The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (22 page)

Venkat was standing with his eyes closed, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. Now he walked up close to the wall, and began looking down, up, left, right, in a staggering figure-eight that irritated Seth, who came up beside him and began searching, too, his eyes starting at the top left corner and travelling methodically down each column. At the end of the second queue, in a miasma of creeping nausea, he realized that he was forcing himself to look into every dead, broken face, while Venkat skimmed haphazardly over others’ pain, only searching to confront his own.

They found Sundar at the same moment. His face, or a version of it. They had been warned of the possibility that all the bones were shattered beneath the skin. They searched the small picture. There was swelling, and stitching, but no one else so closely resembled their boy. The coroner’s assistant took a note, perhaps the number of the picture,
or the fact that they had affirmed it, and they followed him into a room where the body was already waiting.

They knew it was Sundar from the tattoo. No one knew when he had gotten it. Apparently, he had already had it so long that he had forgotten about it by the time of the Indians’ Canada Day picnic on Kootenay Lake when he was nineteen. The kids all stripped to bathing suits and took turns swinging out over the lake on a tire. A tire could have no better purpose, the adults thought, as they watched their children flash and drop, sunlit, into water that seemed their natural home. They would emerge, giggling gods, to take their places again in line. At some point, someone exclaimed and reached to touch Sundar on the shoulder and he turned, alarmed, but couldn’t keep his back to everyone at once. His father ran over to see: a slim dagger that seemed to enter the shoulder blade from above and emerge again beneath it, a cunning trompe l’oeil and wonderfully executed. Venkat was predictably livid.

Now that one pinned wing brought his angel back. In time, they would match the dental records. Now, they left the men alone with Venkat’s dead child.

Venkat lay across the body and began to sob as Seth looked at Sundar’s face. He saw, in his mind’s unwilling eye, sound-wave patterns of the blast, fall time in relation to distance (t
), decomposition slowed to a halt by saline immersion. Then the physics melted away and Seth saw only the terror, Sundar going to the cremation fire with a look on his face that showed he knew his life was ending in horror and unfulfillment.

He felt himself shot through with that horror, as though he were a conduit for lightning. He also felt the desire to pray. But to whom? For whom? Later, he would be able to recall all this, in sequence, in detail, though it likely took no more than a second or two. He felt as though he were searching, looking up into a vast nothingness, and then he felt what he would call a cosmic wind around his ankles. In the moment he began to fall, he woke with a violent start in the coroner’s arms.

Venkat raised himself from the body to take his son’s face in his
hands. Seth, still steadying himself, drew a breath of pity for what Sundar’s father would see.

“So peaceful!” Venkat cried. “Look, look. So peaceful, just as he looked in life. He is sleeping, merely sleeping.”

Was Venkat seeing Sundar as he remembered him rather than as he now was? But when did Sundar ever look peaceful? Perhaps when he slept, his daylight restlessness rubbed out by dreams of stillness. Seth had seen him sleeping, a few times. The night of that day when they nearly lost him at Disneyland, Seth had kissed Sundar’s forehead as he slept. He was old enough that Seth couldn’t do that anymore when he was awake. That childish face came back now, hovering, transparent, over this one.

“Sundar.” Seth’s voice cracked as he said it, and he said it again, and his voice cracked again. “Sundar.” It meant “beautiful”—the perfect name for him—how could they have known? One of many names used to call Krishna, the beautiful boy-god, valiant, mischievous, lordly.

Perhaps terror and peace became the same thing when life’s mysteries were unveiled. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals his divine form at Arjuna’s request, Arjuna is terrified at seeing what no mortal can stand to see. But the end to human doubt surely must also bring with it a definite, final peace. Maybe Venkat, with his greater knowledge both of God and of his son, could see that grace, while unenlightened Seth saw only fear.

Back out in the foyer, they accepted the other families’ weird congratulations on their dubious good fortune—finding a body, the best they could hope for, now. Only one other family present had also positively identified a loved one. The others would continue to wait. “What a world,” Venkat told Seth in that night’s rare moment of speech, “when I fear the evil eye from congratulations on having my son’s dead body. Reflex, eh? What could
drishti
do to me now?”

Sita, too, had an identifying mark: her mangal sutra, her wedding
necklace, unique in the world. Venkat had no close picture of the pendant, but told the police he would know it when he saw it. They didn’t discuss the possibility that it had separated from her through some dismemberment. He was shown two mangal-sutraed necks, both wrong.

Sundar knew how to swim. Sita did not.

Venkat and Seth went back to Bantry Bay three more times, each time superstitiously hoping that on their return they might get a message about Sita’s body. On the fourth night, Venkat confided to Seth that he had known, when he saw his son’s body, that he would not receive his wife’s. “I don’t deserve that much,” he said, and Seth thought how losses might differ in their sharpness, how pain’s varied qualities might relate to varieties of guilt or forgiveness. It was not a fruitful train of thought.

Venkat flew to India, with Sundar’s ashes, destined for the Kaveri River. Seth, from Ireland, returned home.

SETH DROVE VENKAT
’
S CAR
from Vancouver to Lohikarma, seeing now the rolling hills and rocky shores of B.C. as though through the Irish coach window. Lakshmi radiated relief at the door. He knew she would ask him later about what he had seen and what happened, but she seemed uncharacteristically glad to defer her questions. Brinda brought him a cup of instant coffee and she and Ranjani crowded him on the sofa.

“What was it like, Dad?” Brinda asked first, attempting to mask the extent of her curiosity, making him wonder if she would repeat what he said to her friends. “Mom said they found Sundar’s body but not Sita Aunty’s. What’s happening now?”

Seth looked into his coffee and crossed his legs. The sight of the morgue rose in his head, with its smell, medicinal and sweaty, of a damp mop never properly dried. He put his nose to his coffee and patted Ranjani’s knee. “I don’t know what’s happening now. Only about a third of the bodies were recovered.” He checked their faces. Were they upset? Brinda, the clinical one, was frowning and listening. If ever she became upset, she would tell you. Ranjani was harder to read. She was frowning too, but not looking at him.

“Many never will be found. But some still might surface. I convinced Venkat that he should go on to India with Sundar’s ashes, that the
chances of finding Sita’s body were too small. The Irish police would be in touch if they found anyone that looked like her. They seemed very sincere.”

Lakshmi came in, wiping her hands on a towel, and Seth felt sickened by the sense that perhaps he had not yet arrived home, that there was a gulf between him and his family that he hadn’t yet crossed. His mind was filled with impressions he couldn’t properly share: He had seen a boy they loved, puffed and mutilated and dead. He had slept in the bed next to that boy’s father, prayed with him and heard him weep at night. He didn’t want to cross the gulf, didn’t want to share what he had gone through. He even thought Lakshmi might prefer to be spared that burden.

The void
: he couldn’t seem to retreat from the verge, from staring down into it, even when he and Lakshmi made love that night. He was desperate to return to her, and she pretended that he was merely ardent and tried to respond, but it didn’t work and they stopped, unsatisfied. She held his face in her hands and looked at him hard. He permitted himself to be scrutinized. He wondered if she was annoyed and whether they might fight, and he had started to think—think!—that he might welcome the distracting anguish—there was nothing worse than fighting with his wife—when she patted his shoulder. “You need to rest.”

She kissed him, and they lay back in the midsummer half-dark, her head sliding from his shoulder to the pillow beside him, though she still held his hand. He felt angry, a bit, at her easy abandonment, at how she sighed and drifted away.

The next night, he and Lakshmi resumed their customary after-dinner walk. The tradition had started years earlier, when their children became old enough that they could be left alone for an hour in the evening. When summer began, either Seth reminded Lakshmi, or, according to her, they both remembered at the same time, and they resumed. Eight months of the year, they trod the treadmill and cycled the bike in front
of the basement TV, but in this brief warm time, they strolled, conversationally or in silence. That evening, silence prevailed.

As they left the house, Lakshmi checked her peonies. One bush showed half a dozen open blooms in a cheerful if unexceptional middle-pink, but filled the air with a delicious fragrance, oddly reminiscent of tea. The two other bushes bloomed later, their tightly wrapped globes barely starting to open into a deep, meditative red. They gave off no smell—worse, when Seth stuck his face in deep, he got a whiff of dead fish. Her irises were finished but the lilies were about to arrive. In the yard’s coldest corner, a last stand of poppies wobbled to the breeze from the lake, their frothy heads dropping a few petals. It was a competent garden, nothing compared to Sita’s grand passion. As Seth retied a shoe and frowned at their lawn—unmowed for weeks now, glorified by an ambush of orange hawkweed—Lakshmi snapped off a few dandelion puffs and slipped them under the lid of their garbage bin at the curb without disturbing the seeds. What would become of Sita’s heirloom roses, her perennial beds with their precisely timed bloomings, her incomparable herbs and tomatoes, which each friend received, at the end of the season, essentialized into a gift-pack of homemade chutneys?

They headed down a set of concrete steps at the end of their street, crossed a road to another set of steps, and repeated this until they landed up at a small street that led directly to the walking path along the lake. Ten days since the solstice, and still hours to dusk. Sailboats, kids playing along the shore, a couple of evening swimmers though the water was always a bit chilly. On the opposite bank, a familiar mountain stretched, low and passive, reminding Seth, as always, of a book he used to read his kids:
Danny and the Dinosaur
. Its shape resembled nothing so much as the dinosaur, head lowered, like a dog’s, for a nice scratch behind the ears. As they walked, Lakshmi told him about a drama that seemed to be developing around her new supervisor. Seth lost the thread. She accused him, half joking, of not paying attention, but didn’t try to go on.