on the safe side.”
“Why are you concerned with how it looked?” Seth asked.
“Isn’t that kind of what it’s about? Doing this for the service of God, instead of simply for your fellow human beings?”
“It’s the same thing, kanna,” Seth said softly. It was so obvious that it was more meaningful, not less, to serve God by serving those whose lives were hard. Such an intelligent girl, with so little grasp of an inexpressible, private truth.
“How do you think they feel about it?” Brinda gestured at milling lunchers with her eyes, but Seth didn’t look up from the board. “Some of them might not believe in God.”
Seth snorted. “They get lunch. They don’t care.”
“It’s about your motivations, all of you, I mean. I don’t get it.”
Seth agreed, but didn’t say so.
“You’re looking at people with real problems, but you’re only thinking of God.”
“Oh?” Seth said. He moved a knight.
Perhaps (Seth would suggest to me later) she got frustrated that he wouldn’t agree or (my interpretation) that he wouldn’t take the bait, or perhaps (this was Brinda’s own thinking, after she cooled off) she was too full of her own confusion to stop herself.
“What about real life? I can tell you think I shouldn’t have left Dev.”
Seth stood and took her elbow, saying nothing to anyone as he guided her outside. “I never said that.”
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 29
