The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (15 page)

Incense had burned already to the stub and its faint remnants were being overtaken by smells from the kitchen: basmati rice, mustard seed, cumin and coriander. I don’t cook, but the nose knows.

Seth brought his wife over and we made our introductions, palms together. The devotees’ strident singing made conversation with them impossible—a relief I appreciated even as I forcibly lowered my hackles at the God-glorifying. Venkat had already slid onto the floor to join in and Seth did likewise, while Lakshmi gestured that I should follow her.

Seth’s cologne and Lakshmi’s perfume curled away from each other against what I recognized as a whiff of recent sex. Seth, you devil! She wore a white sari with a tangle of flowers along the hem. Some fluttery fabric—not silk. Kritika would have known what it was called.

In the kitchen, Lakshmi gave me a glass of savoury lassi.

“So you met with my husband and daughter this week?” Her tone put me on my guard.

“I did,” I answered. The lassi was lemony and cool, made from homemade yogourt, just the thing after a hilly walk under the still-high sun.

“Collecting our stories.” There was something girlish in the way she looked down at her hands, spread on the counter, but nothing timid in her tone, which had an edge. Skepticism? She looked up again.

“I am …” I wanted to add something but not to give her anything more to react to until I knew where she stood. And in this pause, each gazing at the other, locked in mutual expectancy, I was further disconcerted by the
realization that Lakshmi was beautiful. And in that moment she, too, either felt some current between us or realized that I had noticed her. She looked away.

I plunged ahead, foolhardy perhaps. “Would you like to meet with me?”

She narrowed her eyes a little; her lips tightened. “I’m not sure I will have much to add.”

“Does it bother you that Seth and Brinda have been talking to me?”

She raised her chin slightly. She was in her late fifties, with some lines around her eyes to prove this, and perhaps a softening of the skin around a high forehead and pronounced cheekbones. Full lips, curving nostrils: classical Dravidian features. Large eyes, in a defiant mood. She was curvaceous, a woman who had borne children, but with a self-containment, something like pride, evident in her figure. I suppose there was nothing inappropriate in my noticing her attractiveness, though the force of this noticing was unusual, at least for me. I have never been a great pursuer of women.

“I’m so sorry if you feel I have imposed …” I really was.

My apology softened her, or perhaps she felt sorry for me.

She waved a hand as if to restart. “It’s simply that I am not comfortable talking to anyone outside the family about our private matters.”

“You understand that I will not quote you without your permission?” I asked.

“I understand that, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.” She smiled. (A first!)

I smiled back. “I appreciate what you are saying.”

“Seth wants me to help you.”

Ah. “You really have no obligation.” But I was curious to hear what she would have to say.

She looked over at the devotees, her husband among them, and then indicated the living room, in the opposite corner of the house. I followed. She waved me toward the sofa and took a chair herself.

“I don’t want to seem ungenerous,” she said, playing with her
pallu
, which was wrapped around her back and pulled across her hip. “I recall
trying to find some books on grief, back when it happened, when we were trying to help Venkat and to deal with our own shock, and there weren’t any, really, that applied to the situation. A book like yours could help people, I suppose.”

“Did you seek the advice of a counsellor, back then?”

She looked mildly appalled. “No, I, we were fine. Venkat, of course … well, but I’ll let him tell you about that, if he chooses.”

“May I ask, how did you cope up? I don’t mean how well or poorly. I mean, what means did you use?”

“For my own sadness?”

“You have also mentioned shock.”

“Yes. It was all of that. The fear.” She leaned forward. Her eyes, as I have said, were large and liquid, kohl-lined on the inner lower lids. “Because, to us, it came out of nowhere. A bomb. A plane exploding! How, how do you even start to think about that? I was very concerned about Venkat. He is my relative. He’s not … strong. And poor Sita and Sundar. They were some of our oldest friends here.”

“You were close?”

“Oh, yes.” She hesitated. “Well, Sita confided in me occasionally. I think you could say we were close. She knew she could talk to me.”

I could imagine that a friendship with Lakshmi might be one-sided, that she would be firm and loyal, a good listener, but not a person to reveal much. It could leave a friend wondering how close they really were, if the friend paid attention.

“It was hard, for her, being in Canada. She had miscarriages, one before and one after Sundar. She was always very quiet, especially at gatherings, but every once in a while, she would say she wanted to talk to me, and she would tell me things. Like after the second miscarriage. Venkat didn’t seem to understand at all what she was going through. And then, much later, when Sundar was a teenager, he and Venkat had some very bad fights. Sundar came to Seth for help, once or twice. But he went into engineering, in the end, the way Venkat wanted him to. He was a super kid. Always good to my daughters. I worried most about the effect on them. They were adolescents, not babies, but still.
Or maybe I knew it would have more of an effect because they weren’t babies.”

“What effect do you think it had on them?”

“It …” She angled her shoulders, crossed her legs, a defensive posture. Her collarbones stood out from her sari blouse like a boomerang, an accidental elegance. Admiring the smooth expanse of her décolletage, I noticed what must have been her mangal sutra, a thick gold chain, the pendant hidden in her blouse. “They managed. I always made a point of talking to them about their feelings. But there’s no way to make sense of it.”

“You are all Shivashakti devotees?”

A quick shake of the head. “No, not at all.” She seemed puzzled that I had presumed.

“I’m sorry. You’re not religious?”

She looked away, toward the window, which framed none of the stunning vistas I associated with this town, but simply the house across the street. “If you had asked me back then, I might have said I was. I believe in God, in some way. But I have no patience anymore with rituals, with any organized religion. I still meditate, but I believe that if there is a higher power, it is within us. Self-knowledge. That’s what I’m seeking. Of course, Shivashakti’s followers say he is helping them to find God within themselves. Our tradition says a guru is a guide like that.” She had included me in that “our.” “But I feel uncomfortable with putting that much trust in someone else, to lead you. Especially after nine–eleven, I …” At this point, I think she noticed my extreme and genuine interest and realized she had said more than she had planned to say. She snapped shut. Would she resent me for having gained her confidence?

But then she smiled a little. I wondered at the possible relief to her: being pushed to confide in someone, being given the means safely, harmlessly, to betray the iron-clad unity of her family. “Seth, as you can see, is a devotee. That came out of the crash.” She spoke slowly. “The rest of us, my daughters and myself, we let the deaths become part of who we were. We … grew around the losses, maybe? I’m not quite sure how to explain. Maybe it has something to do with being a woman.
Others’ emotions are not so shattering to us. We’re taught, even while young, to deal with others on an emotional level. Seth needed something more, to be able to cope. He was so shaken at the idea of losing one’s family that we, his family, we weren’t enough to help him through it.” Her tone implied she still felt this inadequacy. “I couldn’t comfort him.”

She was ravishing. Crushes on both Seth and Lakshmi? What was wrong with me? No, I knew what was wrong with me; I thought about that all the time. This required a different question. What was the question?

In the other room, the singing-masters of the soul had finished. We rose to meet them.

Seth was struggling to straighten his legs, and making some joke about it, though the mood was sombre. Warm, though. I liked the faces, particularly, of two of the older, white devotees, men whom Seth brought forward to meet me as Lakshmi tried to usher us toward the buffet, handing each person a plate. One was a school principal, Kaj; the other was Nick, whose profession I didn’t catch. Nick was quiet and reticent, though with an air of leading from behind, as though he would not permit stragglers. Kaj had a loud, red face and bluff manner, and so generated in me some early suspicion, a bull in the china shop of sadness. As we served ourselves, though, he said to me, his Delft-blue eyes vulnerable beneath brushy blond eyebrows, “Seth told me about your project. Good for you. Must be wrenching, talking to people. It’s needed, though, with what Indo-Canadians here have gone through with that. It needs to be acknowledged.”

Lakshmi brushed away compliments on the food as we found places around the kitchen table or on the family room sofa, where I found a spot to eat, plate on my lap. On Seth and Lakshmi’s mantel, there was a clutter of family photos. I rose again to take a closer look. Seth and his siblings in formal portraits. Seth as a sturdy, handsome preschooler in short pants. Such earnest faces. Seth and Lakshmi’s wedding pictures, mid-sixties, to judge by his black-framed eyeglasses, her bejewelled ones. Flash exposure and tension made Lakshmi’s face look like a fawn’s in headlights. Barely out of her teens, my guess. A California sun
bleached a seventies-hued shot of the Sethuratnam family group. Brinda’s little sister Ranjani held the hand of an outsized Mickey Mouse. Ah: and here was Sundar. Darker than the others, hair in his eyes, standing a little apart from Seth, whose arm was extended to include him. Graduation photos of the girls, and wedding pictures for Brinda: the couple framed proudly by parents; Brinda laughing with Ranjani; and Brinda and Dev alone, a casual, friendly pose, charged with meaning now that I knew their story. What would I see if I hadn’t? I glanced over at Brinda herself now, and she caught and returned my look, but sat on the steps leading down into the sunken family room from the kitchen instead of joining me.

You must change your life
, I thought, telling her telepathically what I doubted I would have the courage to tell her in person. Rosslyn used to love Rilke’s poem on Apollo’s partial perfection. She was a much better reader of Rilke than I was or ever will be. A little preachy, to my taste. The poem’s ultimate exhortation rang in my head
—You must change your life!
—as Venkat’s gruff, indignant voice rose above the dinner chat.

“Let me put it to you this way,” he was saying, loudly. It was difficult to watch him talk, with that unsettling stillness in his face. I wondered how his students managed. He taught a dry subject, though, statistics. Maybe they didn’t pay too much attention. His voice rose. “What did the Americans do after nine–eleven? Leapt to the chase. Even Canada closed borders! Sent troops! All-out war! Do we not deserve this treatment? My son was born here and raised here, never lived anywhere else. My wife and I, citizens. Through and through. Not one phone call from them. No condolence visit. Nothing.”

Seth patted him nervously on the arm. “But now things are different, aren’t they?” he murmured. “Look at how much effort and money, this most expensive courtroom ever, bulletproof—”

“Sure, in case those guys’ thug friends try to shoot them out,” Brinda said, not seeming to address anyone in particular.

“Progress can be slow,” Seth said, ambiguously. Was he admitting this or making excuses for it? “Canada is timid. They did finally ban the Sikh Youth Federation and the Babbar Khalsa last year.”

“Under the post–nine–eleven anti-terrorist legislation, right?” A smack of mockery sounded in Brinda’s tone. “Convenient: the Americans want laws pushed through, and suddenly Canadians realized that the Air India bombers
were
targeting Canadians after all.”

“These things take time.” The stubborn cast of Seth’s jaw was animalistic and noble at once. “The wheels of justice turn slowly.”

Venkat raised a fist. “And now that the wheels have begun to turn, the deserving will be crushed beneath them.”

His declaration reminded me of the line … from
Stray Birds
? I think so. Tagore, not someone I am in the habit of quoting:
I thank Thee that I am none of the wheels of power, but am one with the living creatures crushed beneath it
. Venkat seemed to feel differently.

“I guess,” said Brinda, without looking over. “What about that bookseller, a few days ago, undermining Ms. D’s testimony?”

“Miss D-for-divorcée,” Venkat spat.

Brinda flinched.

“No morals. Attention-grabbing. Why did she wait until the trial to come forward, if she knew all this?” Venkat sneered.

She must have come forward before, I thought. Otherwise, why would she have been in witness protection?

No one was stopping Venkat and so he went on. “Trying to take her revenge on them. Those Sikhs always stick together except when they are fighting each other. A pathological liar. How stupid must she be, to be strung along by a married terrorist? Pathetic.” A light shone through his unfocused eyes. “Unless she came forward with the information in order that she could be discredited, and so support her lover’s cause.”

There is a particular sinking nausea I feel when confronted with conspiracy theorists, whether clients or taxi drivers. It triggers my flight response. I stood, took my leave of Brinda as I passed her, put my plate in the sink, pressed grateful farewells on my hosts, and in moments was out the door, inhaling sweet, fresh Canadian air. I steadied myself on the Sethuratnams’ veranda, looking down at the walkway. The mosaic tile-work was meant to be abstract, but as I stood there staring at it and breathing perhaps a little too deeply the rarified mountain air, images
resolved out of the chips and chunks: a grouping of three hearts, a pink-eyed rabbit, some long-snouted creature with a voracious toothy grin.