Seth stepped into the ashram’s darkness. Disappointment came at him. What? Had he thought Shivashakti would be here, waiting, the way he had when they met twenty years ago, all ready to explain?
Vertiginous, he touched the walls. At one end of the meditation hall, a photo of the guru presided. Seth’s eyes began to adjust. The room was lit by a misty glow from beyond the cheap white blinds on the windows. Windows high up, office style: natural light but no distractions. Good for meditation as well as the business of the world. Street lights refracted through falling snow dulled by dirty window panes and edited again by the blinds, but still, the resulting low haze was enough. The room was empty but for Seth and … God? The spirit of God? The likeness of the guru? He looked at Shivashakti’s picture on the shrine, but couldn’t tell whether it was becoming clearer in the low light or less so.
Should he sit, as usual? Stand, as he would for a confrontation? He approached the shrine and struck a match, as if to light the candles, but instead re-lit his joint. Out, out brief candle.
The only way Seth had ever invoked Shivashakti was by use of a mantra, given to Seth by the guru himself—he called Shivashakti by praying to Shivashakti. Seth didn’t think that was what he had come here to do.
The night is yours and the day is yours.
He felt the floor shove against his bottom, as though some aggressive host had popped his knees with a chair. So: he would sit, then.
Seated, he felt habit press him to begin prayer, but as he resisted that, he heard instead, clattering in the cavity of his frightened mind, a rising wave: clatter-clatter—time and matter—chatter-chatter—daughter–daughter—double daughter—doppelgänger—Oppenheimer—double-couple—toil and trouble—now uncouple—all undone—it was too late—Ah, Sita—Oh, Sundar—Ah—Oh—M—Om—Ommm.
The ear-ringing resolved into one sound. Om. Then dissolved again into three parts. Ah. Oh. M. The strands separated and joined. Like cloves of mangosteen, Shivashakti had said, instructing them on the universal syllable. Picture the sweet white heart, the spongy purple flesh.
Om expands and its parts join. A geodesic d-om-e. The last syllable of recorded time.
Om. Seth ached as he chanted, louder and surer now. Speak to me, Shivashakti. But no words, please, I’m sick of them.
Sick with desire … Gather me into the artifice of eternity.
Om. This, too, was a mantra, but from a time before his god. There were others, from childhood. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare. Seth would chant it on his way to school, or while playing, back when he loved Krishna. All children did. “Hurray, Krishna!” Ranjani used to say. As a child, he had perfect confidence in his gods’ distant heroism, despite their flaws. When had he lost the ability to believe like that?
A time before his god—he never even would have thought such a thing before seeing the video today. An absurd thought. There is no time before the eternal.
Om.
Did Shivashakti exist before Seth knew him or did Seth bring him to life by way of his devotion? He could think that as a scientist, but not as a devotee.
Om.
From the street, he heard shouts and the thunder of fireworks. Darkness drops again.
Midnight sun. Sun invocation.
“Om bhur bhuvah suvahah. Tat savitur varenyam. Bhargo devasya dhimahi. Diyo yo nah prachodayat …”
Oh, universe—heaven, earth, and all that rotates between and beyond.
I bow to your infinite centre, You, Sun. I bathe in your infinite rays.
I dissolve in the radiance of the all-mind.
Draw me in to your centre. Drive me out to your borders.
Not-I, all-we, and the infinite plane.
And then, He came.
Whether by the grace of the mantra, or by the way that it propelled Seth into an attitude of receptiveness, Shivashakti appeared.
Appeared might be too strong a word, but there is no weaker one that works. The god was watery and faint as one might expect an apparition to be—I am the ghost of Christmas past! Despite all the promises, and all it had achieved, Seth’s mind was no more still or controlled than it had ever been.
… I am with you and within you …
No words, Seth pleaded, peeking around the edge of his mind, which seemed determined, now that the moment had arrived, to obstruct. In fact, he realized—his third eye was adjusting now—that Shivashakti was, in this form, nothing like his form in life. Or perhaps he was initially some ghost-twin of his known and remembered form, but he was dismembering now, changing rapidly. Expanding and merging in some terrifying way with Seth and the air and the light and not-light.
Without form, was this still Shivashakti? I am not here to say I am God. I am here to prove that you are God. Tat Tvam Asi.
Seth dimly recalled his initial intention—confrontation, right? the big question: why?—but then it spun out of him and away, caught in a tornado … We’re off to see the Wiz … Then the words were gone, what a relief, all the words, disappearing faster and faster now, sucked away from him faster than they could appear, flung out steadily and with intention to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, where they continued on, and on, and on.
The divine quakes before creation, just as Seth was quaking now, just as he and Lakshmi created babies and then were terrified by their mysteries and wildness. You can only love what you cannot understand because only the fool believes he understands, so that only the wise—the bewildered—truly love. Bewilder: to lead into the wild unknown. This is what Shivashakti had done for him. Brought him to the precipice of unknowing. The wild sharp cliffs, the wide grey wilderness, the vast green sea.
NEW YEAR’S MORNING, 2005. Seth felt a rustling, under his head. He started up from what he thought must be the earth and some small creature trying to nest in his ear, but looked down at the blue carpet and then up into Kaj’s blue eyes.
“Uh, trying to put this, under, uh …” Kaj smiled a faint, hard smile and tossed the meditation cushion he was holding back against the wall from where he would have got it. He rose ponderously to his feet—bulky man—and offered Seth a hand.
Seth reached to take it, then waved it away and got to his feet on his own, shaky, the second time in twenty-four hours his legs seemed not to want to hold him, even under an unwelcome gaze of concern.
“I’m …” Kaj sighed. “Going to put a pot of coffee on. Came by to get some copies of, uh, last week’s lecture.”
“Lakshmi asked you to come?” Seth said.
Kaj held his palms up, with a delicate wave of his head. “She … she didn’t have a key. I think she’s on her way over. Let me put on some coffee, eh?”
Lakshmi must not have told him about the video. Kaj thought it was a marital issue. As well it might become. Seth noticed, on the carpet, the burnt end of the joint, flattened from his lying on it. He went to the bathroom to flush it away. When he came out, teeth brushed with a finger, hair smoothed with water, it was to the smell of coffee.
“What time is it?” Seth asked his friend.
“Wouldja look at that? Twenty to.”
Lakshmi and Brinda appeared in the stairwell. “Oh, thank God,” Lakshmi said, starting to cry.
“I’m …” Seth stood. He was what? Fine? Sorry? He was both and neither.
Kaj pointed out past them. “On my way to the soup kitchen.” He raised a hand and descended the stairs.
“Dad, listen,” said Brinda. Seth waved them into the kitchen, where Lakshmi, her eyes drying, poured coffee. “I know the opening to the video was pretty sensationalistic, but the rest of it is, well, not that you’ll feel great about it, but …” She looked at her mother. “I don’t think it implies Shivashakti is evil. Misguided, maybe, or, well, I don’t know. Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have done some pretty strange things, also, apart from all the great things. I don’t know if those aspects can necessarily be separated, in charismatic people. Maybe in anyone. I’m not sure it takes away from Gandhi’s accomplishments, and maybe you’ll feel the sam
e about Shivashakti. You know how I feel about him, so believe me when I say this! You should make up your own mind.” She looked around. “Feels weird to be talking about this here.”
Seth wanted to get out of the ashram, but didn’t feel quite ready to respond to Brinda. “Why don’t we all go volunteer at the soup kitchen?” This felt right: something they liked to do together.
““I can take your place,” Brinda said. “Don’t you and Mom …?”
Seth looked at Lakshmi, who narrowed her eyes a tiny bit and shook her head. “Let’s talk later.” She sighed, quick and hard. “I was worried sick.”
Seth pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am sorry. I, I meant to call.”
“Mom and I are going to horn in on your brandy at Dr. Aidallberry’s.” Brinda said. “You’re not the only one who needs a drink.”
Seth, smiling, descended the stairs with a hand on each of their napes.
“Jai Shivashakti,” the others all said to Seth and his family when they got to the soup kitchen.
“Jai …” he tried. He mumbled, he faltered. Did they notice? “Jai Guru,” he eventually responded. Glory to the teacher. Which?
Physical work, familiar activity—the comforts of routine. As Seth served, Seth recalled Brinda’s objection to his serving his god by serving these people. What had he said? They get fed, they don’t care.
Namaskaram, he thought now. Lakshmi had dragged him to a yoga class one time, where the teacher had translated this into English, the greeting that looks like a prayer. Palms together, at the heart: I salute the divine in you. He never would have thought to put it in words, this idea, but she wasn’t wrong. Still, he never went back.
He thought it as he ladled out minestrone. If Seth loved his kids, he loved God in his kids. He loved God in his wife. He repeated it for each scoop of soup—namaskaram—his head throbbing lightly so that he was aware of the beat of his heart—namaskaram—as he sifted vaguely and painfully through splintered recollections of the long night before.
BRINDA STAYED IN LOHIKARMA some two or three weeks longer. I saw her several times, and when she left, made her promise this time to stay in touch.
Seth made himself harder to see. I called him, but the dull chill in his voice froze out even something so simple as Could we meet, a coffee?
I persisted. We met. I did my best to explain.
He listened, his eyebrows slightly furrowed and, significantly, motionless. His tone was unencouraging when he said, “Lakshmi seemed to think it was a good thing that Brinda talked to you.” Another of his women had allied with me—how they pulled the rugs out from under him! It must have enraged him, not that it would have gone any better for me had she taken his side.
I was oddly reconciled to our estrangement, though. He was displacing his anger and anxiety about Brinda’s divorce onto me. Okay. He needed to do that. And my guess was that, as those feelings ebbed, he might come to agree with his wife. My initial frantic fears and self-recrimination—I had, as always, paved the way for my own loss—had also ebbed, enabling me to see this was likely a temporary loss, the kind normal people dealt with, in normal life, where one has friends and lovers and differs with them and reconciles, where life goes on.
Writing it was helping. I cautiously let myself see some coherence in the story I had begun composing. The longest-ago sections were most digested; I must have thought about all that much more in the intervening time than I had realized. The Lohikarma sections drew on the narratives I had been writing for The Art of Losing, but inserting myself helped me to understand them better. Narrative Therapy. Physician, heal thyself.
It also helped that Rosslyn and I had continued to speak, every week or so at first, and then with increasing frequency, until we were on the phone several nights a week, for hours on end.
When was it that she said she would come to Vancouver, to meet me?
“My sister lives there now, and—you said the verdict is going to be announced March 16?”
“That’s right,” I said, shivering with old fears, old hopes, the anticipatory delight of old habits.
“Spring break. Griffin’s going on a class trip to Russia.”
“Russia!”
“I know.” She laughed. “I’m going to be so anxious. It will be good for me to go away too. Otherwise, when you come through Ottawa in May, you’re on your way back to India, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I don’t want that to be the first time we meet. I’ll see you in Vancouver.”
“That would be so … yes, I would love that.” But I had to specify. “Just don’t—you don’t mean you’ll come to hear the verdict, do you?”
A long pause. “Yes, that was what I meant.” Icy. “You don’t want me to come?”
“I very much, very much want you to come. But not that day.” Oh, Rosslyn. How to explain? “Give me … a few days’ grace.”
As I fished around in my inchoate resistance, you spoke. “Grace,” you repeated. “I always thought that part of what justified your leaving me, in your mind, was that I couldn’t properly understand what you had been through.”
“That may be true.”
“I didn’t think you fully understood it either, though.”
I concurred.
“So—write it.” You actually said it, just as I had imagined you saying it. “Your story. And then let me read it. Maybe I’ll be slightly more convinced that the same thing won’t happen again.”
“I am!” I shouted. “I have been writing it, for weeks already.” I had thought I was writing it for myself, but I am not my ideal reader. You are, Rosslyn. You are. “I will give it to you,” I said. “It cannot be finished, until the verdict. There is so much, not just the story of back then, but of this year—so much you need to know.”
“I do.”
You weren’t done. Much as my father had told me to include the complex of prior causes in The Art of Losing, you further advised me to frame it with my own loss, to preface it by saying that while it is an analytic study of how twelve families came through the disaster, I didn’t come to it strictly as a psychologist. You also told me to make an accounting of my omission to the families, in the course of my final interviews.
You were right. I did.
And so—forward. Into the final chapters, in which Seth does, as I foretold, forgive me, though it does not happen in the way I expected. He and his family held and healed my heart and so, unknowingly, bore it back to you, dear reader. Dearest Rosslyn.
Ready to write the book? Just about.
SPRING 2005
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
—ELIZABETH BISHOP
March 16, verdict day.
MY BRAIN SKITTERED ALL THAT MORNING, causing me to make coffee I forgot to drink, shave the same patch three times, until blood-drops bloomed like a field of poppies. I was filled with sick anxiety simply in anticipation of the verdict, but also, Seth had called me that morning, the first time he had initiated contact since our falling-out.
“Ashwin,” he said, “we’ll see you at the courthouse today?”
My heart hummed. Spring: the frost had melted! I could hear it in his voice. I was welcome in his life again.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Look for us?”
Sometimes relief and the state one wants relief from feel approximately the same. Which is how I expected the verdict to go as well.
There is a courtyard that, appropriately, runs alongside the courthouse. I arrived nearly an hour before the verdict, sat on the stone benches, watched the plants suffocating in the urban air, unable, at first, to go in. Should I have let you come, Rosslyn? But my pitch of anxiety—particularly since it was, to my way of thinking, so unjustifiable—made me testy. I would have been resistant to touch, unwilling to talk. We might have fought. That would have been agonizing. I wanted you there, but it
was better that I had resisted.
I felt your presence, though. Was that wrong—preferring the luminous clarity of a general idea to your flesh-and-blood challenges? No: we would meet, in real life, in a few days. So I let myself invoke you: the joking voice, a gesture I loved, a concentration of something fresh, almost unbearably alive, warm and cool and citron-scented, there among the hard stones and blurring trees. You see? Even though I could not let you come, you helped, as you knew you would.
Inside, I pushed through a crowd to find Seth, with Lakshmi at his side. He reached to shake my hand; I steadied both of mine by clasping his.
Lakshmi gave me her usual brief acknowledgement, then shushed Seth, who had grasped my elbow and pulled me close in the bustle. “There is someone else you must speak to,” he began, with an urgent air, but Lakshmi tugged his sport coat sleeve decisively and frowned.
“Later.”
He made a questioning gesture at her with a hand—what?—as we heard a shout. Some man, pushing through the crowd, was yelling. “Go back home to the Dark Age! We don’t want your problems in Canada.” Venkat and Bala found us just then, but we were too humiliated for eye contact. The crowd moved, and we were swept inside.
It is hard to remember the only thing worth remembering: the difference, if any, between before and after the verdict. Not guilty. Unlike most others, I was not devastated. I was hardly even disappointed. Who Are the Guilty? Only they and their Maker know.
The bombers were not forced to admit personal responsibility. Okay. They could never, to my way of thinking, be so guilty as an elected government perpetrating violence and death on its own people. Whatever terrorists claim, they never represent the will of a majority. Popular governments, by contrast, are supposed to. Those five or ten Khalistani fools who engineered the bomb plot: they killed some hundreds of people, and I’m willing to wager no more than that many people cheered their actions. Perhaps the same is true in the cases of the Vancouver anti-Asian demonstrations, the Brits’ anti-Independence brutality, the Delhi pogroms, the Godhra massacre. But that’s not how it looks. All those originated in the centres of power, not the margins, which is why I was moved to anatomize them, while those turbaned sadsacks on the dock in Vancouver moved me little, if at all.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 35
