The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (27 page)

“Nice deal for him.”

“And maybe he doesn’t really know what the problem is.”

“Hard to find out if you don’t want to know. Dev implies, most of the time, that it’s me,” she said, checking Adrian’s reaction.

He nuzzled her forehead. “Dubious.”

“D’you think I should have an affair?”

He winced. “Not without me.”

She glared into his eyes, her nose nearly touching his, and frowned. “You’re not available.”

He kissed her and shivered. “If you say so.”

They behaved toward one another, that afternoon, as though they were lovers out in public, exhibiting a restrained show of physical affection that looked like evidence of a deeper, stronger, private love but was in fact the barest venting of the tension between them, as of a tiny train whistle atop a steam engine. On parting, they made no further plans.

That night, Brinda went out to hear a band. A friend of hers owned a ski shop, and a clique of Québecois ski bums, recognizing him, joined them at the bar. One caught Brinda’s eye with his blue eyes and biceps. Could he refill her glass? When he stretched out his arm to take it, she shocked herself by tucking a finger under his T-shirt sleeve, lifting it to check out his tattoo. His date appeared out of nowhere, at his other side. They didn’t talk again, until he sought Brinda out to say goodbye, kissing her on both cheeks and saying, “The summer is young. We will see each other again.”

The summer is young?
He couldn’t have been out of his twenties. Men never flirted with her. She snorted with laughter as she returned to the dance floor.

“It’s like something has broken open,” she told me.

I had already noticed. A
shekina
curled around her, a mystic breeze. Her hair fell over her bare shoulders; her brow was full and light, her lips full and dark. I was surprised she didn’t have to beat men, and—why not—women too, away on the street.

How quickly she was progressing! I should have known to distrust that rapidity, but instead unwisely believed it to be evidence that she knew what she must do.

There is a reason doctors are not supposed to treat their own loved ones: if there is a problem, they will not see it because they don’t want to believe it is there (unless they conjure non-existent problems out of worry). I had told her I wasn’t doing therapy with her, that she should see me as an older friend without a social stake in her situation. I never told her how she reminded me of Asha, though that, too, was already changing. The better I got to know B, the more distinct she seemed from A.

Was I finding a new, real attachment to overwrite the morbid, old one? A better way to
change my life
?

“I’m seeing Adrian tonight, to say goodbye,” she told me. “The worst choice I’ve ever had to make.”

“But it is not your choice alone,” I told her. I felt certain she would leave Dev, though she wasn’t ready to admit it. She would return to Edmonton and confront him first. I had to think whether to ask her about that the next day, our final session.

She noticed a book in my window seat: Yann Martel’s
Self
, the Sunday book of a couple of weeks prior. “Are you liking it?” In the novel, a boy in late adolescence spontaneously transforms into a female. “I love how he makes the impossible seem plausible.”

“You yourself hid such a big secret for so long.” I opened the door. “Maybe one of your friends was born as a mermaid, or an alien.”

“Yeah. Maybe Dev was born a woman.”

“Women like sex,” I reminded her.

She laughed. “You’re right, he’s an alien.”

“Aliens don’t like sex?” I asked.

“Only with mermaids,” she said, and trotted down the stairs.

BY THE TIME I FINISHED MY NOTES
on our session, I was itching to leave my stuffy, thought-filled apartment. It was the time of evening when slats of sun blasted through my picture windows, when there was no comfortable place to sit. The air in my flat was burning and dancing with dust.

I opened the door, inhaled—air crisp and dry. Checked the sky—blue and clear. Twice now, I had toted my rain jacket up and down town only to carry it home again, dry. I left it on its peg.

I had a craving to walk at the lakeshore. This was yet another way that Lohikarma might have been good or bad for me, I couldn’t decide: I loved walking in the town so much that I did it every day, sneezing at my knees’ insistent protests. It was slightly easier to descend the slope of the road and ascend via the stairs. I kept my eyes down as I descended—the only thing worse for my knees than climbing is falling, and one excellent way to fall is looking up while walking down.

I was thinking about a bench I liked to sit on. Painted red, facing west, toward the bend in the lake where the mountains hid it, with a little plaque that read “A Place of Tranquility Dedicated to Victims of Crime and Tragedy.” Maudlin. Obvious. Exactly what one wants, sometimes, when no one is looking.

Snow on a far peak. Goose turds on the lawn. Wild rose bush at the water’s edge. Child on a blow-up alligator. Birds in the trees, those dying generations at their song.

Turgid, clay-coloured clouds—here they came. Their unpredictability was the most predictable thing about them. I rose and turned my back on the lake. Behind me, a splash, as of a boy falling out of the sky. The rain began.

The weather was as crazy as everyone else in this town. I exaggerate, but truly I’m like a cat, I hate getting wet, and I was so looking forward to this stroll.

As I steamed, I saw a couple hurrying through the downpour. Seth and Lakshmi, with two umbrellas.

“Here,” Seth said, holding his out over my head. “Take it. You haven’t learned yet, eh?”

I opened my mouth to blast him, but who could do that to Seth? I was happy to see him, and his beautiful wife.

“We were on our way home,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

I looked at Lakshmi. She wasn’t repeating the invitation, as custom dictated. Should I have said I was busy? But I wasn’t. I wanted to go home with them.

Seth insisted I keep his green plaid umbrella while he and Lakshmi huddled in lockstep under her bell-shaped, floral one. It hid their heads, making conversation difficult, so while Seth and I shouted at each other as we went up the municipally maintained stairs—“Careful,” he warned, “slippery when wet!”—Lakshmi had an excuse to say little.

As we arrived at their gate, the rain frazzled to a stop and the sun re-emerged. We all smiled at each other and shook out the brollies.

Seth ferreted out that I had not yet eaten, and Lakshmi started pulling containers out of the fridge to fix me a plate: rice,
kootu kozhambu
, cabbage curry with coconut.

“A pukka Tam-Brahm
thali
!” I exclaimed. They looked uncertain. “It’s become fashionable, Tamil Brahmin cookery. Kids sent from Chennai to work in Delhi and Bombay banks imported their
pattis
and
mamis
to make the food they missed. When they invited their friends, it caught on.”

“It’s very healthy,” Seth said modestly. “Vegetarian and so on.” He fetched me a glass of water, then asked his wife, “Is Brinda home?”

Lakshmi widened her eyes, shrugged one shoulder. Preoccupation tensed her face as Seth went to the bottom of the stairs to call up, “Brinda?”

“She must have gone out while we were walking,” Lakshmi said to him as she put my plate in the microwave. Not surprising that she was attuned to Brinda’s distress, even if the girl wasn’t giving her parents any details.

“And how goes your work?” Seth asked, putting the plate in front of me.

Lakshmi added, “I imagine it’s tough going.”

I had to agree. “And tough to assess, at this stage.”

“Have you met with Venkat again?” Seth asked.

The food was delicious and I wished they would hush and let me eat.

“I haven’t,” I told him. “He was very forthcoming, that one time, but I’d be surprised if he’ll see me again.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Seth assured me.

I didn’t respond.

It was a nice opportunity, me, at their table, with the both of them. Lakshmi, like Venkat, had not volunteered to be interviewed, but here I was again, in her house at Seth’s invitation, and she was not acting terribly guarded. Perhaps I could draw Seth out on the remainder of the story. We had left off, I reminded him now, on the verge of Venkat’s return to Canada, after spreading Sundar’s ashes in the Kaveri River.

Seth and Lakshmi nodded. “He spent a few weeks at the Shivashakti ashram, I think, and then maybe a month or so with his mother,” Seth began.

“Yes, he came back to Canada mid-August or so,” Lakshmi confirmed.

“Bala, that Vancouver friend Sita and Sundar stayed with before they left, drove him back.”

“Long drive,” I said, thinking that I would be making it at the end of this week.

“Yes, and it would seem even longer given the company,” said Seth. Lakshmi scolded him with a gasp, but didn’t disagree.

The Sethuratnams had gotten ready to host both men that night, and assumed they might be putting Venkat up for some time, but when Seth greeted them and asked to carry their bags in, they told him no.

“Venkat has said he wants to go stay in his own house,” Bala explained, jogging in place to wake his cramped body, flinging arms out to crack his elbows in the mountain air. “One is not used to sitting so long! I will take him after the meal and sleep there tonight.” He was tall, lean, exacting. And a Shivashakti devotee, which might have been how he and Venkat met.

As Venkat and Bala entered ahead of him, Seth murmured the news to Lakshmi. She was skeptical, as was he: Venkat’s house had been left exactly as it was before the crash. How could it be healthy for him to go back to it?

Lakshmi had laid out an
idli
buffet, and as Bala headed to the dining table, Seth approached Venkat. “Why on earth do you want to go back home already?” he said softly. “Take it easy, stay here for awhile. I’ll take you there when you’re ready and we’ll …” He had to stop here because, as he and Lakshmi had discussed, they had no idea what Venkat’s plans were.

“I want to stay at my house, Seth,” Venkat replied. “All I have now are their memories.”

“You could see he was a man who had been crushed, emptied,” Lakshmi said now. “It struck us even more, after not having seen him for a couple of months. We were already starting to get on with life, a little. We had our kids and work, and so on. Isn’t that right?”

Seth nodded.

“But Venkat returned here to nothing. Worse than nothing, I suppose.”

“All those reminders,” Seth said, “but he wanted to be back among them.”

I imagined him saying that to Lakshmi that night, on Venkat’s return, as he watched his wife get ready for bed, her nightgown frill scooping the smooth expanse of her sternum.

The scent of Nivea cream crossed to him from her cheekbones, knuckles, elbows: all her sharp points. Seth thought of Venkat, in his own bedroom, which would be cold and unanimated by any feminine spirit. Would he turn on Sita’s bedside lamp, open a jar of cold cream and hold it under his nose, maybe even leave it open in the bathroom, along with her jewellery box? Would he put his nose among the hangers, drizzle a little of her shampoo on the pillow?