The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (20 page)

Venkat began another outburst but Seth went to him. “Venkat, come.” He guided Venkat by the elbow to the dining table, which was covered with a rose-pink tablecloth, overlaid in crochet-lace, itself protected in clear plastic. He drew a Cross pen from his breast pocket, one his daughters had given him for Father’s Day, a week ago Sunday—was it so recent? “Fill them out however you can.” He beckoned to the officers, and showed them the way upstairs.

The doorbell rang again. Seth, looking through the peephole, sighed: Mohan “Moe” Iyer. He opened the door.

“Seth,” Moe said, removing his shoes and walking past him. Mohan’s wife Sarojini, overdressed, as usual, in a starched gold-plaid sari and a sapphire jewellery set, greeted him as she and their kids slipped off their sandals as well.

Mohan went straight to Venkat, who was slumped over the yellow forms, the dome of his forehead resting in a palm, pen lying on the page.

Mohan squeezed his shoulder. “Bastard Sikhs, eh, man?” He spoke in a broad, Western-Canadian drawl, buttoned tight over his native accent
like a loud shirt across a midlife gut. “We’ll break ’em, I swear to God.”

Seth saw Venkat’s breath cease, his veins pulse. Then he nodded. “The Sikhs. Ah, okay.” He rose, fiery and fearsome. “Yes, that makes sense.”

“Oh, you hadn’t heard, yet?” Mohan turned his palms up. “Sorry, man.”

“The damn Sikhs,” Venkat muttered, fists clenched at his waist. “Should have thrown them out of Punjab with the Paks.”

“Well, that’s exactly what they want. Khalistan Zindabad! Eh? I say give them to Pakistan, why should they get any Indian turf? Hope baby Gandhi doesn’t give in now. No good comes of dealing with terrorists,” Mohan ended with a growl, wandering away from Venkat, each man too consumed with his own thoughts to feel slighted by the other. “Seth.” Mohan gestured at him with a help-me-out-here squint. “Coffee?”

The officers lumbered down the stairs. “How’re you doing with those forms, sir?” McMurphy asked.

Venkat leaned in to McMurphy. “It was the Sikhs!” He hit the policeman’s chest conspiratorially and Seth poised to pounce in case the cop drew his gun, but the mountainous man only winced. “Go get them!” Venkat waved at the door. “Hang them high! Sikhs,” he repeated, frustrated by the officer’s paralysis. “You know, turbans!”

“We have, um—that’s what they’re saying on the news, sir.” McMurphy nodded gravely. “RCMP in Vancouver, they’re following up every possible lead.”

“What is this?” Venkat asked, still standing close enough to the officer that they must have felt each other’s warmth. “Ask anyone, they’ll tell you who did it.”

McMurphy looked at him strangely and asked,
sotto voce
, “Do you, sir, have any knowledge of identity of the individuals that might have done this?”

Venkat snarled. “I told you—the Sikhs.” He gestured, toward himself, toward some vague entity beyond. “I look like one of them to you?”

Mohan stepped forward holding a business card, like a cigarette, between two fingers. “Iyer,” he said, the
r
unrolled, the
y
disappeared, so he might have been trying to say ‘ire.’ “I’m a developer here in Lohikarma. West Wind Condos? Terrible shame, terrible, terrible.”

The officer stood and fished out a few cards of his own.

“Any and all information would be welcome,” he said, passing them out, and then addressed himself to Venkat, trying to regain focus. “Could I ask you to fill out those forms, sir?” McMurphy looked at Seth. “Vancouver wanted them back by the end of the day. They’ve gotta get them out to Ireland, eh.”

Half an hour later, the RCMP left with their paperwork.

The Iyers hovered an hour longer, talking nonsense, thought Seth. Three years ago, Mohan had hit him up for an investment in that condo project. Seth and Lakshmi had fought: she didn’t trust Mohan. Finally she had thrown up her hands. “Don’t talk to me about this, Seth. I don’t want to be involved.”

When, a week later, the cancelled cheque drawn on their capital improvement account came back, she confronted him. “What have you done?” He reminded her that she had told him to go ahead and do what he wanted, but that wasn’t how she remembered it.

Now, Mohan had promised investors dividends by the end of the year. Lakshmi was impressed that the condos had been built, but still found Mohan slick and shady in ways she couldn’t quite name. He was a big Social Credit party supporter; went to Vancouver and Victoria for parties in politicians’ mansions. Seth had no talent for power, but he admired it. Confronted with Mohan himself, though, the hennaed hair, the pinky ring … it was nice, occasionally, to see things as Lakshmi saw them.

The next morning, Seth went home to pack a bag and, by ten thirty or so, he and Venkat were on the road. Seth drove Venkat’s car, a Honda sedan he had bought in Vancouver the previous year. He had driven Sundar out to the coast for the start of school, left the old car with him, and drove home in the new one. Every little thing, Seth thought, gripping the caramel-coloured steering wheel cover, was bound up with their families.

He breathed hard against the fear and sadness, and the fear of sadness, and leaned over the wheel, willing himself to focus on the road.

They exited Lohikarma into the verdant countryside, the mountains sometimes close, sometimes far; clumps of lupins in lavender and rose dying out against the roadside green, making way for thimbleberries, chicory, glorious pink paintbrush. Past the Doukhobor lumber mill. Past Glade, Thrums, Brilliant—towns whose names bespoke the shining optimism they all had brought here, the vitality and beauty they saw here, in the beginning.

Venkat was staring out the window, hunched and small-looking. It was strange to see him reduced to infantilism by loss, needing to be told to eat and bathe, and occasionally making demands he knew everyone would run to fulfill. Maybe the adult Venkat would return when they hit the Irish shore; with his family in the vicinity, perhaps he would be restored to his old bossiness, which Seth was almost starting to miss.

From Vancouver, Seth and Venkat flew the same route the dead had flown, bouncing from Toronto to Montreal, and out over the Atlantic. The jet was nearly empty, holidays cancelled, relatives in India saying, “It’s not worth it. Stay back.” Seth looked around the cabin, repopulating it with the passengers of the lost plane, eating breakfast, watching TV. How long till the vanished became invisible?

A little under an hour from Heathrow, he tried to look down, through the clouds, but his forehead rapped the invisible inner layer of the acrylic window. Beside him, Venkat sat the way he’d laid in bed, straight, staring, unresponsive, only his knuckles, white on the armrests, suggesting tension rather than catatonia. But as they passed through the airplane-shaped void where Air India 182 had exploded, nothing happened.

They landed in London, where beautifully groomed Air India employees came forward solicitously to escort them to their connection gate. They were trailed by a white Canadian in a suit with a maple-leaf pin on his lapel, who seemed relieved to have delivered them.

They realized, in the queue to board the small plane headed for County Cork airport, that there were at least eight other families going the same way for the same reason. They made eye contact, acknowledging that they, too, had been singled out by history, tapped on the shoulder and asked to step out of the long file of people shuffling obliviously forward into an unknown future of children, grandchildren, spouses with whom to grow old. With them were a few hand-holders, like Seth, bereaved but not shattered; in shock, but, by the grace of God, still in that other line.

In Cork, each family was met by its own cop, sent by the Irish Gardai, and its own grief counsellor, usually a nun. Venkat’s was Sister Bernadette. She introduced herself first to Seth, who explained his own role as she continued to hold the hand she had shaken. Then she took Venkat’s unresisting arm, murmuring some words Seth couldn’t hear in a brogue he barely understood, not that it mattered. She was a guiding spirit in a cloud-grey cardigan and Seth, as he followed her, felt something inside him, twisted tight all week, release a little. Sister Bernadette sat them down and explained they would go straight away to Cork Regional Hospital.

“The coroner is still working with the bodies. As soon as they are finished, then families can start identifying their loved ones,” she said. “We’re told it may take another day or so. Folks are disturbed that they’re not yet permitted to claim their own, but, I must tell you, only perhaps a third of the lost have been brought back. Still, it’s something.” There was in her voice a greater comprehension of disaster than Seth himself felt. In the days following, it seemed all of County Cork was working to provide some comfort to the families and see the bodies recovered and returned. Their only piece of luck, the families would say later. In a bigger place, it wouldn’t have been like that. In London, they would have been ignored, milling about—another few hundred Indians, give or take,
what could they want?
In a more insular place, no one would have known what to do with them. But in a place where everyone had tragedy mapped on the palms of their hands, where every family tree was torn by civil war or emigration, famine or sudden
squalls at sea, here, they knew how to address themselves to death.

On the way to the hospital, Sister Bernadette asked Venkat if he had brought pictures of his family. He had tucked two small albums in his shoulder bag, and took them out to show her now. “I have dry clothes for them, in my suitcase.”

At the hospital, they were led into a large assembly hall, where a Gardai detective addressed them. “We can’t tell you how sorry we are for your losses. Our hearts, every one, go out to you. Our mission is to make sure that each and everybody recovered goes back to his or her loving family.”

A young officer passed out forms, identical to the ones Venkat had filled out at home a couple of days prior, except that these were pink where the others had been yellow.

“I did this already,” Venkat said, pushing the papers away, but the police officer gently handed them back.

“Sir, I’ve heard that the Canadian police had you do something similar, but we think there’s been some breakdown of communication. Could you jot it down again, sir? If it’s no trouble …”

Again, this unawkward recognition, these officers so unlike the Mounties, who gave the impression they had never heard of death until they arrived at Venkat’s door. How many generations does it take to achieve fluency in the language of grief? Venkat filled out the forms and handed over a family picture, he and the young officer holding it between them a moment, as though it were a diploma or some other certificate of achievement, while the Gardai promised Venkat that it would be returned to him.

And then, the waiting.

Sister Bernadette asked their preference: a nearby hotel had been found for them. They could eat here at the hospital if they were hungry. The food, she said, was not as bad as it might be. And a coach trip had been arranged for the next morning: to Bantry Bay, the closest point on land to where the plane had last signalled its existence, to the point in the water where, two days ago, two sharks were added to the body count, killed by their mates in a feeding frenzy.

Venkat seemed without opinion, but Seth found his limbs were waterlogged with a drastic, irresistible fatigue and asked whether, yes, they could be taken to their hotel. At a small, family-run place about ten miles from the hospital, they were shown to their room, two double beds on a carpet the same rose tint of Venkat’s at home in Lohikarma. Sister Bernadette said she would be back for them in the morning.

Venkat set his bags down and took the albums out again, minus the snap he had entrusted to the Gardai: one of him and Sita on either side of Sundar, who wore his high school graduation cap-and-tassel. Venkat sat on one bed while Seth lay down on the other and watched him take a school portrait of Sundar and his own wedding photo out of one album to prop upright on the bedside table.

They were all fond of Sita: she was sensitive and conversational—at least when spoken to; she didn’t initiate social contact much—such a contrast to Venkat’s humourlessness and bombast that it was often painful to see them together in a room. Sita, whose every fibre tensed visibly when he got started, had only ever managed to influence him a little. Lakshmi, who had her own battles with Seth, said she couldn’t imagine how on earth one would approach Venkat on the subject of his stone-set views and the ways he embarrassed himself. Perhaps that was the angle. Someone with so much pride surely couldn’t be immune to embarrassment.