The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (24 page)

Shanmugham felt dizzy and fell to the ground. His friends found him there, weak and barely sentient. He had a snake bite, but recovered, took his new name and began the life of an ascetic. He was married but now took a vow of celibacy. (He did not cast out his wife; she became his first devotee.) After travelling the “length and breadth” of India, garnering knowledge of its peoples, languages and holy men, he started an ashram close to Mangalore, in 1973. His intention was never to promote himself as a god—“I am not here to say I am God—Aham Brahmasmi. I am here to prove that you are God—Tat Tvam Asi,” he famously said. But he had achieved Samadhi, a conscious union with the divine, and could not deny the many who hungered to feed from his light.

Seth consumed this information, though there was also a part of him that knew the history and testimonials were irrelevant. He remembered, early in his marriage, playing with Lakshmi’s fingers while she talked to him about her childhood, when suddenly she pulled her hand
away to slap his. “You’re not even listening!” she had said, but it wasn’t true. He hadn’t registered the words, but he was listening with every atom of his being to the sound of her voice. Like that, he now wanted to know everything about his guru, but not for what he learned. It was simply another way of basking in his presence.
Bhakti
—love of God as though he were a lover. This is what it was, for Seth: honeyed wonder. He was drenched in it.

While he was caught in the beam of a personal sun, though, Lakshmi grew more sombre with each passing week. They acted normal—meals with the children and rides to the pool–library–mall, along with discussions of Venkat’s fast-approaching return at the start of the academic year. But on the nights when he went to satsang, he would return to find his wife quiet.

On one of those nights, perhaps in the fourth week, he came home with Shivashakti’s 1984 lecture compendium and lay reading it in bed.

She came into the room with a basket of folded laundry, paused, and put the basket down to open the closet. “So that’s it. You’re a Shivashakti devotee now?”

He closed the book on a thumb. “I, uh, it looks that way, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, that’s how it looks,” she said, putting the clothes away, her face to the closet.

“You go to the Vedanta Centre,” he reminded her.

“But I’m not a devotee.” She sat on the bed, the basket dangling from her hand.

“No,” he agreed.

Lakshmi had, more than once, questioned the value of gurus, which were fundamental in their tradition. Before the bomb, he had thought, in some vague way, of trying to find a guru someday, when he was in his sixties, maybe post-retirement, some proper age for renunciation and seeking. Lakshmi was more of a true seeker than he was, so he had thought, but repeated disillusionment or her native non-conformity
seemed to have turned her off the quest. He realized now that she believed that the two of them had rejected Shivashakti bilaterally, years ago, she in her typically intense way and he in his typically joking one. Now, she felt betrayed. Perhaps even jealous. She had been waiting for an explanation of some sort. He, too, felt he owed it to her, and so he tried.

“It … it was so scary, Lakshmi,” he began. “Terrifying, the idea, losing your family. I realized …” Was he making sense? “I realized I would have nothing, if that were to happen to me, to all of you.”

“It’s not going to happen,” she said, putting a hand on his leg.

He didn’t mean to, but he gave her a look. She took her hand away.

“The fear, Lakshmi, what I saw there, the broken hearts. You’ll understand, maybe, when you see Venkat again. Horrible.”

Lakshmi was silent.

“You want to love us less?” she asked, finally, with a detectable note of what sounded to Seth like ridicule.

“The opposite,” he said. “Devotion to God would mean I can also be devoted to you.”

Had he detached from them? Not exactly. He had pulled back, but that didn’t mean he loved them less. The scriptures preached love without attachment but didn’t that ultimately mean detaching from those you loved? His love for his wife didn’t lessen when he had his first daughter nor did his love for his first child dim when the second was born. In fact, his attachment to his family increased. He had to admit that his devotion to Shivashakti hadn’t had the same effect, so far. And yet, he still felt it was what might enable him to love without fear of being destroyed.

“That’s like having an affair to save a marriage!” Lakshmi said.

Seth laughed.

“No, it is!” she said. “You might feel more content at first, maybe even more loving toward your spouse, maybe because of guilt. But then eventually that other love eats into you and makes you discontent or the lover becomes more demanding, and then you have to choose.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,
kanna
!” How was it he had been given this excellent girl? “Are you sure you’re only making a comparison and not really thinking I am having an affair?”

“You would be if it were up to that Irene woman.” Lakshmi sniffed. Irene, Seth’s fellow-devotee, worked in the municipal government building, as did Lakshmi. That week, she had come up to Lakshmi in the cafeteria and talked at inappropriate length about what a wonderful man Seth was. “
So gentle
, she said.
And brilliant. Oh, and handsome? My, my!
” Lakshmi, impersonating Irene, emitted a vacuous yet evil giggle.

Seth covered his blushing ears with his hands, laughing harder. “Oh, Lakshmi. The poor woman.”

Lakshmi, too, laughed. “It’s her own fault, don’t pity her. Pity me, having to listen to her. And what’s all that flaking and cracking on her cheeks? She needs to see a doctor.”

They laughed and laughed and laughed. They went to bed in a peace that was not uneasy, the air cleared. Still, each also knew the other would prefer a closer agreement, and that neither would budge.

I DIDN
’
T EXACTLY GET ALL OF THIS
from Seth in that one afternoon. True, we talked for some hours. True, he covered much of this period of time. I went back to my apartment and transcribed—that, dear reader, you’ve heard before. But I waited to write. Seth was not strictly linear when he talked; more a charming digressor. The information filled in, the narrative filled out, over the course of this year. The writing came, in time.

I, too, may have a linearity problem, and must admit now to a small detail I have so far failed to include in this narrative:

Ottawa. En route east from Montreal, I interviewed a family there. I stayed three days, in a hotel, with a phone book. Where Rosslyn was listed.

Thank goodness for Maureen McTeer, the anodyne P.M. Joe Clark’s feisty First Madam, who refused to change her name upon marriage or even, à-la-Hillary-used-to-be-Rodham, upon ascension to Official Helpmeet. Thanks to her, a whole generation of Canadian girls, Tory, Liberal or NDP, were inspired to remain Ms. from birth to death. Rosslyn was listed under her own name.

I Googled her: still with Ottawa public schools, but also teaching in the College of Social Work. She had published a few papers, co-written. I drove past her house, barely able to bring myself to look, but in any
case, I saw nothing of note and drove away not quite understanding what I had done.

I had seen her shortly after the bombing, but not since.

June 1985. After the bomb took my sister and her children, I went on an indefinite leave from IRDS and, though I had finally got my own apartment, went back to stay awhile with my parents.

I was at work on my book about the pogroms, but the bombing stopped it cold.
Who Are the Victims?
I thought, in the sleepless nights I spent pacing, hearing my mother wail, sensing my father’s cavernous grief from the chair in his room where I knew he sat, awake, too. Could I now count Kritika, Anand and Asha among the victims of the Delhi riots?

Suresh, my brother-in-law, came to India a couple of weeks after the bombing. He stayed with his own parents, and would come to pay his respects to mine. You can imagine the scene. The magnitude of grief in our house. Once or twice I went out when Suresh was expected. My father looked disappointed, but didn’t stop me. I couldn’t tell that my mother even noticed.

Back in Canada, Rosslyn saw Kritika’s name on a list of the dead. She called me at my parents’ home. She got the time wrong and the phone rang at two in the morning. In normal circumstances, the household would have been thrown into alarm. Now that the worst had already happened, no one blinked an eye. Her voice was like warm sand, and yet I felt pierced, all over, with shards of longing—endless distances—and regret.

She asked if I might come to Canada, if there wouldn’t be a funeral. It hadn’t occurred to me until she asked, but when she did, I said yes.

After Suresh returned to Montreal, I came to visit him. He and I had never established much more than a formal warmth, so I didn’t pretend I was going to comfort him. I hadn’t known if there would be a funeral—there was, though I never would have attended it if my father hadn’t
asked me to do so on his behalf. My mother asked me to bring back keepsakes from Kritika’s home, although Suresh would have been a more reliable person to ask to choose something. I’m too unsentimental about objects to be counted on for such a wish. But my mother had a stubborn, tribal quality that meant she would never ask an in-law, no matter how devoted, but only a blood relative, no matter how dismissive.

In any case, Suresh seemed genuinely glad for my company and my help in reorganizing the house. Despite his sappy taste in poetry, he was not one of those who clung to material reminders of the departed.

He sorted through their things methodically, using the process to work through his grief. I came to admire him, in those days, more deeply than I had before. He kept only what was of genuine value to him, and asked me to help him get rid of the rest.

He never went to Ireland: he waited for the official word, but said he felt in his blood that his family were gone. He didn’t know how or why he was better able to recognize this than so many others.

I would have met him there, but my sister’s remains, and Asha’s and Anand’s, were never found.

One day, I went to Ottawa to see Rosslyn. Hazel eyes flecked with concern. Gilded brown hair in a style slightly different from before. Freckles accentuated by the sun. Pregnant, she looked curvier, and happier, than she had with me. She had walked to our rendezvous, and now fanned her blouse and blew down her neckline, glowing faintly as we waited for a table.

“Marriage, is it?” I asked, once we were seated. She had suggested one of our favourite old places: informal, but with heavy wood tables and big windows; all original recipes, several named for regulars.

“The wedding’s in a little under a month.”

She wore an aquamarine stone on her left hand. I remarked that her nails, while short, were not ragged.

“I’ve been using something to help me stop biting them.”

“While planning your wedding? Don’t tell me you’ve started smoking?”

A smirk. “Yeah, yeah.”

She was marrying a teacher, someone she had known for years. He must have made his move as soon as I left—and why not?