The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (44 page)

Then, when she left for Edmonton, she had a tiny ouroboros tattooed around her navel. Friends, and Dev, had thought it was an expression of loyalty to her hometown. She didn’t correct them. To her, it was about Sundar, but how or why wasn’t clear. She never told her parents.

Her father was still talking about Venkat. “He’s on leave, because of that breakdown, or whatever it was. Terrible. No teaching for the rest of this academic year.” Seth rolled his head from side to side. His winter
coat was new, looked stiff. “The Dean told me they’re going to ask him to retire.”

“Does he still come on Fridays?” Brinda realized he hadn’t come last night.

“Oh, sure. We postponed yesterday. He’ll come tonight.” He gave her an uncertain smile and then found a spot and began to parallel park.

Brinda stared ahead as he bounced the car forward and back a few times—unnecessarily, in her view. “I’m not looking forward to seeing him.”

“Tch.” He finally put the car in park and got out, put his hands to his lower back and stretched, then bent to squint at the meter. “Poor fellow.”

She followed her father to the entrance, each of them cradling a large bag of tomatoes. Mealy though tomatoes were at this time of year, the chronically vitamin-C-deprived homeless would relish them.

The Welcome Centre was located in the old Hudson’s Bay building, vacated when the chain’s stores across the country went down, the economy a giant game of Whac-A-Mole. The homelessness advocacy organization, a strong one with branches throughout the lower mainland, had signed a cheap lease, with the condition that this would not be a shelter but rather a place to provide a meal, counselling, and other daylight-hour resources to the region’s homeless, a population that had always been large but burgeoned during exceptionally bad or good times. The soup kitchen was set up in the old cafeteria. Various community groups and individuals provided volunteer assistance, but the Shivashakti devotees were a mainstay, staffing lunch every Saturday and donating much of the food they served.

Seth and Brinda signed in at a desk manned by a security guard with a crewcut who was densely highlighting a battered paperback. Brinda checked the multi-creased spine:
The Fountainhead
. The Welcome Centre door opened behind them, blowing in the fragrance of spices heated in oil.

“Oh, Brinda, you have come! To help also.” Mrs. Arora, the wife of Seth’s colleague in the physics department, waddled toward her. She
had lost a two-year-old grandchild, a swimming accident, as Brinda recalled, about five years ago. “Hello, Dr. Sethuratnam. All right?”

In the kitchen, they put on long, white aprons. Mrs. Arora surveyed the lunch counter and got bread out of the fridge. Seth greeted the cook with familiarity—he was the kitchen’s only full-time employee, and they took their orders from him—and put a colander in the industrial sink to rinse the tomatoes. Brinda shuffled along beside him, unsure of what to do, until the cook gave her some wilting heads of iceberg lettuce to slice.

There were two other volunteers already there, both of whom Brinda knew slightly. One was a nervously energetic academic—an Indian man with a high voice, younger than her parents. He had arrived a couple of years back, a new hire in Chemistry, but a Shivashakti devotee since childhood. He didn’t do conversations, only harangues, mostly non sequiturs on Western immorality. Lakshmi couldn’t stand him, but still, he had come to their memorial last June.

The other familiar face was that of a white man in his fifties, soft-spoken, with a beard—Bill? Jim? Hmm. He had struck Brinda as intelligent, compared to the general run of Shivashakti adherents. She had even heard him crack a mild joke once. Her dad told her that Bill? Jim?—Ah: Nick!—owned a graphic design company and printed the organic food co-op’s newsletter.

Two new volunteers crept into the kitchen as the chatter of clients intruded from the dining room. One was a young woman with stringy brown hair, a pilly black sweater and fabulous boots of parti-coloured suede. She was called Addie, followed instructions quickly, said nothing, and smiled only, briefly, at Mrs. Arora. Anytime her trembly hands were not occupied, they would fly to her mouth so she could bite her cuticles with unselfconscious violence, as though trying to reach the bone. Though it was a habit Brinda shared, the biting struck her as unhygienic in this context.

The other new volunteer was quasi-useless, which was fine, since six in the kitchen was too many. They always scheduled one extra, Seth had told her, in case someone couldn’t make it.
Or was useless,
Brinda imagined saying to him after, when they might laugh about this guy: in his early forties, shaped like a Weeble. A meandering cloud of beard divided the slope of his cheek from his neck. Told to portion cheesecake into small bowls, he did, but only as long, apparently, as the instruction reverberated in his head. He decelerated through the filling of eight bowls before taking up his meditation wheel to stand, spinning it, a conspicuously still centre amid the increasing activity.
As though he’s superior to the work he volunteered for
, Brinda thought,
as though he’s teaching us how to live
. The harried cook got him back on task twice, and then finally assigned the cheesecake to Addie and asked the Buddhist to go stand on the far side of the industrial freezer.

In the minutes before the cook declared that lunch was served, he ran pots to the lunch counter. Brinda peered at the alternative universe dimly sighted through the Sterno-scented steam now rising from lentil soup, pasta, egg fried-rice: the haphazard vegetarian menu negotiated when the Shivashakti-ites offered to do the Saturday meal on the one condition that they not be asked to serve meat. This was the only thing about her father’s faith that impressed her: that it had led him into regular, friendly contact with the dispossessed, now lined up, joking through missing teeth.

Brinda dished up rice and smiled timidly, conscious of trying to show how non-judgemental she was, and feeling falser for it. Her dad knew many of them by name. A grubby white man with Down’s syndrome reached awkwardly beneath the glass hood to shake his hand. A native man with a merlot scar bisecting his face, forehead to nose-tip, leaned toward Seth and muttered something that sounded threatening. Seth pointed a ladle as though it were a gun, and said, “Hey, who’s the real Indian here?” The two of them laughed, holding their guts in an oddly similar way.

The clients were perhaps 60 percent native. There was one Sikh man, in a turban and beard, who nodded solemnly to the servers and ate by himself. Two men looked Chinese—or Vietnamese? Migrant workers who somehow got shut out of their own communities? The rest were
white. There was a couple who only reluctantly stopped embracing to join the back of the lunch line, though the woman held onto her man’s ski jacket at the back while he got a tray of food. When they sat at one of the long tables, they locked their legs together and hunched protectively over their single tray. They ate from the same plate and drank Hawaiian Punch from the same cup.

As Brinda speculated on all that couple might have lost and on what had brought the others to this pass, she felt a familiar awareness of the futility of wanting to know them, of knowing anyone. She had been given so many clues to Dev’s character, and still had no idea who he was or what he thought. So, essentially, there was no true intimacy, or not for her. It might be different for those who were better at extracting information or who were less trusting, or whose judgements were more accurate … No, in this mood, she would have to believe it was the same for everyone. You could only know what a person told you or what you witnessed, and the person could deny what they said, and you could completely misinterpret what you saw.

The thing Dev seemed not to understand was the currency of confession, the way weakness could endear you to someone. Until it made them despise you for all you could not give.

The soup kitchen line was through. Apart from a minimum of clean-up, the servers were done their shift. The cook told them to help themselves to lunch, but none of them did. Mrs. Arora and the young professor said their goodbyes. The Buddhist stood and spun his wheel in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, as if alerting the others to a portal between worlds. Seth and Nick, who liked to get a cup of coffee and hang out among the lunchers, had to squeeze past him, as did Brinda. Addie of the harlequin boots, who looked panicked when Mrs. Arora left, followed them, middle finger to mouth. Although the kitchen was then empty, the cook came and whacked the wheel-spinner’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Buddy. Get outta the way?”

Seth sat down at a table with a few empty chairs, pulling one out for Brinda as she watched Addie and the Buddhist leave. “That guy was
unbelievable,” she said to her father,
sotto voce
, as someone came up to him with a chessboard.

Seth looked at her and back at his chess partner, who was setting up the board on the table in front of him. “What?”

“The Buddhist? Spinning his little wheel like it was a party favour?”

“It’s a form of meditation,” Seth said.

“I know. Why did he have to do it when he was supposed to be working?” The clatter in the dining room was like a sound screen, and anyone close to them was interested only in the chess game.

Seth shrugged. “Maybe he needed to. You can’t know.”

Brinda gave him a look of undisguised exasperation. “Why did he sign up to volunteer if he needed to meditate?”

“You can’t know.” Seth realized yet again, with pity, that Brinda had no idea what he felt, all the time, in and out of Shivashakti’s presence. His faith was not monolithic, but even his doubts sustained him. Her arrogance, and Ranjani’s, was almost impressive.

Brinda sighed. “It felt holier-than-thou. Literally.”

He sighed, too, and frowned at the chessboard.

“It looked,” she went on, and he so wished that she wouldn’t, “as though he signed up to serve poor people because he felt he should, so he would get dharma credit or whatever, but then was double-timing it with public prayer to be on the safe side.”

“Why are you concerned with how it looked?” Seth asked.

“Isn’t that kind of what it’s about? Doing this for the service of God, instead of simply for your fellow human beings?”

“It’s the same thing,
kanna
,” Seth said softly. It was so obvious that it was more meaningful, not less, to serve God by serving those whose lives were hard. Such an intelligent girl, with so little grasp of an inexpressible, private truth.

“How do you think they feel about it?” Brinda gestured at milling lunchers with her eyes, but Seth didn’t look up from the board. “Some of them might not believe in God.”

Seth snorted. “They get lunch. They don’t care.”

“It’s about your motivations, all of you, I mean. I don’t get it.”

Seth agreed, but didn’t say so.

“You’re looking at people with real problems, but you’re only thinking of God.”

“Oh?” Seth said. He moved a knight.

Perhaps (Seth would suggest to me later) she got frustrated that he wouldn’t agree or (my interpretation) that he wouldn’t take the bait, or perhaps (this was Brinda’s own thinking, after she cooled off) she was too full of her own confusion to stop herself.

“What about real life? I can tell you think I shouldn’t have left Dev.”

Seth stood and took her elbow, saying nothing to anyone as he guided her outside. “I never said that.”

“You never said one way or another. I feel your accusations, about my failure.”

“No,
kanna
, it’s my failure.” His chess partner came to the glass door, cupping his hands against the glare to see father and daughter on the sidewalk, then turned around and went back inside.

“Mine.” She was his height, matched him eye to eye. “I’m an adult. I can take responsibility for my mistakes.”

“Okay!” Nothing he could say would make this better.

“You infantilize me. That’s why I didn’t try to talk to you and Mom about our problems, beforehand.”

“Did you talk to anyone about it?” he asked, trying to look concerned but not, what, not paternal? She was his child. She needed to get real.

“I saw a therapist, in Edmonton. And Ashwin, last summer, was a huge help.”

“Ashwin?”
Ashwin?

“Yeah.” Her eyes got big, and she covered her mouth with her hands but spoke through them. “Ashwin Rao.”

“Ashwin Rao. You talked to him about your marriage?”

“Yeah. Um. I told him not to tell you that we were talking about it. He’s a psychologist, a good one.”

“I know damn well he’s a psychologist, but he was pretty high and mighty about not helping Venkat, lack of licence or some such, even though Venkat needed it, and then on the other side, he’s meeting
you and coaching you to leave Dev? To get divorced? Who the hell is this guy?”

Brinda, arms crossed, gestured toward the car with a hunched shoulder. “Could we get off the street, please?”

Seth stalked over to unlock it, and they both got in.

“Look, Dad, he said he couldn’t be my therapist, like you said. And he never coached me to leave Dev. I asked him if I could talk to him, because I trusted him.”

“I encouraged you to go and meet with him.” So stupid, so trusting. “Machiavellian.”

“You’ve got it wrong. He told me he shouldn’t, but I made him. He didn’t charge me, and I made him promise not to tell you.”

“And he agreed.”

“I am an adult, in case you forgot!”

“I am your father, in case you forgot! You’re talking to some stranger, and not to me?”

“It was easier to talk to someone who didn’t have a stake! Everything that hurts me seems to hurt you twice as much.”

“It was highly inappropriate of Ashwin Rao.”

“Are you going to tell Mom?”

He gave her a look that she thought she should understand, but she didn’t, and no further answer was forthcoming.