The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (28 page)

How long would Venkat be able to recall Sita’s own scent? Had he already forgotten it?

Seth felt enveloped as his wife got under the covers. He put his arms around her waist, his muzzle in her neck. He trailed his nose down between her breasts; the nightgown pulled down easily to let him kiss them. It pulled up easily to let him kiss her belly. Those other scents carry you to this one; you fall to your knees before its regal advance, its crazy-making, uncatchable variety.

Erotic reverie: I was tingling lightly. It had been a long time. I shifted in my chair, swallowed hard, uncrossed and recrossed my legs.

Seth and Lakshmi were talking, not to me, to each other, about how their daughters confided in Lakshmi (but not everything, as I knew), about how women are trained for empathy. While I saw in my mind’s eye Seth watching Lakshmi as she curved, sleeping, through the dark. The mood of terror had subsided and yet his need for Shivashakti remained as pressing as ever. He had not missed a satsang all summer.

“I have a recurring nightmare,” Seth admitted to me now.

It went like this: He fell asleep, almost. He wakened, falling,
gasp, thump
, on the pillow. Not uncommon. Happened to him all his life, as it did to others. Except that, since the bomb, it always came with the same nightmare: he was naked on a clifftop. Dark night, rubble beneath his toes, arms outstretched, a breeze in his face, on his back. Pushed or lifted, he toppled into the void.

“I get it once every year or so,” he said.

“Really?” Lakshmi asked. “You never told me.”

“I did,” Seth answered.

“You never,” she said.

“I did,” he said. “Years ago. You forgot.”

“Maybe, if you only told me years ago.”

“I assumed you would remember, so why would I tell you again?”

Seth felt a keen disappointment in Venkat and Bala’s early departure that night: he had been anticipating, more than he wanted to admit even to himself, conversation on the subject of their now-shared God. He had left the latest lecture compendium on the coffee table, but the men never made it into the living room.

Still, he couldn’t completely restrain himself, and had asked Bala, over dinner, “I recently acquired Shivashakti’s lectures from last year. Have you read it yet?”

“No, no,” said Bala. “But of course we attend satsang every week, so we never miss a lecture. When did you become interested?”

Lakshmi glared across the food at Seth.

“I’m not sure when …” Seth kept his gaze averted from his wife, on Bala. “Well, was there any one address or topic that you specially liked? I’m very taken with his ideas on family and community life. To think he could have such wisdom on both though he himself has neither!”

“You could as well say he has both.” Bala prissily dabbed small bites of idli in ghee and
melagaipodi
, making Seth feel bizarrely compelled to stuff himself. “His devotees are family and community.”

“
Ahmama
. True.” Seth wagged his head in agreement with Bala, and wagged it again in appreciation of his wife. “Lakshmi:
mallipoo
idlis. Wonderful.” They were. Nothing like Lakshmi’s idlis, particularly with eggplant
sambar
. He addressed Bala with renewed cheer. “And the best part is that it is eternal, isn’t it? There is no death, in his family. Because it is not the individual who loves or is loved by him. It is the mind of God.”

“I think it is correct to say the individual devotee is loving him.” Bala
tossed bites of banana into his mouth without touching his lips, Brahmin-style, and folded the peel neatly onto his plate. “But we are also part and parcel of his makeup.”

“Yes, yes.” Seth licked his fingers, then his whole palm, as noisily as he could. What did Venkat make of this? Was he even listening?

It was Seth who took the lead in the work of assisting Venkat to re-enter his former life. He asked a hundred questions about Venkat’s routine in the morning: What time did he get up on weekdays? How did he get up? What did he do first? What did he do next? And together, step by step, they worked out a new routine, without the sounds of Sita first readying the puja corner for his prayers and then preparing his breakfast. Venkat would set his alarm clock. He would mix an oatmeal packet into a bowl of water and put it in the microwave before sitting to pray, so that it would be ready when he was done.

Did Venkat say,
Seth, I’m not a baby
? No. As an Indian man and a psychologist, I will attest that there are very few useful generalizations to be made about the Indian male psyche, but this may be one: Indian men are raised to be cared for. An Indian woman might have told such a friend as Seth to back off, but Venkat meekly accepted this instruction and Seth’s monitoring, in the first few weeks of the semester, to make sure that he was following the routines Seth had devised. In those weeks, everyone wanted to visit and bring food. Venkat’s already-full freezer was packed to the hinges until the Sethuratnams, the unofficial but undisputed organizers of his life, asked friends if they could hold off, please, until the stores were depleted.

One other generalization to be made about Indians—they don’t tiptoe around death. You could even say that about me, as hyper-perceptive and socially hapless as I am. This is not to say that Indians’ ways of coping up are better. There are the hysterics, who will fall down and thrash for you so that you are numbed, the depths of your own emotion unable to compete with the heights of theirs. There are
whole communities that insist on immediate remarriage. Many of the women bereaved in the Sikh pogroms complained of being remarried to a relative of their late husband’s in such rapid order they felt they were supposed to throw their love and grief out the window on the way to the wedding. But to the extent that Indians have failed fully to progress into secular modernism, we understand that death is part of life, while books about Westerners and grief all talk of people who stayed away from the bereaved, possibly out of fear of becoming sad, possibly because they don’t know what to say and fear saying the wrong thing.

Lakshmi also raised the question I had been waiting to ask the families on my next round of interviews: their thoughts on the bombing as an act of brown-on-brown terrorism that a (nearly) white government failed to prevent or even properly to investigate.

“I wondered at the time if
that
was why the white-Canadian colleagues avoided Venkat,” she said, her elbows on the glass-top table. “Maybe they were afraid, if they talked to him, he would blame them.”

“Some Indians also felt ashamed that the conflict in India had spilled over here,” Seth said. “You can feel you’re all being lumped together.”

“You felt isolated?” I asked.

I remembered this myself—I had lived in Canada from 1969 to 1983, and every new person I met asked where I was from and whether I agreed with his assessment of some Indian restaurant’s authenticity. To Rosslyn’s family, I was always intractably foreign. Her mother was shocked that I ate meat; her father asked me about suttee. He asked her, in private, how she could be sure I didn’t have another wife and family back home. When she told me, we laughed, but he must have read a news story that frightened him. Poor man: he was concerned for his daughter. And they were never unkind to me.

Seth nodded slowly. “I haven’t felt like that, for a long time.”

“Is that so?” I hadn’t been back long enough to tell what had changed.

“Yes, I think I mentioned. You raise your kids here, they feel more Canadian than Indian, they marry Canadians, or …”

His voice faded there, quickly and strangely, and I was convinced
that he had somehow sniffed out what was happening with Brinda. My best guess, in retrospect, was that his faltering was related in fact to his
other
daughter, who had called that afternoon with unsettling news.

“For me, it has been Shivashakti,” he went on, his voice strengthening, his back straightening, “more than anything, who has helped me feel at home here. Our centre has members from all over—Indian, not Indian, it makes no difference—and the community service means you reach out, you get to know people in a way that is impossible otherwise. My guru gave me the way to see and feel how I belong here.”

Lakshmi had straightened too. “But even those of us who are not devotees have found a way to feel that we belong too.”

I mentioned her eyes, right? They blazed.

I helped them remember what they had been speaking of when I had diverted them: settling Venkat back into his life.

The only subject of disagreement (on this, they could agree) had been his house. Seth tried to suggest that Venkat come to stay at their house while he and Lakshmi packed away Sundar and Sita’s things and shifted the rooms around a little. But Venkat was categorical. The house stayed as it was.

Venkat’s courses that fall were ones he had taught before, Statistical Methods, an intro course that rotated among faculty members, and Theory of Experiment Design. Neither was particularly challenging.

Lakshmi and Seth asked him to come every Friday night to dinner. He complied, though Seth usually had to remind him, either catching him at the office before he left or, on a couple of occasions, phoning him when, after waiting some time, they realized he had forgotten.

Also, at least one night a week, Seth would take Venkat to a Shivashakti satsang. It was odd to feel that he was guiding Venkat back into his own fold. Seth was also uncomfortably aware of having ranked the rest of his fellow devotees according to his own arbitrary standards of temperament and authenticity.

Daisy and Irene were in the middle somewhere. “Where’s your pretty wife?” one or the other would often ask. Maybe if he told Lakshmi they made him uncomfortable, she would come with him more often. Carsten, the leonine young man who read the lecture the first time Seth came, was on the lower end. Seth sensed his ambition and didn’t much like the way Carsten talked down to him. Very near the bottom was the Reverend Jonathan Dunn, a Unitarian pastor whom Seth found suspicious for no good reason. One night, he had persuaded Lakshmi and his daughters to come to satsang. On the drive home, he wondered aloud whether Dunn attended every kind of service in town. “Is he hoping to get people to come to his church?” Lakshmi and the girls replied that the Unitarian philosophy might be closer to their own even than Shivashakti’s.

“What?” He turned around to look at them, three captivating, dusk-lit strangers. “You would go to that guy’s church but I have to beg you to come to satsang with me?”

“It’s nothing personal, Dad,” Brinda said.

He would think about this exchange for years.
Nothing personal?
What the hell did that mean? How could it not be
personal
?

It was an irony of the worst sort that those devotees most visibly buoyed by a surging elation in their Lord were the ones Seth least liked to talk to. The ones he liked best—Nick Copeland and Kaj Halonen—for all their steadiness and dedication, tended not to effuse in the way Seth himself wanted and needed. He had pinned some hopes on the Indian families. Maybe, he thought, he needed people who knew what his ideas of God had been before. But they, too, disappointed him.