The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (11 page)

Earlier this year, back in Delhi, Vijaya, my upstairs neighbour, the widow, had begun inviting me to meals. Somehow she learned about my Sunday routine and somehow I invited her to join me. She was an MA in literature, after all, teaching at the college level. Perhaps she had seen me leaving one Sunday or another for Chandni Chowk, Oxford Books, Bahrisons? I sometimes thought she conspired casually to run into me in our stairwell—evidence not of my allure, but rather of her desperation.

So one morning we went to look at books together. I was
sweating lightly and already regretting it. So self-conscious! We had no idea how to behave. There is no template, back home, for middle-aged dating. Others out and about were mostly younger, students, bachelor profs. Occasionally a middle-aged couple, but terrifyingly chic; women with short hair, men with long. It was Sunday: anyone who looked like us was at home, the men lounging on divans, the women cooking.

Vijaya chose a Jane Austen reissue, one of the few, she said, that she hadn’t read. I hate Austen. Artificial, sentimental claptrap. I chose Bruce Chatwin’s
On the Black Hill
. She peered politely at the blurbs.

Impossible to think of going to a coffeehouse, sitting among shouting, pretentious would-be poets. It would have compounded the awkwardness unbearably. As I hesitated, she invited me home for lunch. We entered her flat and followed the script: I lounged on the divan with Chatwin while she cooked. Her children telephoned: chatter-chatter-chatter. She switched on the television or radio, the blare of Bollywood. We ate and made small talk in Telegu. A hot midday meal induces a siesta, so I made my farewells. It was late afternoon by the time I woke. I never finished the book. I doubt she even opened hers. What piercing solitude. I recalled it now, here in the Big Bean Café. I was alone with my book and my meal, but it was that day with my widow that I felt in full my loneliness. How the other half lives, the variety, the social engagement: would this have been my life if I had succeeded in having a family? How would I have coped up with all that?

The breakfast burrito was passable, despite hard-core vegetarian ingredients requiring long mastication. The coffee was better than expected. And the book was excellent—Highly Recommended for All Collections. Indelible characters, and a view on a corner of Canadian history. I wondered if Seth or Brinda had read it. I was feeling very warm toward Canadians just now.

I remembered, randomly, as always, my parking-garage cat. Would Vijaya give it some yogourt rice to keep it going?

It probably had run away or been struck by a car.

At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, the longest day of the year (sun-up at 4:42! Rise aaand shine!), I was walking from one greystone building to the next in Harbord’s lush quad, looking for Sonnet Hall, where, funnily, the department of math and statistics did its thing. Professor Venkataraman’s office was on the second floor. He seemed to be on the same teaching schedule as his friend Seth, and had asked me to come immediately after his class.

His door remained closed to my knock, so I sat on one of several smallish wooden chairs in the hall. They were scattered, like hard, uncomfortable throw pillows, for use by anyone waiting for tardy profs. Several were decorated with angry words, deeply inscribed. I waited nearly an hour, but refrained from deepening any of the inscriptions. I called his office number and listened to it ring; I called his home number and left a message saying I would try again the next day at the same time, and could he please confirm?

He didn’t, but I returned the next day in any case and waited fifteen or twenty minutes before giving up once more. As I pushed the elevator button (going down stairs is often harder on knees than going up) a man of about my age emerged from the stairwell. He was unlocking his door as I caught him.

“Professor Venkataraman?” He looked at me blankly. “Ashwin Rao. I’m conducting the, er, doing the study. I sent a letter and we spoke by phone last week …” His face seemed to harden but he nodded.

I followed him into his office, breathing his trailing scent: dusty, ammoniac, faint but distinct, perhaps intensified by raised body temperature because he had walked up the stairs. I couldn’t identify it and wondered if it might be a drug I didn’t know. Anti-anxiety medications alter body chemistry in specific ways, common enough that I often can distinguish them. The skin of his face and hands was flaccid, as if from sudden weight loss.

He pulled a visitor’s chair out from his desk and gestured me into
it, then sat on a sagging sofa, as though we were therapist and client. I reminded myself that this was something else.

“Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?”

There was an odd immobility to his face, not severe but noticeable. It wasn’t the slackness of stroke, but rather a rigidity that could almost have been conscious or, if not, then otherwise psychological in its origins. He also had a noticeable facial discolouration, not uncommon in Indians with a particular type of skin, which gave a bluish shading to his features. He was quite bald on top, the fringe behind his ears neatly combed. His pants and shirt were of the sort not to wrinkle, but he was not dressed with care.

I gave him the same answer I had given Seth. He asked where I was based, my academic history. I had the clear sensation that I was being ranked.

“So you are interested in what?” he said, at last. “How I have got on since the bombing, is it? The trial has stirred up all the old emotions. Now we are waiting, again, for it all to be over.”

I nodded and waited. A victim’s father had been quoted in the papers, on the trial, saying, “It is like somebody putting a needle in a wound that has formed a crust. It was probably bleeding on the inside, but you couldn’t see it. Now it is bleeding on the outside.” Freud felt this himself, when his own child died, “a deep, narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed.”

Venkat cocked his head coldly. “You want to ask some questions?”

I sniffed and swallowed, and rubbed my nose, which was itching. “We can start wherever you like. People often want to talk first about the early days, when you found out about the bomb. I would like to know that, as a sort of baseline. And more about your family.”

“
Accha
, is that so? And how will this help,
who
will this help? I didn’t want to do this, you understand.” He gestured in my direction, as if toward something unpleasant. “Sethu’s idea.” He sighed. “He and Lakshmi are good people. But how, what is the model for this research? Someone will publish this? You travel around and ask questions of anyone who will answer? Journalism, then? Maybe made for TV?”

Despair filled me, a chilly blue liquid, seeping in from the ground. My feet grew cold, my fingers numb.

Why are you dredging all this up?

“I hadn’t realized Dr. Sethuratnam had put you up to this. Please. You don’t have to.” But if he didn’t talk with me, I would have no reason to meet Seth again, and all the unfamiliar, perhaps groundless optimism of the last couple of days would be snatched away.

“No,” he barked. “That would not be right. Let us talk.”

I stayed more than two hours. Don’t think this means things got more pleasant. It was simply that once he started, he did not stop.

On my way back to my apartment, I bought two mickeys of Canadian whisky. For after I finished my notes. My steno pad, in my shirt pocket, thwapped my heart in time with my steps.

The composition notebook marked “Venkataraman” was on my dining-table-desk. I made a sandwich, then found the first blank page after my notes on Seth. I pulled a fresh pen from the package and my steno pad from my pocket, and began to write.

Dr. Venkataraman’s monologue (monolong?) had often seemed virtually incoherent, but I did my best to record it the way he had told it, to try to follow the lines of his thought. He began with the accused, those in the dock and the ones who seemed to have gotten away. He ranted about governmental incompetence. Air India had been threatened, don’t forget. Planes were going to be bombed, that’s what they said, payback for decades of atrocities. Air India let the Canadian Aviation Security folks know, but, as happens, the white people thought the brown people were merely asking for a handout. Extra security? Make ’em pay for it. Next! Same with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service—insecurity and stupidity service was more like it! And whatever information they could get, they refused to share with the RCMP, who were working blind, not that they would admit it! He told me in nauseating detail, much of it redundant to me—we had read the same
sources—how the bomb was made, how it was planted, right under the noses of everyone whose job it was to prevent such things. The RCMP made him fill out forms, then lost them. The Canadians didn’t bother sending anyone to Ireland to help with logistics—that fell to an Indian diplomat and the Irish themselves. Over and through he cycled—details, details, details—hardly mentioning his wife or child or how he lived his wreck of a life. I was unable to interrupt, to guide him or ask questions.

Transcription took six hours. I permitted myself coffee at the three-hour mark, while my whisky stood like a Buckingham Palace guard beside the hot plate.

Ann Finkbeiner said that the parents she interviewed had found “subtle and often unconscious ways of preserving the bond” with their children. I had begun to see this in many of my interviewees’ stories. It sometimes took hours of talking for the subject to reveal the ways they had found, and I often didn’t recognize these until I transcribed the interview, even if it seemed obvious in retrospect. My brother-in-law, Suresh, had gravitated to hospice work, comforting other grieving parents and departing kids. Another man I talked to had given up his career as a research scientist to found a charity in India, its various branches named for his late wife and children, providing schooling and medical care for needy kids there. The dancer I had seen at the trial last year famously emerged from several years of debilitating grief to found what has become the premier academy of Indian classical dance in Canada. Eventually, she created and performed a choreography inspired by her horrendous losses.

I couldn’t tell, with Venkataraman, how, if at all, he had “changed his life to preserve the bond.” He was the only person I interviewed who hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Finkbeiner, like me, interviewed volunteers only. Perhaps people who found a way to “preserve the bond” were more willing to talk about the course of their lives following bereavement? Would Venkat be the exception that proved the rule, the one who had felt his family float away, leaving him grasping at ether?

Shortly after nine, I finished. Full stop. I creaked my back upright and tried to straighten my neck. I massaged my right hand with my left, then sat on it to undo the kinks. The goiter-like callus on my bird-finger’s first knuckle was throbbing. The sky was starting to pink.

It had been good to discharge him onto the page, but the feel of him lingered in me—his quaking inadequacy in the face of the disaster; his loneliness, for how could someone like him find anyone else to be with? I had let his emptiness pass through mine onto the page but still it blew about in me, its cold surfaces shifting and tumbling freely.

I should have boiled up some rice and dal and delivered myself early to bed with some poetry to read upon the pillow. I was carrying a leafing-apart copy of Robert Hass’s
Praise
, left by some tourist at a Delhi bookstall, just as I would leave it here for some other tourist, or maybe even the same one, on the same circuit as I, some invisible doppelgänger I was unwittingly trailing around the world, and who was trailing me …

Instead, I cracked open the whisky. An aluminium cap, perforations tearing as you twist, perhaps not as satisfying as magazine-subscription-card-tearing, or bubble-wrap-popping (this latter delight has come lately to India thanks to online booksellers), but quite good in its own special way, the brief cracking of something made to be torn.

It was 22
^nd
June, the eve of the anniversary. All over Canada, we were in our rooms, alone or with others, readying ourselves for the onslaught of memory. I took up a small tumbler. I poured a shot.
Shhh. Ahhh. T
.