Were they illusions? He was revising his lectures for the spring and finding himself particularly interested in the ones on time and perception. He considered now whether to insert something about the physics of memory and imagination, how it is that a smell or taste can transport us to a different time, so that we are living simultaneously in our imagined past and in a present that is what we call reality.
Images of Shivashakti appeared on the television screen as the narration commenced, a woman speaking in a nasal South London accent. “Man and woman, God and human, Shivashakti is a religious leader with power that many think will someday rival the Pope’s.” Seth indicated the screen with his eyebrows, but his wife and daughter looked unimpressed, if carefully neutral. “Born into poverty in rural India, Shivashakti has long since transformed the village of his birth into a bustling town, eventually renamed Shivashaktipurum, with a clinic, schools, and a large ashram where his followers live and worship. All were built on donations from this guru’s devotees. It is rumoured that he is in the top ten Indian charitable organizations for receipt of foreign funds. But the rumours don’t stop there. In the wake of an attempted suicide by a teenage follower, stories have begun circulating that, for years, Shivashakti has habitually forced young devotees to participate in clandestine sexual activities.”
Seth’s ears began to ring. He is God. In temples back home, in the moment when the priest did the arathi, circling the god’s features with a lamp of burning camphor, another priest would ring a bell as worshippers bowed to the deity. The space would empty of all sound save the ringing, in the silence of worship. Was Shivashakti ringing a bell now to drown out the documentary’s harangue, to create a corridor through which Seth could return to him? Tat Tvam Asi. That thou art. His wife and daughter appeared frozen, either genuinely attentive to the TV or permitting him to nurse his humiliation in private. On Seth’s plate, sticky okra seeds glistened as if with thwarted sexual will; flecks of spices corroded slickly congealed peaks of rice. He stared at the TV, willing his God, Shivashakti, who had sustained him all these years, to give him darshan. My lord. Look at me. I am here.
It seemed an eternity before Shivashakti looked out at the viewers. It was old footage—the guru twenty years younger, the age he was when Seth first went to the ashram—but still, his glance appeared to Seth not to be the blessing gaze of divine upliftment that he knew so well. It was now the hollow look of a hunted man.
Whatever the accusations, true or untrue, they changed nothing. Shivashakti’s wisdom, which was your own. His strength, which was your own. The good he brought into the lives of his followers.
He couldn’t look at his wife and daughter. They were saying nothing, but their thoughts—“We knew it! We knew it all along!”—radiated toward him like a stink. They knew nothing. Which used to be fine. Now they would never know.
He rose. “I need to go out.”
Lakshmi asked, “Where? You don’t want to see the rest?”
Not with you, he wanted to say. “No.”
“Do you want us to stop it?”
“As you like,” he said. “The office, I’m going to work.”
Lakshmi looked at Brinda, who asked her father, “Do you want me to drive you?”
He shook his head and was gone.
“What do you think?” Lakshmi asked. Her lower lip was always chapped in winter and she chewed on it now.
“I guess it’s probably fine,” Brinda said slowly. “Let him go. I feel bad for him.”
“Yes. Poor thing. Do you want to keep watching? I don’t know if I need to.”
“No, let’s finish, maybe … all we’ve learned about are the accusations. Let’s find out what actually happened and then we can tell Dad if he wants to know.”
Lakshmi restarted the video. The BBC had found three people, two men and one woman, who testified that as young people living in or around the ashram, they had been brought to their guru for a semi-private audience. Together with the one or two other young people present, they had been encouraged, by Shivashakti, to engage in sexual touching. Some eventually had intercourse, also in the presence of the guru. Condoms were provided, and instruction given—hands-on, if necessary—in how to use them. On camera, their faces obscured and voices distorted for the tape, all of the young people denied that they had had sex with the guru, but they agreed that he was present and watching at all times. When they were asked whether he touched himself or otherwise showed arousal as he was watching them, one mumbled in the affirmative, one emphatically denied it, and one said he couldn’t say. When asked why they didn’t refuse, none of them responded. When asked if they enjoyed it or felt humiliated, one man broke down in tears. The other man said he did enjoy it, but that the girl he was with seemed reluctant and shy, and he felt sorry for her, which spoiled his enjoyment somewhat. Another time, though, he was with a boy and a girl, and he didn’t enjoy that as much. Brinda had to keep reminding herself that their voices were deliberately altered; the effect was to make them sound deaf or otherwise disabled.
The third interviewee, a woman, said she enjoyed it very much and was grateful to her guru for having introduced her to sex, for making her understand that the act was sacred in and of itself. When she was married, she said, she would have much more to offer her husband. But she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, because that would jeopardize her chances at marriage. Once, he had invited her into his chambers alone and encouraged her to touch herself. “He taught me the pleasure of my body,” she said.
“Is that what you believe he meant to do?” asked the interviewer.
Brinda said, “That’s not a fair question.”
The woman paused. “I don’t know.”
“Bizarre, bizarre.” Brinda put both hands on her head. “What was he doing?”
The interviews were interspersed with others asking the same question.
“First of all, it is not true,” said a smiling young man the documentary identified as an Official Spokesperson for the guru. Despite contradicting the BBC’s suppositions, he wagged his head in the Indian affirmative, as though to pacify the detractors. “And then, whatever Shivashakti does, it is for the good. It cannot be for the bad, even when we cannot see the good result.”
“So why do you think he did it?” asked the unseen interviewer.
“He just said he didn’t do it,” Brinda muttered.
“Am I God?” the Spokesperson responded, smiling still more broadly, leaning in a little toward the camera, teasing. “I cannot know what is in the mind of God.” He threw his hands up, lightly. “Maybe he wants us to question.”
Brinda wanted to resent his smugness, but there was something so enviable about his certainty in the midst of chaos—she wished she could feel it too.
“Sure, it could be true,” said another devotee, an American in a raw silk blazer, the head of a well-known pop-music recording label. His jaw jutted pugilistically, and Brinda recalled that he had had some scandals of his own. “It doesn’t matter to me. This man turned my life around. I would be wandering in the darkness right now if it weren’t for Shivashakti.” Brinda and Ranjani used to joke that Westerners’ pronunciation put the “shock” in “shakti.” It made their dad laugh. Never again. “He might have done it, whatever you say he did. I don’t know and it doesn’t make any difference.” He brushed thinning hair out of his eyes. “I know myself because of him.”
Over footage of Shivashaktipurum—clean, broad boulevards lined with airy-looking concrete buildings; young people doing exercises in formation in the schoolyard, kitted out in uniforms of the hand-loomed red cloth traditional to that area; devotees at work in the ashram kitchens and at prayer in the ashram galleries—the narrator spoke of two young people, called to one of these unconventional sessions, who had gone on to marry, overcoming their parents’ objections by telling them that their guru had, effectively, married them already.
Every commentator the BBC spoke to had a wildly different interpretation of the swami’s ac
tions. A Western academic who wrote about contemporary Indian religious movements suggested that he might have been trying to encourage Indian young people in greater sexual freedom. “He may have felt he couldn’t do so openly without alienating Indian parents. Why he had to watch them, though …” She looked uncomfortable. “Maybe to make sure they did what he said?”
An Indian activist with a salt-and-pepper beard who called himself a “guru-buster” dispassionately offered alternatives. “It could be that he is sexually perverted. An old story: the guru uses power to get sex. But it could also be that he is using it to get more power. He is a worm in the heart and mind.” He looked as though he had saddened himself. “He is not a soul-healer. He is a soul-stealer.”
The father of the boy who had attempted suicide bared his teeth at the camera as it caught him mid-accusation. “Western money has corruped this so-called godman, to turn our Indian boys into homosexuals and make our country weak.” The camera lingered on his face for a few seconds after he finished speaking, bewilderment between his brows, disgust in the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.
Brinda knew that expression: she had seen it on Venkat. It was the face of a man who had lost a son to a nebulous evil, one that wasn’t targeting his son specifically, just people like his son, anyone who happened, like a minnow, to drift into its net.
There were many routes Seth could take to his office, none long, though some were longer than others. In his first years of teaching, he had always taken the quickest way, since he was always short of time and since he hadn’t yet developed the subtle, binding affection that he now felt for the place. He had not chosen Lohikarma any more than he had chosen where he would be born or to whom. That inevitability was, for him, the start of love. He hadn’t chosen whom he would marry or what nature of kids they would have: male or female, tall or short, peaceful or agitated or furious. People and places came to you and you came to love them.
He drove, the houses he passed as familiar as the words of a mantra. In past crises, the Air India bomb of twenty years ago, the Brinda bomb of two weeks ago, he had turned to God. How would he get through this one?
The corner houses on their street teetered in his peripheral vision as he got his bearings and chose which way to turn. The blue ranch house on the south was strung with an exuberance of lights in uneven patterns. The house on the northern corner was beige and sedate. Professor and Mrs. Aidallbery: a menorah in their picture window. Seth wondered, when he and Jake toasted the New Year with their annual brandy tomorrow afternoon, whether he would be able to confess his sadness, or would hide it.
He turned north, toward the lake, toward the house of an art collector, specializing in west coast tribes. They had known him as Pasha Essad Bey, until he was unmasked as a Nazi war criminal and deported. That had been a shock: did the Pasha collect marvels of native art as a recompense for his past evils, or did he acquire the artifacts while denying their makers’ humanity? It didn’t matter now. Seth slowed to get a glimpse of his favourite among the more than forty totem poles on the lawns. It was Salish, topped with an enormous eagle, wings outspread, painted in rich red, yellow, green and black. Though the palette was different, it reminded him of the Dravidian deities that guarded the temples of his childhood, with their wide-open eyes and snarling mouths.
He had always thought, semi-jestingly, of his peek through the shrubbery as a darshan-on-the-go, like those they would take at roadside shrines back home: bending and peering to get a glimpse of the god within and reciprocally receive the god’s blessing glance. Today, though, when he made eye contact with the eagle, he recalled one of the many proofs of Shivashakti’s divinity, his unblinking gaze, and an unexpected curtain of tears cut him off from the great bird’s sight.
He turned his attention to the road, breathing hard through his nose, slowing at the corner by a house with a storefront on the ground floor. He used to take the children here to buy Mojo candies and Double Bubble gum, and Number 7 cigarettes for himself. It was run by a Chinese family, the man about Seth’s age. His father, who sat in the back, had worked in the mines. His father had worked on the railroad. The daughter had graduated with Brinda.
Turning right, he gained a magnificent view of the mountains before his car started down a precipitous decline toward the centre of town.
The video said that a few people had been calling for the allegations to be investigated, but the police seemed not to be responding. A police spokesperson said that there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing and no evidence of criminality. When asked whether Shivashakti would be investigated, the officer said, “We must protect the rights of all our people, madam.”
“Which means …?” Brinda asked the set, but no one answered.
The BBC speculated that given the number of high-ranking politicians who had visited the ashram, there would be no pressure from any official direction for the guru to explain his actions.
“And devotees have closed ranks, saying, effectively, that God works in mysterious ways,” the narrator concluded.
“No kidding,” Brinda said, as the credits rolled. She thought of Sundar, who had spent a summer doing sewa in Shivashaktipurum. Was Shivashakti doing this sort of thing back then?
“Disgusting,” Lakshmi said, getting up and gathering plates. “Those poor kids.”
Brinda’s hadn’t felt quite so ready to judge. “So you believe it?”
Lakshmi hesitated. “It never surprises me when one of these gurus is unmasked.”
“What do you think Dad thinks?” Brinda followed her mother to the kitchen to get her own lunch.
“He couldn’t have seen or heard anything like this before, or he never would have continued on as a devotee. I imagine he doesn’t know what to think.” Lakshmi finished washing her hands, dried them on a tea towel. “I’ll phone him or go by his office in a little while. Let’s give him some space.”
Seth drove through downtown and arrived at the Phys-Chem building, but arced through the empty parking lot and out again without slowing down, turning the car back toward the town centre. He had been at home in India, and now he was at home here. There had been a limbo: After college, he taught school for a year, in India but far from home. Then Indiana, which had hit him hard, but he had made friends and even dated a couple of girls. One was a physics office secretary who went on a date with every foreign grad student in the department. The other was an undergraduate, Anna Gradeless, a farm girl. He hadn’t thought of her in years! The longer he spent with her, the more fraternal his feelings became—something anti-erotic in getting to know a girl before marriage.
He aimed west of High Street, toward one of the mixed commercial blocks that rimmed the downtown. It happened to be the street with the old Hudson’s Bay Co. building, now the soup kitchen where he volunteered on Saturdays—tomorrow.
The other devotees. Did they know? The video had been broadcast some months ago, in the U.K. How could he not have heard about its awful accusations? But there were always detractors, naysayers. Such as those in his own family. If Seth sensed the criticism coming, he turned off, tuned out, as they used to say. Why would none of the other devotees have told him? He would have listened if it had come from Nick or Kaj. Kaj would have said something. He must not have heard either.
He drove the dragging belly of the old town. In front of The Minter’s Arms, he saw a hepatitis sufferer he knew from the soup kitchen, bloated and alone, either waiting for the bar to open or not permitted to enter. Seth hoped it was the latter. What time did the bars open? He would have liked a drink himself except that it would mean stopping the car. His native buddy from the soup kitchen, the one with the cloven face, was across the street, his arm around a woman. All his years in Canada and, with a couple of exceptions on Harbord U committees, the only Natives he had met were on the other side of the Sterno divide.
Ah, no, wait. A memory undimmed. He turned east, toward it, toward their second apartment, the one they had moved to when Lakshmi was pregnant. T
hey lived on the ground floor, a two-bedroom flat. At the very top was a tiny attic suite inhabited by a quiet girl with long brown hair and glasses, in nursing school. Francine. She spoke another language—Kutenai? Why was Seth remembering such trivia now? He drove past the house, which had been dilapidated when they lived there, split up, propped up, carpeted. Now its gingerbread was repaired and repainted in stately plum and beige, of a piece with all the other historic homes reclaimed from the students and itinerant workers, fancy landscaping burying the stories of their recent past.
Had Francine been in the residential schools? He hadn’t given her a thought when all the news was breaking on these generations-old traumas, dating to when government officials seized children from their homes, putting them in the care of lecherous priests who beat them for speaking their mother tongues. Francine spoke English with a lilting accent, when she spoke at all.
Seth’s only experience of Catholic priests was at St. Joseph’s. Horrors must have happened, there as elsewhere, at some point, he was forced to admit. But systematically? Surely he would have known. Had Father O’Sullivan, beloved of all, heard of such things? How could he not? Seth tasted something bitter on his lips, but couldn’t feel his mouth. He couldn’t feel his fingertips, either, though it wasn’t that cold. He turned the heat up and spiralled, north again, toward their first apartment.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal …
Seth remembered Venkat’s long-ago warning, in the wake of his suicide attempt: Attachment is pain, he had said. Perhaps Shivashakti had orchestrated this: given Seth his mantra; cultivated his love; put him in the midst of a crisis so he could save himself with prayer and then, when Seth’s attachment and gratitude were at their heights, look him in the eye and show him his folly. Was it folly? He was not sure. Speak to me, Lord!
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 32
