“It might have been a better punishment for you to return to Venkat.” Seth heard himself say this, as if from another room, as though he were eavesdropping on some other branch of his multi-furcated life. He had never been so harsh and confident.
“I tried to call, one time.” Sita wiped a gleam of sweat from the cup of each eye. “After I got here. Maybe around … it was winter. November? There was no answer at home and when I called his office, they said he was on leave.”
They all waited but Seth said nothing.
Lakshmi wiped tears from her own lashes with the palms of her hands and explained, “He would have been in India then. He, he did try to kill himself.”
She didn’t touch Sita as she said this, Seth noticed. Nothing to soften this news. In this branch of his life, it appeared that Lakshmi and his daughters allied themselves with him, followed his lead. It was what he’d always wanted and yet now it discomfited him.
“By the time I stopped believing in God,” said Sita, “I had started believing life was a kind of penance, set by, maybe by the force of life itself.”
She might so easily have slipped through history’s cracks, were it not for this chance occurrence: her favourite people from her past life, practically on her doorstep.
“And how do you live here, Sita?” Lakshmi asked.
She told them about the ATM card and chequebook she carried, for an account she had established secretly when Sundar was six, when she began working outside of the home, so she could afford small things for him—swim goggles, comic books—that Venkat wouldn’t allow. At first she put in only a few dollars weekly; she was working part time and was wary of detection. But over time, her contributions grew, so that, when the disaster struck, she had enough to sustain her for months. “Especially since I wasn’t really eating and didn’t care where I slept. I just walked and kept walking, north, I suppose.”
She was unclear exactly how she came to Malcolm Island, but thought she must have landed there about the time her money ran low, when she took on seasonal work in the fish processing plant. (A fish-works must have been an advanced circle of hell for a Tamil Brahmin, with their fastidious vegetarian genetics. And it would have held a particular sting for her, looking death-by-air in the face a thousand times a day.) “When I got here, I remembered our holiday. Remember that?” They all nodded. “It was so nice, that week here, with Sundar. He enjoyed it so much. So did I.”
Her second winter here, she was working as a cashier at the co-op. One day, a local named George Sinclair struck up a conversation with her. An ex-American, the sort they had heard of, he had recently moved onto a single acre of his own. He recognized her from the fish plant. “He offered to let me garden a patch on his land. The first week that I worked on it, I walked six kilometres each way from my rented room, an hour and a half each way, with the gardening work in between. Sinclair had a truck, so he started to pick me up and drop me, but I felt I was a burden. A burden to people, a burden to the earth. That felt wrong. I must only give, now: a ghost should not take. So he asked and I moved in to his cabin.” She sounded impersonal, but looked somehow dreamy. “No shock, no shame.” She gestured at her torso. “This is not even a body to me, anymore.”
Then she seemed to awaken slightly, and told Lakshmi, “So this is how we get along. I sell my vegetables and flowers, late spring, summer, fall. Sinclair teaches yoga, does odd repairs here and there. He has kayaks and sometimes he takes tourists out. Can you come and see me there? Our home?” Her manner grew slightly frantic. “How long are you here? And how are all of you? Ranjani, with a baby,” she crooned a little, the volubility and animation seeming strange on her.
“Yes,” Seth said, trying to seize the lead. “Ranjani’s husband’s work brought us up this way again.” Ranjani’s husband. There is no truth. Everyone is 99 percent secret, he thought. What had Sita not told them? What was untellable? What was Venkat doing now?
“I went—” Seth began. It seemed important to tell her this. “—with Venkat to Ireland, to look for, to claim …” Your bodies? His bodies? “Sundar’s body was found. We identified it. Venkat took the ashes to India, to the Kaveri.”
Sita had brought a hand to her mouth, her gesture, perhaps, to greet the dead or long-gone, and her eyes looked more like her eyes than ever. “He saw him.”
“His body, yes.”
“He saw him last. And took his ashes back home, to scatter, in the Kaveri.”
Seth—boom—was blinded by another bludgeon of fury. “You could have seen him too.”
“Not with him!” she said, vehement, dismissive, clubbing him with her words, thought Seth—boom, how he disliked her, boom, what kind of woman was she?
Sita looked around at them, at a spectrum of reactions that she read or misread as misunderstanding, or understanding too well. “It wasn’t my fault alone that I wasn’t on that plane. How could I—I couldn’t have stood beside him, to collect my Sundar’s, my Sundar’s …” She made a noise, guttural, desperate; and again, the rubbing of the face. “It wasn’t only God that gave me this hell.”
“Why didn’t you call us?” Lakshmi asked then, her voice gentle, her hand extended once more.
“Back then? I’m not sure.” Another sip of water. “I didn’t want to involve you?”
“But why did you pursue us here, if that was how you felt?” Seth sounded softer but felt no softening. Why did he feel no softening?
“How could I have lived with myself if I had let you go? I don’t always understand myself too well. That holiday, here, with all of you. It might have been the best week of my life.” In a yet-softer voice, she asked Ranjani, “What is your baby called?”
“Kieran.” Ranjani pulled his blanket a little higher, cupping his head so that he couldn’t be seen. “Kieran Sundar.”
Sita made a startled, lateral movement with a small noise of pain, as though someone had slipped a knife in beneath her shoulder blade. Seth felt it, too, and felt his petty moral ire drain, burst, from his own wound. Whatever she had done or failed to do, he and Lakshmi sat before her now with their girls and their grandson. Sundar had died.
“We’re so sorry.” His tears came, finally, with grand force. “Such a wonderful boy. And you—such a good mother to him.” He went outside to cry alone.
They agreed that they would come to see her at home.
“Anytime,” Sita said. “I won’t be coming into town again for a week or so, I’ll be home preparing the beds for planting. Bring towels. We have a sauna. I’ll build a fire. There’s a beach. Ocean view. I’ll make tea.” She sounded like an only child planning a make-believe party. “We don’t have a phone, so if you want to send a message to me, just ask at the co-op if anyone is coming out our way. Sinclair, and Karma—that is what I’m called now, here.”
They talked, in the days that followed, as they walked shores of stone and shores of sand; scrutinized wall-hung weavings and photos of the dead, a new kind of family discussion, where daughters talked directly to father and anyone might take any side. No three females giggling in secret, cynical rightness; no Seth stewing in solitary silence. Most often, the women felt Sita had had the right to leave Venkat, especially after Sundar was grown. And Seth had little trouble saying he wouldn’t want to be married to Venkat. He had not chosen his mate, but if fate had chosen a Venkat for him, he might have been forced to tinker.
The women were no more convinced than Sita herself had been that she was right not to show herself after the crash. Or however that went. They got tangled in the double-negatives; language failed them. They all resented that their family had been, for twenty years—twenty years!—burdened with Venkat. But Sita had been burdened with him for twenty-five years before that. And she hadn’t chosen him or that responsibility any more than they had; in fact, they might say she had less choice—so how could they say she was remiss?
Finally, Seth asked, “What do we say to Venkat?”
“Nothing,” said Brinda, and her father nodded and sai
d, “That’s right.”
They were over the midline hump of their holiday already, and a day dawned bright for their trip to the island’s northwest flank. Ranjani opted to stay back, because of the baby—Sita had no running water and only a wood stove for heat—so the other three went, mid-afternoon. Sita had drawn them a map and it proved itself. They exited the car “in the middle of nowhere,” except for a scarf Sita had tied to mark the path. The forest scraggled out onto a narrow strip of beach, as though a curtain had been pulled back before they were quite ready, to show them the grey-green sea.
To their left was a cabin whose walls were made of fitted and mudded wood, seven feet high at one end, slanting under large tar-coated shingles to a terminal wall of five feet or so. Seventy, eighty square feet? At most. A small chimney poked out the top of the low end. It kept its hunched back to the woods, and they walked around the front to find the garden patch on its other side. The brush had been hacked back there and Sita was turning soil in full sun, the bones of her arms all jags and points under a billowing T-shirt. Her jeans were bunched at the hips. She let her shovel drop, and dusted her hands on her pants to reach toward them, face eerie, joy-animated skin over a still-frozen skull, sunlight filling some hollows so that the others seemed darker than ever. She clutched their sleeves and showed them around.
She gardened some flowers now, but mostly vegetables. Brinda asked about her one-time dream, to create a Linnean clock out of flowers that would open in sequence to show the hours. Seth had pressed her, back in the day, to propose it to the City of Lohikarma, do it in Harbord Park.
Sita twisted her lips to one side. “Vanity,” she said.
Brinda remembered that the Air India Memorial in Bantry Bay was a sundial, but didn’t ask if Sita knew about it.
The cabin, it turned out, was made of driftwood. “Logging, you know. Incredible what washes up. No need to cut any more down.” Sinclair had just left, she said, to teach a yoga class in town. That might have been his truck they passed. He would be back in a couple of hours. She had had a feeling they would come today. She had scraped out the fire pit at the edge of the beach and built within it a teepee-frame of sticks filled with brush. A blackened kettle sat on the ground, ringed by chipped enamelled-tin cups.
They peeked inside the house, whose door opened to the woods: a bunk and a bench, the width of each implying that Sinclair must be nearly as skinny as Sita, trestle table, chair for a guest, potbellied stove. Pot-hooks screwed into the walls, a two-foot shelf of dishes and books, another of dry goods. A window to the sea and an oil lamp.
“You cook here?” Lakshmi asked, trying to see the contents of the Mason jars on the dry goods shelf.
“We mostly eat raw food. One of us might make a dal from time to time. We have a root cellar for, for thayir.”
It was the first Tamil word they had heard from her, the woman who had been made to speak only English to her husband, only Tamil to her son. Thayir: the homemade yogourt they all had craved in their early years far from home. Some made poor attempts with commercial brands, but it wasn’t worth it; they lacked the taste, the spirit of home. Finally, in the seventies, someone brought—smuggled?—some culture over and it grew and spread from home to home across Canada in preciously Tupperwared tablespoons, to every Tamil Brahmin in the land. Sita had been cut off from all that.
The sauna was a more sophisticated building, with a tiny adorable antechamber and connected hot-room. “Sinclair knew better what he was doing by this point. He built the house first,” Sita said, seeming not to see anything but them, but wanting them to see it all.
She does have a life, Brinda thought, watching her. And it gives her, if not joy, then pride; if not pride, then satisfaction.
Sinclair’s latest project was a yoga studio, usable already if not complete, with a sea-view picture window to match the sauna’s. They irrigated the garden from a bore well.
“So simple,” said Lakshmi, her highest compliment.
Seth remembered then that his wife said once, in response to a question from the kids: What would you be or do if you didn’t have a family? “A monastic,” she had replied. No hesitation. She sounded almost surprised that they didn’t already know. It fit perfectly. What else, with her silent meditation and retreats? The nunnery: what she would have done in Venkat’s place. No paralytic fear for her—she had a backup plan, an imagined life in parallel.
“So you garden through the summer?” she asked Sita. “And in the winter?”
Sita wanted to please, but didn’t seem to get the question. Ah, how does she occupy her time, in the winter.
“Time,” she said, as though it were a puzzle.
It was, the family agreed later. They didn’t think enough about how to solve the question of time. They thought, as did most people, about how best to spend it.
“Time passes. I walk the shore. Winter days are short.” A strange smile shape-shifted Sita’s hollows. “I remember Sundar. I remember all he said, his feel and weight and scent”—the brown-cereal aroma of his little-boy time, the must of adolescence, the sulphury power of growing manhood—“what he liked, what he didn’t like, what hurt his feelings, all he knew, what he hid from me. I think of him, when I wake in the night, when I sit at the shore. Time passes.” She took a deep breath, salt air. “Let me get the fire started. Tea. I’ve heated the sauna, already. You must try it.”
Seth still had some hard questions to ask. “And, your boyfriend, you told him about us?”
“Yes, I told him about you.” She had a smudge of charcoal on her nose. The fire kindled.
“Does he know of your life before?”
“I told him I lost my husband and son in the disaster.”
The truth, in other words, thought Seth. Sita shrugged brightly at him as though he had spoken it aloud. “You said, about Venkat, He loved us but he never knew us. It made me wonder if my wife and daughters should leave me: I freely admit that I don’t understand them.”
She gave him a very small smile, no reassurance, no condemnation. “It’s time for a sauna. You should go first.”
He resisted. “No, ladies first.” Lakshmi was also a little reticent, so it was decided that the two of them would go for a stroll while Sita and Brinda went first.
“We will yell when we come out,” said Sita, “so that you can cover your eyes if you don’t want to see us naked when we run out for our ocean dip.”
This was distasteful to him. Their hostess: if she hadn’t known so many details of their past, their shared lives, he never would have believed her to be the same Sita, that demure paragon, excellent cook, shapely, soft, unassuming. She really had died.
And yet …
“Ocean dip?” Brinda asked Sita as he and Lakshmi walked away.
And yet: there was something familiar in his feelings for her, perhaps because of how she had changed. She had been so opaque before, treated him as a respected older relative, kept herself masked. And in any case, the wife of a relative—what did Seth need to know? But now she seemed as though, for all she had been hiding for twenty years, she had nothing to hide. She perhaps feared nothing. She positively invited the direct question! What was familiar? She reminded him more of his daughters now, and his way of relating, even perhaps his actual feelings, had obediently merged with her shift, into an affectionate sense of familial discord.
It was very strange for Brinda to undress with Sita. Women of her mother’s time and place were exceedingly if inconsistently shy about nudity. She remembered her Toronto aunt telling her once that she couldn’t stand the gym locker room because it embarrassed her to see other women naked. Yet every Indian river had women standing in its flow, their thin, wet saris hiding practically nothing.
Sita pulled off her T-shirt, dropped her jeans, picked up a towel without hiding herself in it. “Ready?” she asked. In the hot-room, Sita spread her towel untidily on a bench, scooped water onto the stones, her movements completely unselfconscious. This is not a body to me anymore, she
had told Brinda’s dad. No shock, no shame. As though she were crone or child, or, as she put it, ghost.
“So different, eh?” Lakshmi said, picking up a piece of driftwood as they neared the water.
“Huh? Oh, yes.”
“Really makes me question how we live, our values.”
No surprise for Seth there. “For her, her life seems not to have any value.”
“I’m not sure of that.”
“She said it, didn’t she?” He picked up a rock and threw it into the water. “She has nothing to live for, now that Sundar is gone.”
“I guess that’s what I’m asking: why do we have to live for something?” Now she sounded defensive, irritable. “Why can’t we simply live?”
Before, he had lived for his family. He thought Shivashakti had saved him from that. He was learning.
“Okay. You win,” he said. “But I didn’t come to Canada and live here forty years to give up flush toilets.”
She snorted and slapped his arm. They walked on.
Sita was emaciated, but still, when she sat, there were those few inches of below-the-navel shirring, the body’s graffiti: Baby Wuz Here. Ex-skinny Ranjani had it now, a muffin-top above the chic jeans. But she would get back to exercising. And then she would have it all, wouldn’t she? Envy can become a way of life. It’s why Brinda had to try to avoid her sister until she had a life of her own.
“You are not married, no babies,” Sita said.
Brinda couldn’t decide whether the steam intensified the burn in her nostrils or mitigated it, just as she had never been sure that she liked saunas. She looked down at her own smooth belly, up and out to the ocean. “Divorced.”
“Oh-oh-oh.” Sita shook her head. “I could feel it.”
“I wish I were like you,” Brinda cried then with the force of a realization. “I want so much. You’re so self-contained. If I didn’t want, I could have stayed with Dev. Or I could be happy divorced. Or if not happy, then … then whatever you are.”
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 37
