The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  “You never said one way or another. I feel your accusations, about my failure.”

  “No, kanna, it’s my failure.” His chess partner came to the glass door, cupping his hands against the glare to see father and daughter on the sidewalk, then turned around and went back inside.

  “Mine.” She was his height, matched him eye to eye. “I’m an adult. I can take responsibility for my mistakes.”

  “Okay!” Nothing he could say would make this better.

  “You infantilize me. That’s why I didn’t try to talk to you and Mom about our problems, beforehand.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about it?” he asked, trying to look concerned but not, what, not paternal? She was his child. She needed to get real.

  “I saw a therapist, in Edmonton. And Ashwin, last summer, was a huge help.”

  “Ashwin?” Ashwin?

  “Yeah.” Her eyes got big, and she covered her mouth with her hands but spoke through them. “Ashwin Rao.”

  “Ashwin Rao. You talked to him about your marriage?”

  “Yeah. Um. I told him not to tell you that we were talking about it. He’s a psychologist, a good one.”

  “I know damn well he’s a psychologist, but he was pretty high and mighty about not helping Venkat, lack of licence or some such, even though Venkat needed it, and then on the other side, he’s meeting you and coaching you to leave Dev? To get divorced? Who the hell is this guy?”

  Brinda, arms crossed, gestured toward the car with a hunched shoulder. “Could we get off the street, please?”

  Seth stalked over to unlock it, and they both got in.

  “Look, Dad, he said he couldn’t be my therapist, like you said. And he never coached me to leave Dev. I asked him if I could talk to him, because I trusted him.”

  “I encouraged you to go and meet with him.” So stupid, so trusting. “Machiavellian.”

  “You’ve got it wrong. He told me he shouldn’t, but I made him. He didn’t charge me, and I made him promise not to tell you.”

  “And he agreed.”

  “I am an adult, in case you forgot!”

  “I am your father, in case you forgot! You’re talking to some stranger, and not to me?”

  “It was easier to talk to someone who didn’t have a stake! Everything that hurts me seems to hurt you twice as much.”

  “It was highly inappropriate of Ashwin Rao.”

  “Are you going to tell Mom?”

  He gave her a look that she thought she should understand, but she didn’t, and no further answer was forthcoming.

  Mid-afternoon, Seth called Venkat to ask when he was coming.

  “Ah? Oh! Friday, is it?”

  Seth cleared his throat and tried to talk so that the others couldn’t hear. “No. It’s Christmas.” He had mentioned it only yesterday.

  There was a short pause at the other end.

  “Ah, okay, yes, thank you. We’ll see you at suppertime.”

  We. Venkat had, for years now, brought Mandy with him when he came to dinner at Seth’s house. The first couple of times, Lakshmi was disgusted and wanted Seth to say something, but Seth couldn’t. Then, one time, Ranjani and Brinda were there and Venkat took Mandy out of his cage to entertain them. They all had to admit he was a well-adjusted bird. That evening was the most fun they had ever had with Venkat—the only time, Ranjani and Brinda said, that they had ever actually enjoyed his presence, as they fed Mandy apple pieces and tried to teach him to sing Bob and Doug McKenzie’s theme song: “Coo roo coo coo, coo roo coo coo!” It might have been too long a sequence for a parakeet, but Venkat, who wasn’t familiar with the tune, shortened it, so that Mandy now said, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” proficiently, particularly when cued by a doorbell.

  So that tonight, when Venkat rang the doorbell, Mandy chorused along from under his polar-fleece cage-cover, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” When Brinda opened the door, it was as though some unseen guardian angel was warning her that a crazy man cometh.

  But she let him in and they all wished him Merry Christmas.

  (“Was that just to spike him?” Seth would later ask his women.

  “Spite, Dad,” Brinda would respond absent-mindedly, while Seth waited for an answer that never came.)

  “To you all, I say Happy Pongal,” Venkat said with a note of warning. “You can call it solstice.” He turned his baggy glare on their raggedy tinsel tree. “The lunar calendar has drifted such that the established day doesn’t arrive until what we call mid-January, but this is the festival you are meaning to celebrate.” Ranjani made a comic face at Seth as she took Venkat’s coat. Brinda had already escaped to the kitchen. “It is a pagan festival, and we, as members of an agricultural society, can and should observe it.”

  “Agriculture. The Pentiction Peach Festival, you mean?” Lakshmi asked, gesturing toward the living room as Venkat stopped Seth from picking the cage up, despite the cat’s approach.

  “Lakshmi, our roots!” Venkat threw his hands in the air. “Our roots!”

  Seth watched his women suppress their laughter. He hadn’t had a chance to tell Lakshmi about Ashwin Rao, but would have to, tonight. She was going to hit the roof.

  He brooded. How he loved their faces: Lakshmi’s mother’s eyes replicated in Ranjani; Brinda furrowing his own sister’s brow. Lakshmi bore little resemblance to any relative. He imagined that she resembled some long-ago people whose delicate phenotypics, buried in genetic codes, surfaced only in the rarest of their descendants.

  Venkat poked the cat away with his toe, set the cage on the coffee table, bent to lift the fleece drape over his own head and chirped at his bird. Three years after he first got the birds, four years after the bombing, the thing Seth and Lakshmi had feared came to pass: one of the birds, half of a mating pair, sickened and died. Venkat had four at the time: Mandy; a female with whom Mandy had refused to mate; and the couple. The other male started pulling his feathers out when his mate got ill. Venkat, too, lost hair, beside himself with the effort to save her. His teaching suffered, but it didn’t have far to fall. Seth and Lakshmi went on high alert, calling the hospital’s psychiatric wing and the animal shelter to check on space availability and warn them of the possible arrival of sudden guests.

  When the bird’s death came, however, Venkat received it with unexpected grace. Seth and Lakshmi returned home from work to a voice-mail announcement from Venkat, who sounded grave but hardly distraught. They met him an hour later at a pet crematorium and then accompanied him to a nook of the Kootenay River he had apparently decided on in advance as the spot to spread the ashes.

  The place was beautiful: half an hour from town, deep in birch woods, among moss-softened rocks and fallen timber out of whose crevices shelved huge, mustard-hued fungi. It was late fall. Clearly no one had been along the path in some time. Seth himself never would have known it was there. He wondered how often Venkat came and what else he did in the times when Seth was not with him. It struck him as marvellous and frightening how little we can know of the lives of others, even the closest, hours and hours in each day when they are out of our sight and we are out of their minds, leaving them to wander in mind and spirit to lonely places.

  Om … Venkat began chanting the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra … Tryambakam Yajamahe Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam Urvarukamiva … Lakshmi joined, then Seth, clearing his throat. Bandhanan Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat … They prayed to Shiva, the three-eyed, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, to deliver them from ignorance into understanding and acceptance, of life, of death.

  After scattering the ashes, Venkat came to the Sethuratnams’ house for a bite of supper. Lakshmi asked him how it was he seemed so calm.

  Venkat was nonplussed but quickly warmed to his answer. “I nursed her all through her sickness, I cared for her, and when she died, in my own hand”—he held out his hands as he said this, cupped as if to hold a quivering green knot of life—“it was a relief. It was a good death, a natural death. Who are we to fight the will of God?”

  “We’re rel
ieved to see you handling it so well,” Lakshmi said warmly.

  Venkat gave her an odd look. “I lost my wife and child, Lakshmi. How could any other death seriously affect me?” More pensively, he added, “But I have not lost the ability to grieve.”

  It convinced them that he had settled, emotionally. He was still strange, but not volatile, teaching on a schedule, looking after the parakeets. Then came the trial, and then the outburst in class, and now they were all living once more with that long-ago fear of what he might do to himself. The verdict—whatever it was—couldn’t come soon enough.

  Mandy climbed Venkat’s arm to perch on his shoulder. The bird would stay there throughout the meal, accepting snacks of cucumbers or nuts. It had never mated, though Venkat now had three other pairs and had tried each of the new females first with Mandarin before giving her as a wife to a lesser, dumber husband. Venkat said Mandy was too full of filial devotion to love a mate, that he was a sannyasin, an ascetic and celibate, though Brinda and Ranjani delighted in e-mailing Seth articles on homosexuality in the animal world. Told you: Venkat Uncle needs to try Mandy with one of the males! ☺

  “But where is your husband, Brinda?” Venkat asked, as they helped themselves to dinner from the buffet.

  Brinda looked at her parents and then at Venkat, who glanced at her without evident interest. She noticed that the stippling in his face was configured at present into a Rorschach vase, his forehead, nose and chin darker than the rest of his face, the lower end blending into uneven stubble.

  “He’s spending the holiday with his own family,” she mumbled.

  “Is his family not your own?” he asked, not ungently, but he was preparing for one of his set-piece speeches. “I understand this kind of thinking is becoming common even in India today, but we have always understood the Hindu woman to be the core of the family. That is strength, not weakness! These Westerners.”

  Brinda had argued with Venkat once or twice as a hot-headed feminist-progressive teen, but since then, she had chosen to steer the conversation elsewhere and preserve her self-esteem with an occasional choice riposte that she was never sure he caught. Today, she felt as though she had handed him the hot pan of her humiliation so he could shake it and watch her fry.

  Ranjani usually left when Venkat went into this mode. Tonight, her blood a swollen torrent of maternal hormones, she came to her sister’s defence. “You are living in, like, the sixteenth century. Maybe she has her reasons for being here on her own, like, maybe she wasn’t being treated very well? It’s none of your business. I don’t see what Hindu identity has to do with preaching and meddling.”

  Venkat had started when she began speaking. They would say later that he had gotten used to hearing no voices but birdy echoes of his own. “But no, but, dear girl,” he said, with puzzlement, “why do you … We are talking only, nothing to take so seriously.”

  Ranjani’s fury was not abating, and Venkat looked at Brinda, seated at the next edge of the table, closest to him. Her eyes were stretched wide, to contain her tears. “Is it true?” He reached a hand toward her shoulder, distress in his voice even though his face, with its odd stillness, looked stern and impassive. “You are a very good girl. Chamathu. Please don’t cry. Everything will be all right.”

  Brinda got up and walked stiffly out of the dining room.

  “Paavum, the poor thing. Tch, tch, tch.” Venkat looked from Brinda’s retreating back to Seth. “Such good girls. Like daughters to me.”

  Seth looked at Lakshmi. Note to selves: if this was how their most judgemental friend reacted to the separation, maybe they didn’t need to fear the judgements of others.

  “Greg,” he said, waving for his son-in-law’s empty wineglass. “Refill.” As he passed the full glass back, Ranjani intercepted and took a swig. She winked at her dad across Venkat’s shiny bald head, bowed over his plate.

  Why didn’t Seth feel relieved? Oh, right: he still had to tell Lakshmi about Ashwin.

  AND MY CHRISTMAS DAY, mere blocks away from all this subtle drama? As peaceful as any I ever had.

  I had work, glorious work, oodles of it. I was planning an interdisciplinary conference at the IRDS, and considering taking over the centre’s directorship for a two-year term; on a side table was a colleague’s manuscript I’d been asked to read. And The Art of Losing, my study based on this year’s interviews, was taking shape. My new plan was to stay in Lohikarma until early March, when I would go to Vancouver to hear the verdict, which would, whatever it was, provide some sort of epilogue or capstone to my interviewees’ story. I organized my transcripts, noting patterns, exceptions, potential explanations, whatever the interviews thus far could yield, and planned for a final set of interviews to follow the verdict.

  I had bought rather a good port, the day before, and that evening, took two different Stiltons from paper wrappings, one blue-veined, the other studded with bits of fig and orange. Did I mention I had planned to call Rosslyn again, on Boxing Day evening? Wouldn’t want to interfere with her Christmas. I arranged my food into a still life with some items I kept on the coffee table, a bird-skull and some stones lustered by the steady thoughtlessness of the lake. And a book: Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being.

  My intention had been to read it aloud, but when I heard myself speak the opening lines, “Darkness and snow descend; The clock on the mantelpiece / Has nothing to recommend,” I sounded comical. “Winter completes an age …”—so true it was ridiculous. I tossed it aside and turned on the boob tube. It’s a Wonderful Life. Unironic, sentimental cheer, made available at an ironic, artificial distance. That was more like it.

  SUNDAY, THE 26TH, the Sethuratnams began the final phase of preparation for Ranjani’s bangle ceremony, her velaikappu, to take place on the 30th. She had shyly confessed to them that although she hated weddings, once she learned she was pregnant, she knew she wanted this ceremony for the baby. Thrilled, Seth and Lakshmi displaced all their thwarted wedding energy onto this event, violating tradition to include men in the celebration, broadening the circle so that it genuinely, not only symbolically, included everyone who might be part of the baby’s life. Only the women would actually perform the ritual, though: bangles were not for guys, and one should only push tradition so far.

  They had booked a lakeside community hall, owned by a church. Seth had favoured having it at the Shivashakti ashram in the centre of town, but Ranjani had said, “Sorry, Dad,” before he even finished the suggestion. He didn’t nurse the hurt for long. Friends were coming from Vancouver; Lakshmi’s brother and mother from Toronto. The morning of the 26th, Ranjani and Seth arrived in the kitchen to find Lakshmi stewing over lists assigning friends to duties and duties to friends, lists of items to buy and items to bring, lists of calls, lists of lists. As Ranjani fixed coffee, Greg descended the stairs and asked to turn on the TV.

  A tsunami had hit Asia the previous night, and now was breaking over and over, on-screen, in fragmentary amateur footage. “Where is this?” Seth kept asking, “Where is this?” as the footage switched to new-casters in front of a smoothly digital, cerulean ocean jagged by the red edges of shifting tectonic plates and cartoon-yellow seismic tremors. Two beaches in Chennai had been hit. Seth’s brother lived near one, in Adyar, where he and his wife walked daily. They couldn’t get through to him, the phone lines jammed. They didn’t know anyone living near the other, Marina Beach, although it was possible at any time that someone they knew might be there. It was a popular urban beach full of their fond holiday memories: Seth dunking his sari-wrapped younger sisters; two-rupee peeps into the freak-booths; tooth-rattling gallops on a malnourished nag; black-roasted corn rubbed with lime juice and salt.

  Late morning, an e-mail reached them from Seth’s brother, saying he and his wife had felt the tremors as they returned from their morning walk perhaps an hour before the waves hit. Their guess was that a number of the fisher-families whose huts lined the shore would have been devastated, but it increasingly appeared that no one close to t
hem had been taken.

  As soon as he had heard from his brother, Seth called Kaj Halonen, the current vice-president of the Shivashakti Centre, and turned on his computer. His browser was set for Shivashakti’s website, to which their own centre’s site was linked. There was already a message on the guru’s homepage, of consolation and guidance for the tsunami victims and those who would help them.

  “Jai Guru. We’re watching the news,” said Kaj. “Tamil Nadu. Have you talked to your family?”

  “Jai Guru. All fine.”

  “Oh, good, good, good. We can give relief money. It’s in the coffers. We’ll hold an emergency vote to release it. And the members’ll give more.”

  “I know it. But the suggestion should come from you. Indian adepts will be shy to bring it up.”

  Talking with Kaj reminded Seth that he had, in his briefcase, a video he had been meaning to watch since the start of the holidays. A colleague had left it in his box sometime during exam week, a BBC piece on Shivashakti, taped off the TV, it seemed. Seth had been surprised at the gesture; that colleague, though Indian and a recent arrival, had never acted particularly warmly toward him. Seth didn’t even know how he knew about Seth’s own interest in Shivashakti. It came with a note: Something you should see.

  There were other documentaries on Shivashakti, but produced by devotees. It was nice to see interest from the mainstream media. If they could do lives of Gandhi and Nehru, Bill Gates and the Pope, it wasn’t surprising that they would eventually want to tell Shivashakti’s story. He had suggested watching it to Brinda and Lakshmi a few nights ago but … what had happened? Brinda had brought home some Italian film, Bread and Tulips. They had enjoyed it.

  Now there would be no time until the velaikappu was done. He could watch it alone, but he wanted to watch it with his family. Even if they continued to disagree with him, it was important that they understand Shivashakti’s stature in the world.