The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (42 page)

How could I have thought to do the trip in three days? Five driving days later, some of them very long, I pulled into the parking lot
beneath my little apartment, available through the holidays, miraculously, despite Lohikarma’s skiing, its pubs, its unhurried jollity. Snow-blind, lumbago in full flare, I bumped my roll-aboard up the stairs, blowing through the knife-thin ridge of snow atop each iron slat, and extracted the key from its combo-lock safe. I was in bed in 30 minutes, and slept on my back, exuding avuncular exhaustion in snores so loud they woke me.

Brinda came to see me next morning, bringing an Italian-style coffee for me (very nice), and full of news. Her hip points jutted beneath her jeans—she had lost weight she couldn’t afford—and her skin was shiny and blotchy. I smelled insomnia on her—a musty scent, as of slept-in clothes or sheets. It was magnified by the crystalline scent of snow that blew in with her entrance.

“Not sleeping?” I asked her.

She started and looked back at me as she made her way onto my sofa. “Not much, no.” Her hair looked lank, and she wore at least two bulky sweaters. And yet there was also something frantically cheerful there.

“Tell me.” I took the armchair, my hand warming on my paper-cup cappuccino.

“Yeah.” She exhaled through her lips, not a long pause. “Now that I’ve decided I’m leaving Dev, I can’t understand how I stuck with him for so long.”

Had she said this last summer? Our minds often work cyclically.

“He’ll never change. We tried counselling when I went back last summer, but he never properly admitted a thing. It was all still unresolved when I left, and then he came to see me in October, and it was terrible. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. As soon as he left Baltimore, I started—I, like, fell into an affair.” Her mouth crept up, an involuntary smile.

“Good,” I said, more emphatically even than I had intended.

“It’s … friendly. A French guy. Nothing that will last.”

“Sounds perfect.” I let caution ring in my voice.

“I think so. You can’t totally control your emotions in these things, but I would be surprised if we ended up anything more, or less, than
friends. He’s a, you might say, a libertine.” She looked amused at the term, but perhaps was trying to gauge if I was shocked.

“French, you say?”

“Half. He grew up in Brazil.”

“A finishing school for libertines.”

She snorted. “Yeah. It’s not as though I would want to be rebounding to, say, Adrian.” She crumbled into tears.

“Oh, dear girl.” Where were the tissues? Dear, dear girl. “Are you in touch with Adrian?”

“He’s sticking it out with his girlfriend, for now. His father died, in October, right when the worst hit me with Dev.” She blew her nose. “I think he was back and forth quite a bit, through the fall. I e-mailed him, after I arrived, a couple of days ago, wondering if he’d be here for the holidays. We hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months.”

“And?”

“He’s in Vancouver, meeting his mother at his sister’s house.”

“Ah.”

“The wierdest part is how terrifying it is. Dev never made me feel all that secure—he was always threatening to leave his job for God knows what, and spent most of what he earned on music and films and eating out. We didn’t own a house. But we had a home, a life. Now I have no home, no job, no real relationship. It’s like the earth cracked open under me.”

And yet, she was having a wonderful year, in all other ways. She talked to me: the thesis, hard but exhilarating; Baltimore, different from anywhere she’d lived; new friends, their writing, their escapades; her professors, their opinions, their mannerisms—she was on fire with it all. And yet. The doubt and insecurity were real, and justified. She would get over it, but now, she was shuffling one foot forward through very interesting terrain while the other toed a crevasse so deep she was scared to look down. (Yet another laboured metaphor, but surely you are accustomed to them by now?)

I rubbed my neck as she spoke, and tried to hide the stiffness in my back. She would be here some four or five weeks; Johns Hopkins had a
long winter break, lots of time to work on her thesis. Her sister, about whom Brinda had spoken little, would be home in a week. I couldn’t tell how Brinda felt about her, but had grown too tired to ask. I walked her out—we would meet again in a few days—and bought a paper across the street. The trial was back in the news: it had ended. Everyone, including me, had nearly stopped paying attention. The justice, one Josephson, had announced his intention to reveal his verdict on March 16. I would have to return to Vancouver to hear it.

Back in the flat, I lay down. I had called Seth the day I left Ottawa, and we had an afternoon appointment. Would he ask any further about my abrupt departure in the fall? Would I be able to avoid Venkat? I realized I didn’t care much whether I did or not. My last thought, before I snoozed, was how asinine, how ridiculous, I was still to be so excited, four days later, at having talked to Rosslyn.

SETH
’
S SKIN WAS GREYISH
. Surely, he couldn’t have developed wrinkles in six weeks, but I had not seen before this downward-pointing pattern in the lines of his face. His eyebrows, particularly, seemed on a collision course, as though destined to squeeze shut the third eye. He rose to greet me, then sat again behind his desk.

All I could think to ask was, “How are you?”

“I am—we’re fine,” he replied. The Newton’s cradle was on his desk and he set the balls a-clack. “Brinda, my elder daughter—you met her? Last summer.”

I indicated that I had.

“She has come home for the holidays, earlier than expected. Her husband has not come with her. My second daughter will come next week, with her, er, her husband. She is expecting.” The steelies swung in two-two time. He watched them for a long time, then spoke while still looking at them. “One of many mysteries, in physics, is why it is that all the atoms of any given substance configure identically. Their size, their weight, their behaviour—at least in limited circumstances—will be uniform. And if we try to change them, they will act so as to return to their initial state. Conservation of momentum, static states, conservation of energy—resistance to change seems to be a universal law.”

“Even with people?”

“Feynman—you ever read Richard Feynman? Genius. He said, ‘what animals do, atoms do.’ We are a mass of interlocked systems, from our atoms to our organs. No system wants to break or change, so when you seem to see such a break, you look for what else changes to accommodate it, so that the overall effect is still equilibrium.”

“Or you examine the laws to see how your theory fails.” All this was equally applicable to therapy.

“Exactly. You know anything about quantum theory?”

Oh God
. I searched my recollections but quickly realized I wanted only to hear what he had to say. “No,” I answered.

He settled back in his chair, knees and elbows spreading slightly. “It’s the most elegant set of developments in physics since classical times.” His eyebrows had crept back into positions of repose. “Essentially, quantum theory is based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says we can’t know where an atom is and how it is moving at the same time. We can only know one or the other. Yes?”

I gave an ambiguous nod.

“Either way, the existence of the atom, at a place, or at a speed, is confirmed only via the observation. Until it is observed, in other words, it effectively does not exist, except as a possibility, a sort of ghost. I take much longer to develop this in my classes, you understand.”

Some mechanism clicked or whirred in the recesses of my mind. “Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.

He beamed and slapped his knee. “Excellent! What is the paradox?”

I had gotten myself into this. I worked in hopes of another smile. “That, uh, the cat is neither, or both, alive or dead?”

“Very good. And this is not the cat’s experience, obviously.”

“But how is the paradox resolved?”

“This continues to be an area of exploration. Niels Bohr speculated that, in a sense, reality occurs at the point of observation, that many related possibilities remain equally real or unreal until observation separates one from the others, causing the others to vanish or fall away. Me, I like to think about the multi-verse proposition, that each time an
observation is made, the universe splits. So that in one universe, Schrödinger’s cat lives; in the other, it is dead.”

In one ramified universe, Sundar and Sita are alive; in this one, they have died. In one universe, the Sikh pogroms happened; in another, the rule of law prevailed. In some universes, humans never evolved, while elsewhere in time and space I sit on a branch of a branch of a branch of reality, playing Monopoly with Asha’s children and talking John Coltrane with her Bosnian-émigré husband.

Whereas in this one, I talk to Seth.

“Physics supports this?” I asked, then. “You believe this?” This theory seemed wildly improbable and unproveable and simplistic. And it wasn’t even comforting.

“Science, I think, need not prove anything,” he said. “At times it has appeared to, but some say a theory’s value is in its usefulness: if it can describe or explain a set of phenomena, it is good as far as that goes.”

I thought I was catching on. “As one Canadian therapist put it, stories used to be considered true because they were meaningful, not meaningful because they were true.”

“Precisely. This eliminates dualism, just as in Hinduism we are trying to eliminate the separation between self and God, matter and consciousness. We understand the world to be an illusion. Heisenberg said, ‘The division of the world into body and soul, inner world and outer world, is no longer adequate.’ In observing the world, we create it.”

I have read that once people didn’t speak of belief in God so much as behave in a way consistent with such a belief. When I was young, when my parents wanted to go to the temple, I went, I bent, I prayed as needed. No one asked whether I believed. Was Seth saying that every thinking person is an agnostic? Bring God into being through worship; no need to try to prove God’s existence. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

“I am not a scientist, however,” he said. “I am merely a teacher, parroting laws, like Mandy. ‘E=mc
²
!’ ‘E=mc
²
!’ Bloody smart, for a bird!” He chuckled, a sound more like a hiccup, with the pressure of his distress.

Unlike most people, Seth is most himself when joking, and the
room let its breath out. But then he gave me a different smile, and started again to age, the lines in his face unsmoothing and pointing once again in accusation at his elongating nose and drooping mouth. The transformation—from professor alight with the beauty of ideas to man bent under a burden of worry—was profound and touching.

We said our farewells. He turned, reaching into his jacket pocket, turned back. “Where are you spending the holidays?”

“I—here in Lohikarma, in fact.” Caught off guard. “I have a lot of work and I thought I might have the peace and solitude here to get it done.”

He appeared to accept this, then to remember something. “Our daughter’s
velaikappu
, bangle ceremony. Does your community do this? The ceremony for a pregnant woman.”

I nodded vaguely. I might have heard of such a thing.

“Traditionally only women attend. But our daughter refused to have a proper wedding. They married in a secret civil ceremony, no guests, totally private. Ridiculous,” he said apologetically, even though my reaction was to admire her. “But finally we have a chance to celebrate the marriage, the baby! You must come. December thirtieth. Most of the Indians in town will be there!”

To anyone else I would have said this was the best reason to avoid it, but how, when one daughter’s future weighed so heavily on him, could I refuse the opportunity to celebrate the other’s?

“Thank you,” I said.

“You have a mailing address here? I’ll send you an invitation.”

His hand had slipped back into his pocket as I wrote it on a Post-it on his desk. I left, Seth’s loop of rudraksha beads clicking softly through his fingers as he counted time in units of God’s name, the door clicking softly shut behind me.

’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
when Ranjani and Greg arrived. Seth and Lakshmi went together to fetch them from the Castlegar airport, so that all four tumbled into the house a bit giddy, what with Ranjani flying barely under the pregnancy wire and the incipient holiday-party atmosphere generated on the hour-long drive. Brinda, who had spent their absence on the couch, curled around the cat, let them in.

She had called Ranjani a week earlier, to break her news, get it over with and spare her parents, who talked to Ranjani every couple of days, the agony of concealing it. They would start telling relatives and friends across the globe after the holidays.

Ranjani had been rigidly thin since late adolescence, never having recovered from the rigours of losing her baby fat. Now she looked cheeky and appetizing as she twinkled in on shiny boots. Earrings fanning her face like excited maids. Her beach ball, as she called it, draped in black. Handsome, solicitous Greg followed her in with the baggage.