The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (40 page)

A semi-trailer passed her going the other way, a motorhome appeared behind her, and she saw them crossing each other where the ghost of her car might have sat ruminating on the fate it had escaped. Each vehicle had half her ghost-car stuck to its nose; the blood on their bumpers was hers.
Exit ghost
.

AT
8
P.M. ON A SNOWY NIGHT
in mid-December 2004, the Sethuratnams’ doorbell rang. Lakshmi, on the treadmill in front of the TV, started. She would never answer the door alone at night, however, and only interrupted her exercise under duress, so she did nothing but wait for Seth. Seth was in the bathroom and so expected Lakshmi to go. The doorbell rang again. They met at the door, each looking annoyed as Seth undid the dead bolt and Lakshmi opened the door.

It was Brinda, whom they weren’t expecting for another ten days.

“Sweetheart!”

She endured their embraces, then unzipped her down-filled jacket. Her hair fell in her face as she took off her boots. Even when she straightened, though, she didn’t look her parents in the eye. She hadn’t said anything yet, and didn’t seem overjoyed to have surprised them. She looked strange and had some strange mark on her face, and when Seth took a last look outside before closing the door, he saw that the front of her little Honda was pugged, with one headlight smashed.

“You drove here in that car?”

Brinda looked at him, grey and weary. “I had a little accident, a bighorn. It’s fine, I’m not hurt. I need to—I’m leaving Dev.”

“Oh, oh, oh.” Lakshmi folded their girl into her arms and Brinda’s
tears started up. “Of course you need to,” the mother said, and Seth thought,
She does?

It must be something only a mother could see. Lakshmi could be critical of her daughters but her claws came out at the first sign that anyone else might have hurt them. And neither she nor Seth loved Dev.

But Brinda had never told them anything before this, before saying she was … 
oh God
, it couldn’t be true. What had happened to her? What had happened to her car? What had he failed to protect her from?

They shuffled to the family room, Lakshmi’s arms still wrapped around her daughter. She gestured at him as he sat. “Seth. Get her a glass of water.” He went.

“I hadn’t—” Brinda paused, not exactly waiting for her father to return, but not wanting to repeat herself in case she said something he needed to hear. She was herself curious to hear what she would say. She hadn’t known she was certain about leaving Dev until she made her announcement at the door. The idea was six months old and the marriage was in tatters. But still she hadn’t decided. Seth gave her the water, she sipped and tried again, “I wasn’t …” She realized now that she had in fact been certain only since escaping death in dark and snow, since backing away from the mountain, hands up.

Her mother sat, holding Brinda’s hand and looking down tactfully so that her daughter wouldn’t see in her eyes the distress and anxiety that she was communicating, anyhow, through her fingers. Seth sat on her other side. Brinda felt an ancient surge of impatience—even now, when she needed them, when she was breaking their hearts—impatience with her parents’ love and worry. Prompted by this familiar inner storm, she lied.

“He’s been seeing someone else for awhile.” She pulled her hand out of Lakshmi’s. She had loved her mother’s hands as a child, soft skin, ridged nails, ropy veins she played with in moments when her mother couldn’t pay attention to her. She wished she could play with them now; she wished her mother were distracted and she were small again. She moved to an armchair, where they couldn’t crowd her.

“It wasn’t the first time, though it was the first time I threatened to leave him. He came to visit me in Baltimore, but when I got back for
Christmas, I could see there’s no way anything’s changing. So yesterday, while he was at work, I jumped in the car and drove.” She waved vaguely toward the great darkness without, began to cry again, and moved back to the sofa, where her mother put her arms around her. They had not left Seth quite enough room, but he perched where he could and put a hand on Brinda’s back.

She wiped her cheeks hard, felt her parents’ hands warm and heavy on her back and wished she could shrug them away. “I’ll be fine.”

Rage clawed at Seth as he went to the meditation corner, at one side of the hearth in their family room. He bent to take up his rudraksha mala, his hands shaking. Canada! What ever possessed them to come here? His mother had had it right when she said her greatest regret was letting him emigrate. It opened up the flood, in their family. Now half of his siblings’ children also were located abroad—oh God, what would his brothers and sisters say when they heard?

He began the concatenation of syllables his God had prescribed for him when they’d met:
Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai
. The prayer was just under his breath, holding up that bridge of air between him and the outside world, barely loud and hard and real enough to drown out the sounds of his wife getting his daughter settled in her old bedroom upstairs.

His mother had said that once you let your child leave India, you lose him. He comes back every four years, she said, with loving smiles and Cadbury’s chocolate, talking about all he misses, but then he fades away again to eat meat and speak English with white people in cold lands. He promised you he wouldn’t eat meat, he says he isn’t eating it, but you can smell it on him. If you let your child go, she warned the neighbours, you will never know him again and you will lose command of his children and his wife.

Lakshmi loved it in Canada. Seth had heard her talk about the freedoms she had here: not to participate in the oppression of ritual; not to
justify her choices for her children to all the relatives; not to attend every wedding of the season; to dress as she liked; to be alone when she needed. She had contrasted herself with Sita in this regard, whom Venkat had held to specific standards. Seth hadn’t had the strength, apparently.

Lakshmi had not suffered Seth’s level of anxiety when their daughters came of marriageable age. It wasn’t
her
dharma at stake.
Kanyadanam
. He had asked his wife, when the inquiries started to arrive from other parents in their community, from out east, from California, one from India, to talk to Brinda and Ranjani, to ask if they would consider one of their boys—promising young professionals from good families. Seth found them, at least superficially, suitable.
But, no
. Even though neither girl had any other prospect at that point, they demurred: they had been raised Canadian, they said. They couldn’t agree to a marriage with someone they didn’t know. They could get to know the boy before the marriage, Seth said. What they meant, they said, is that they would have to get to know the boy and then decide whether to marry him; they couldn’t agree to marry him and then get to know him. That, they said, would be too weird.

Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai
.

Being Canadian meant being fussy and then settling after all for second-best. Would Brinda be in this situation now if she had married into one of the families on offer? No, she would have finished her doctorate, gotten a job and had two babies by now. She would be happy, like everyone else.

There had always been something a little funny about Dev. Sure, he and Lakshmi had been happy at first: a PhD, Indian. Okay, the mother was uneducated, and Christian—not ideal. The father, not so communicative. Not Tamil. But overall, promising. Seth had been glad to be wrong in not trusting the young to choose for themselves. Now, look.

And Ranjani. His nostrils flared.

When she called to tell them she was pregnant, he had been enthusiastic. A baby is never wrong. They always liked Greg. Respectful to Seth and Lakshmi. Good to Ranjani, and good for her. But when Seth had asked
when they were going to get married, she had said, “Dad.” Her tone: practised and ungentle. “We’ve been living together for six years. In the eyes of the law, we’re married whether we want to be or not.” And what were he and Lakshmi supposed to say to their friends? Their mothers?

Lakshmi’s solution: when they announced the pregnancy, they said Ranjani and Greg had married a few years earlier in a civil ceremony without telling anyone, that the young couple didn’t believe in the spectacle and waste of weddings.

“You’re right that’s one reason I don’t want to get married,” Ranjani retorted, impatience humming up the wires. “Why say
I am
married at the same time?”

Lakshmi told her that unless she wanted to explain to each and every one of their friends why she wasn’t married, she should let her parents say what they want.

Seth hadn’t liked the strategy any better. “Why would anyone get married like that?”
Preposterous
.

“Seth! Remember that’s what Brinda’s friend Colleen did? She didn’t want to deal with the family politics, who to invite, this and that. I thought it was a great idea.”

“Who would do that?” he asked, and Lakshmi threw up her hands.

He felt his eyebrows dampen and wiped them with his thumb. His mother had been right. And now it was too late.

Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai
.

What was he praying for? Peace? But he didn’t want peace. He wanted to be angry. He wanted his daughters to be happy. Goddammit, why couldn’t he make them listen to him? Well, Ranjani did seem happy, so maybe Seth didn’t have a leg to stand on there. But Brinda: No husband. No job. No proper degree. It was his fault, for not being firmer. This country robbed parents of their dharma. He heard Lakshmi enter the family room behind him. It was her fault. She was always disagreeing with him. And now Brinda was paying the price. He heard her sit on the sofa, but as though from a great distance. A heat in his ears was obliterating the sound of his prayers.

Lakshmi waited a time, and when he didn’t stop or turn, came to sit beside him. She waited again, and then put a hand on his thigh. “Seth?”

His rage concentrated at the point of her touch. He was inside the head of Shiva, as the Lord sat deep in stone-cold meditation atop Mount Kailash. And here was Kama, now disguised as his wife, approaching as if innocently even while taking aim with a flowery arrow. Don’t look, Seth! The eye of your enlightenment will open and the cold beam of knowledge burn her to ash.

Seth fixed his gaze on the engraved-silver vessel of
vibhuti
on the hearth. Shivashakti materialized holy ash after each address, and Seth had replenished his supply on his last trip to India, standing in line as a devotee scraped portions into bits of paper torn from the
Hindu
newspaper. He had carried it home in his breast pocket.

Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai
.

Lakshmi withdrew.

And from inside the mind of his Lord, Seth now heard him speak, the silence of the everynowhere voice, so that the hiss in his ears dissolved.
Yes, my son, Kama is an arrogant imp—Desire, the great disruptor. If not for him, the cycles of creation and destruction would halt! And well might your thoughts be disrupted! Please, sir, ask Vanity and Illusion to stand aside. All you have suffered, Lakshmi has suffered too. Every decision she has taken was also yours. This crisis has tipped your rajas out of balance, and so you show your flank to anger and desire. Think again. You can slow time by speeding motion, but you cannot reverse it. Right your rajas. Slow yourself. Open to your other half
.

Seth put his rudraksha mala down and took up a pinch of
vibhuti
in a single gesture, smearing it on his forehead and neck as he rose. He found Lakshmi upstairs in her own meditation corner, in Ranjani’s old room.

Ranjani had fled to Vancouver straight after high school. He and Lakshmi could never understand. Brinda was still living at home, going to Harbord. She seemed happy. Ranjani made it clear she would never move back—took all her albums, posters, knick-knacks and doo-dads.
By contrast, when Brinda left, she said she wanted to return, and so took only the bare essentials.

The first few years, he and Lakshmi left the girls’ bedrooms as they were. They hoped Ranjani might at least come home for summers; she didn’t. They hoped Brinda might find a job at Harbord after finishing her PhD. She didn’t finish her PhD. And when she married, Lakshmi helped her pack up her sentimental items to take to Edmonton, since they could all now finally accept that she would never again move back home. Seth thought of her now, in the queen bed they installed so that she and Dev could use it together when they came for holidays.

Gradually, too, they had made changes in Ranjani’s room. She told them not to wait for a wedding. She told them, a few years after she met Greg, that she was living with him and that she wouldn’t come home for holidays unless he could come too, and stay in the same room with her. Seth and Lakshmi meekly got a larger bed for her room also. There were other guests, from time to time, they reasoned, for whom it would come in handy.