The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (43 page)

The sight of them made Brinda want to stab someone, any anonymous person randomly passing behind her.
Turn, slash, turn back. Don party face
.

They greeted with hugs. Greg carried the bags up to their room and
descended to receive a beer from Seth’s outstretched hand, while Ranjani arranged herself on the sofa with ginger ale.

Seth offered Greg his recliner, but Greg sat instead beside Ranjani, a hand on her knee.

“I’m nervous about you flying.” Seth pointed at Ranjani. “And I said you shouldn’t be driving in Vancouver.”

She rolled her eyes. “Is this just while I’m pregnant? Or d’you want to come out and chauffeur us till the baby’s, what, twenty-five? Or maybe forever?”

Seth tinkled his ice. It would take three lifetimes to learn how not to offend his daughters, mostly because he didn’t see why he should learn such a thing. What did it matter? Ranjani was so much warmer these days, calling to chat about fetal development and delivery options, sounding happier and acting more open toward them than she had since she was a child. In truth, he could feel he was becoming reconciled to it, her refusal to marry. As Lakshmi pointed out, they themselves might not ever have gotten legally married, had he not had to bring her to Canada. He wondered if Hindu priests back home were now legal officiants. He and Lakshmi had never even had birth certificates, but that didn’t mean they weren’t born.

Ranjani said she and Greg were legally joined, common-law, emphasis on “law,” saying it made no legal difference. Seth didn’t quite trust that—if it was true, why were there separate categories?—but he trusted Greg. He and Ranjani were settled. That was the important thing.
A child, a child
, Seth chorused to himself. Long, warm fingers encircled his rib cage and he glanced over at Brinda, who looked as though similar tentacles gripped her, less affectionately. He and Lakshmi had longed for a grandchild ever since Brinda’s marriage. Why had it not occurred to them that they would have one from Ranjani? Mostly because Ranjani, through the long years of never quite becoming the film artist she had aimed to be, had never mentioned motherhood. Brinda had. Brinda married. And then she rolled off the rails of stability, even while Ranjani’s bile and disillusion turned some corner and receded. Ranjani found a steady job, as a videographer with a consulting company. Greg’s work
schedule, though still erratically freelance, became full, as did his wallet. They were no longer struggling artists; they were yuppies.

He looked again at Brinda, the daughter he had thought he understood. No house, no husband, no babies. What had happened to her?

The sound of his mantra filled his ears as though he were holding conch shells to his head on a crowded beach, shutting out the holiday chatter to pretend to listen to the sound of the inexorable ocean.
Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai
.

When Brinda had showed up in distress, Seth called in sick, missing his last classes of the semester, since Lakshmi had already used up her holiday time for the year. He put off his grading, as well as piled-up duties for the Shivashakti Centre of the Kootenays, on whose board he served (now Past President), to show Brinda he had all the time in the world for her. After a few days, though, she made it clear that wasn’t what she wanted.

His wife had always been the one to speak with their daughters when they were upset. She would then tell Seth what was wrong. The arrangement suited them all. This time, when Lakshmi asked Brinda to tell her more about what had happened, Brinda had said she was still working it out herself. Lakshmi had pressed a little—she wanted to know, as he did, about the affairs—
who how long when such a shock
—but Brinda had reacted badly, saying it wasn’t her responsibility to mitigate that shock. Lakshmi told him later, pressing her thumb and forefinger into her eyelids, “She’s right, of course. What difference does it make?”

After that, they tiptoed. At dinner, they would talk about the news, about family friends—others’ weddings, others’ babies, subjects that fizzled quickly—and about Brinda’s thesis, the only topic on which she grew animated and assured.

Given that there was practically nothing, nothing practical, that Seth could do to help Brinda or to assuage her pain, he had filled every spare moment with prayer, sitting at the shrine whenever possible and, otherwise—at traffic lights, at the photocopier, at the kitchen sink—filling his thoughts with the name of the Eternal One.

Which was practical in one sense: it kept his head from popping off in a mortal scream, and so meant that if ever there was anything his family needed, he was still alive to do it. When he was distracted from both prayer and worry, say, in a student conference, it was the worry that returned first, in a fist-biting rush, a million tiny pickaxes.

“I can very well see that I’m in a fix,” Brinda yelled at them in a rare moment of open discussion. “Thirty-five, no job, home, marriage. I don’t need you to worry. I’m doing plenty of that.”

She was asking them to buoy her up with faith in her abilities, her decisions, her future. But that’s exactly what they had done her whole life. They hadn’t opposed any of her decisions. And she seemed no more pleased than they were at the result.

Was he praying for Shivashakti to help his daughter? He had never prayed in that way before. Could Brinda be helped by a god she didn’t believe in? Seth believed: perhaps Shivashakti would show him once again which course of action to take.

Thinking that he might, Seth grew irrationally afraid, once more reminded of Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, in the moment when Krishna, to convince the warrior of his own puniness, reveals himself in his full divinity. He thought about it now, that almost too-familiar passage, as he watched his women talk and ran his palm along the family cat’s bony back. It was the passage that J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted, or misquoted, or was said to have misquoted, even mentally, at the moment when he saw his bomb explode.

Seth used a 1965 video clip in his Intro Physics classes, of Oppenheimer, looking like a heavy-browed elf with his bald head and pointy ears, his eyes aimed away from the camera, recalling that moment twenty years before. “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

Of course, one can quibble. The god in the Bhagavad Gita is never called Vishnu, but rather Krishna—one of Vishnu’s incarnations, Prince
Arjuna’s charioteer. The god doesn’t merely “take on his multi-armed form” but reveals the full radiance of his divinity—containing multitudes, not only of arms, but heads, bodies, consciousnesses. It is more than mortal sight, mortal understanding, can bear. And he doesn’t do it merely “to impress” Arjuna, he does it because it seems the only way to make Arjuna understand that whatever he does or doesn’t do, everyone on that battlefield is destined to die—as is the Prince himself.

Most importantly, though, the word in Sanskrit that Oppenheimer translates as “Death” is also “Time.” The translation Seth and Lakshmi used to read with the kids says, “I am the mighty world-destroying Time …” Seth would use this in his class for an anecdotal break in the sessions on fusion and fission, but would return to it at the end of the course, when he talked about time as perceived by the average person—inexorable, linear, constantly vanishing—then as conceived by most physicists—as another dimension, as with space, and subject to all those limits and freedoms, an elastic and explorable territory of existence.

And anyway, according to Oppenheimer’s brother, whatever Oppenheimer may have thought, all he actually said when the bomb exploded was, “It worked.”

AN ASIDE. I HAD THOUGHT
, on this visit to Lohikarma, of telling Seth what Venkat was doing. On our first meeting, I was prevented by his distress. The longer I waited, the harder it was, but it wasn’t only that. I feared that Seth somehow knew, and, worse, that he would approve.

This is what I think: Oppenheimer believed he had usurped God. With the bomb, he and his co-creators could control Death–Time, the destroyer of worlds. They had moved outside of history. Oppenheimer was not without humility and public sentiment, but I believe this is what he thought. Seth may have understood that moment in the Gita as the one in which Arjuna sees he is powerless to affect the course of history, but I don’t think he thought beyond that to question the hubris of those who would wage war in God’s name or America’s.

My guess is that Seth, like practically all of our countrymen, felt proud that in Oppenheimer’s moment of great glory, when he had a vision of what the world might become as a result of his genius—
I am become Death
—the scripture that best served this self-awe was Hindu. I have known many who have wanted to use this as evidence that Kaliyug, the destruction of the known world, will culminate in a Hindu raj.

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has an essay, “The Anger of the Damned,” concerning the fact that most of us in poor countries know we are condemned to shorter and harder lives than people in the
developed world, that our countries are not as wealthy or as well run, and that we feel this is, in some way, our own fault. Colonialism is now almost three generations past, we say, in our conferences and coffee shops. What is wrong with us? Pamuk speaks of the “overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world’s population.” What he doesn’t mention is that this feeling is not limited to the poorest strata of these vertiginously vertical societies. My country of billions is as steep as it is broad, and those teetering at the top also feel a rage-making shame at our national poverty.

This is how Sudhir Kakar (the writer and psychoanalyst I would be if Kakar weren’t that person already) puts it in his groundbreaking analysis of Hindu–Muslim violence in India: “For the elites of the non-Western world, there is an additional humiliation in their greater consciousness of the defeat of their civilizations in the colonial encounter with the West. This defeat is not merely an abstraction or a historical memory, but one which is confirmed by the peripheral role of their countries in the international economic and political order of the post-colonial world.”

The governing classes’ ongoing failure to provide for their poor is held up to them at meetings of the UN–OPEC–IMF. It is a blade idly and perpetually scratching their testicles. And this is why I worried that Seth, even if he would never profess a politics of sectarian violence, was not likely to disagree with it. How could he be a devotee of Shivashakti’s for so long and not know that Hindu nationalist groups recruited on the ashram grounds, insinuating themselves into conversations with the vulnerable, particularly those with connections to Western money? I could only think that he must know that, even if he didn’t know—or didn’t want to know—that Venkat had succumbed.

What if I revealed Venkat’s secret and Seth was not disillusioned, not even disapproving? Could I love him anymore? Perhaps. I could not yet risk it.

CHRISTMAS MORNING, AFTER PRESENTS
and brunch, Seth showered and made one more cup of coffee for the road. His daughters loitered in the kitchen. “Are you coming, Brinda?” Seth jingled his keys in his pocket.

“Time to go, already?” She rose from her chair and stretched.

“I like to be there by eleven fifteen.”

As Seth backed down the steep driveway to the equally steep road, Brinda said, “And how is Venkat Uncle?”

Seth raised his eyebrows and grimaced. “My guess is that he’s lying in bed with the goddamn birds flying around. He’s going to catch avian flu. When I was there yesterday, one of them …” He stumbled into the trap of his daughter’s amusement. “It went … potty. On the table, while he was eating. While he was feeding it from his plate.” He shuddered.

“You’ve been complaining about that for over fifteen years, Dad.” Brinda’s voice bounced back to her from the car window, her breath dimming the pane, the cold taking it back. “It didn’t go in his food, did it?”

“It could have. Scary.”

Venkat didn’t deserve to be smitten by anything so protracted—and ironic—as avian flu, Brinda thought. A nice fat lightning bolt, though, or a quadruple-ventricle cardiac arrest—picture the fist of his heart unfurling as his mottled soul ascends—might offer him deliverance.

“Scary.” She mimicked her father’s tone almost without thought. “It could have gone in yours.”

“I don’t eat anything there, unless I’ve taken it out of the box and microwaved it myself.”

“I’ve seen that on microwaveable boxes: Full Complement of Daily Vitamins, and Neutralizes Bird Poop!” Brinda grinned in adolescent triumph, but then the cheer and normalcy of the moment made her self-conscious, her depression rising again, a veil between her and life.

They reached downtown within five minutes of leaving their house. Seth turned left along High Street, her hometown’s heart, six short blocks hammocked between low purple mountains. So different from when she was growing up: brick sidewalks now curved up to fudge shop doors; scrawny young trees guarded wrought-iron benches to host tired tourists’ bottoms. Historic buildings had been restored, though almost none for its original purpose.

Brinda did miss the ratty Dairy Queen, the saggy-ceilinged Catholic bookstore where she bought votive candles for self-consciously kitsch undergrad parties. But tourism was insurance that her hometown wouldn’t disappear. So many other boom towns became ghost towns. Even her parents’ villages in India were returning to dust: a few old people on verandas grinned through betel-blotched teeth as their houses literally crumbled behind them, walls pitted for lack of whitewash, bricks washing away in the rain, kids and money washing away to the cities.

There was a new W
ELCOME TO
L
OHIKARMA
sign at the edge of town, with the ouroboros, a dragon biting its own tail. When she was little, the town logo had frightened her. It looked like self-obliteration.