The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (25 page)

“Ashwin, I’m so sorry.” She put her hand over mine. “I don’t know what else to say.”

The sensation of her hand was softly electric: it had been so long since I had been touched. I had never been so intimate with anyone, and I wanted so much to talk to her, about the bombings, the pogroms, my confusion, my book-in-progress. I tried a little, but like most Canadians of her age—generations away from the old countries; never seen war or riots; barely seen poverty outside of native reserves—she couldn’t hold the personal and the political together for too long. That really is a first-world problem. Her concern was for me, as an individual, a friend, and she couldn’t fully fathom the bigger picture.

I let it go, but there was nothing further I could say about my own emotional condition. I could see she was perhaps hurt by this, as well as a little frustrated by her own inability to ask the right questions or offer me comfort. She was in love with another and her life was a far country.

I asked what she was reading and she told me, and said how our favourite bookstore had changed owners, and how the school where she used to work was being torn down. I told her about my new apartment, and she noted down the address. It was a decent, easy means of paving the way to goodbye.

Back in Montreal, I asked my old mentor and analyst, Marie Chambord, for her thoughts on my book. That was to be the last time I saw her, though she continued to advise me on my work until her death in 2002.

“My anger will show,” I told her.

“It won’t,” she replied, and pursed her narrow lips at me. She picked
up one of the many small steel sculptures she kept, brightly polished and randomly arranged, on a low table between her chair and the client’s. “You did your project with those families, those people. You wrote their stories. Now, a year later, you are injured by a revenge. Would you sit and tell such things to your patient?
Je pense que non
. You tell your analyst. This is why every analyst has an analyst.”

I, too, palmed one of the figures—weighty, cool, Brancusi-esque. The metal absorbed the warmth from my hand.

“
Bon
. Write the book.” She opened her hand, balancing the thing, shaped like an Egyptian cat, on her palm. “Your opinions go in. Your story, it stays out.” Though her hand seemed not to move, the little figure rocked and rocked, merry-seeming at first, and then increasingly autonomic, back and forth without ceasing.

When I returned to India, I had a vasectomy. In Canada, if you say “never before,” they won’t let you say “never again.” This is the difference between a staid young country with an aging population of 3.2 persons per square kilometre and an old one careering toward the billion-person mark and trying to find the brakes. If you so much as mention the v-snip in India, they clap a sweet-air mask on your face and scalpel-pop your scrotum before you can change your mind. There may be monetary incentives, for doctors and patients. I’ve had no reason to regret it.

I brought my mother back a bag of doodads—a jewellery set she had given Kritika, some crafts the children had made. A few photos. She was not content—had I chosen wrong? Was it too little? I don’t know. I hadn’t expected her to be pleased, so I hadn’t tried very hard.

Rosslyn sent me a birth announcement for her son. I threw it away without responding. Were there subsequent children? If so, I wasn’t notified. There may have been a Christmas card. We had no contact after that.

But—I wrote the book.

IT WAS, WHAT
, my fourth or fifth day in Lohikarma. Only that? All I say in my journal of that morning is how deeply I had fallen into this place, these people. Brinda would come to see me again, late that morning.

True confessions: the more I thought of her, the more I saw her as some sort of reincarnation of my niece. Nothing literal! But Brinda appeared to me as Asha’s figurative re-embodiment, and the prospect of listening to her, helping however I could, my undeniable small tender wellings of paternal feeling, these were in some way serving my lost little girl.

Did I let Brinda in as a way of
changing my life to preserve the bond?
I wasn’t so articulate about it at the time. We never act authentically if we have this level of self-consciousness. And yet, looking back, that doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

When she arrived, there was a short, quiet interlude, but as though under pressure. My guess was that she felt that she should show some interest in me and my project, out of politeness, rather than plunge straight away into her own story, even if that was what she was most eager to do.

“I can’t remember,” she said, gathering her hair back off her shoulders, “was the other night the first time you met Venkat Uncle?”

“I had a long interview with him, on Monday.” I didn’t want to think about Venkat.

“Was he like he was the night of the memorial?”

“He seems to need to follow a train of thought without interruption.”

“He spends a lot of time alone.”

That could also be said of me. I needed to move the focus to her. “Are you anxious, about the trial outcome?”

She chewed her lower lip, though her nervous mannerisms had decreased slightly. She emanated a thoughtfulness, now, more than anxiety. She wore a purple summer dress, pretty on her.

“I probably was, right at the start. Excited, maybe, more than anxious. I thought it was an open-and-shut case! So naive: nearly twenty years to come to this point—it’s got to be complicated. I’m not sure the outcome will prove much. But they have to convict them, right? After all this time, why would they bring it to trial unless conviction was a sure thing? How would the government live it down?”

I nodded. This was how most of us felt.

“And I think it might help people like Venkat Uncle to feel some small measure of resolution.” Her eyes suddenly looked huge and strange. “I feel bad saying this. He lost everything. But he’s a pathetically sad person.”

“We should talk about you,” I said, bluntly, but it was what both of us wanted.

“I suppose, eh? I leave day after tomorrow.” She smiled and sighed. “So problem numero uno is Dev, everything we were going through. And then I came to that resolution, this spring, told myself to stop hoping against hope that anything about him would change.” She bit a cuticle, looked at it, sat on her hand. “And then, last week, here in Lohikarma, I ran into an old friend. Adrian. You met him, remember?”

The young man at the coffee shop.

A high school buddy from the smart kids’ crowd: school newspaper, chemistry club, skinny wiseacres, quasi-misfits. Adrian had gone west, after high school, apprenticed as a boat builder while ambling through an undergraduate degree. Now he was finishing medical school in Toronto. He was to have spent this summer in Europe with his girlfriend—he referred to the girlfriend at their first meeting, while Brinda somehow didn’t manage to mention Dev—but now she had gone on the trip without him while he came back to Lohikarma to help his parents. His father, a fruit farmer, was dying of cancer.

It had been ten years since he and Brinda had last seen each other. He had the same curly hair and green eyes, but the solidity of adulthood suited his frame, which had been gangly and awkward when they were teens. She recalled a little crush on him back then, but she had little crushes on lots of boys. Doubtful that many turned out as nice as this.

Initial conversation was easy, bridging topics old and new, and he asked if they might get together sometime. He had left Lohikarma so young that he had only a few friends still in town.

The next night, they met at an old drinkers’ haven that Brinda had frequented in university, The Minter’s Arms, one of the last High Street strongholds. The bar was brightly lit; the carpet red and gold with themes of empire.

Adrian looked across the room as he sipped his beer. “Play pool, by any chance?”

“I have done,” Brinda said with a note of calculation.

“You’re probably really good,” Adrian said.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said, and
thump-tha-thump
she felt she had to wreck this, now,
wreck it!
—at least a little. “My—my husband and I play sometimes.” Her mouth felt tense and she folded her lips in and pursed them. “I really am not very good at all. But then, he’s a bit of a sore loser.” She breathed through her nose.

Adrian lifted his beer glass to look through it. They were in their thirties. Everyone had a history. Friends had died. Others had had babies early and divorced. Others had ended up happy—fancy that. Life was
approaching its midpoint and not becoming any more transparent with the years.

“And what does he do?”

“Lab tech. University of Alberta.”

He nodded, she nodded.

“Let’s play,” she said. “Table just came free.”

“I’ll get quarters. You go stake it out.” They got up and went in opposite directions.

“Will your husband come to Baltimore with you?” he asked, later, in the car. She had walked downtown to meet him and now he was dropping her at home. His parents still lived out on the farm, a twenty-minute drive from town.

“Nope.”

He waited a sec. “Separation’s no fun.”

“I guess not.”

She asked nothing about his girlfriend, and chided herself for this later as she replayed the evening, chin on her knees in the window seat of her childhood room.