The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (46 page)

“
Jai Guru
. We’re watching the news,” said Kaj. “Tamil Nadu. Have you talked to your family?”

“
Jai Guru
. All fine.”

“Oh, good, good, good. We can give relief money. It’s in the coffers. We’ll hold an emergency vote to release it. And the members’ll give more.”

“I know it. But the suggestion should come from you. Indian adepts will be shy to bring it up.”

Talking with Kaj reminded Seth that he had, in his briefcase, a video
he had been meaning to watch since the start of the holidays. A colleague had left it in his box sometime during exam week, a BBC piece on Shivashakti, taped off the TV, it seemed. Seth had been surprised at the gesture; that colleague, though Indian and a recent arrival, had never acted particularly warmly toward him. Seth didn’t even know how he knew about Seth’s own interest in Shivashakti. It came with a note:
Something you should see
.

There were other documentaries on Shivashakti, but produced by devotees. It was nice to see interest from the mainstream media. If they could do lives of Gandhi and Nehru, Bill Gates and the Pope, it wasn’t surprising that they would eventually want to tell Shivashakti’s story. He had suggested watching it to Brinda and Lakshmi a few nights ago but … what had happened? Brinda had brought home some Italian film,
Bread and Tulips
. They had enjoyed it.

Now there would be no time until the velaikappu was done. He could watch it alone, but he wanted to watch it with his family. Even if they continued to disagree with him, it was important that they understand Shivashakti’s stature in the world.

By the evening, the tsunami was relegated to number of dead, number of dollars, anecdotes of elsewhere. Seth imagined that this was what other households might have felt like in the days after the Air India bombing: there but for the grace of name-your-deity; and then the newspeople make as much hay as they can until some other disaster drives it off the front pages.

Seth recalled Bantry Bay, the sea calm as surely the Indian ocean now was, lapping at its own debris, the way their cat ate its own vomit.

They drove to the caterer’s the next morning, with the car radio blaring news, still
all-tsunami, all the time
. Seth switched it off as they arrived. Inside, at one of the three tables, an old man buttoned into a brown cardigan sat playing a game of Chinese checkers with a boy of nine or ten, who bore some resemblance to Sundar. Twenty years. Sundar might have
been coming to the velaikappu with his own children. Or not: Brinda had none. Seth had to stop thinking in the old terms. Sundar was dead and nothing ever turned out the way you expected.

Ah, why not dream?
That maybe someday, ten years from now on an afternoon much like this, he would be sitting across a Chinese checkerboard with his own grandchild, watching that hidden girl or boy wrinkle Seth’s own eyebrows, still too large on the child’s serious, heart-shaped face.

MONDAY, THE
27
TH
, I went to the High Street post office to send back my colleague’s manuscript. The weather had turned foul. Clumps of snow, like hairballs, criss-crossed the air as if borne on competing winds. I marched along miserably, a scarf wrapped about my head, my eyelashes freezing together. Driving would have been worse. En route, I passed an outdoor-wear shop doing brisk business, and stopped to get a Gulag-guard hat: nylon shell and earflaps lined in fake fur. My eyelashes still froze on the way back.

I was surprised when Brinda kept our four o’clock appointment.

“Why didn’t you postpone?” I asked, as she stamped and shook outside, then entered and gingerly removed her thawing things on the mat.

She twisted her lips and bit a cuticle.

“Something happened?” I asked.

The kettle called. She moved to sit on the sofa, but then rose again and came to where I was making tea.

“I …” She looked away and then back at me. “You’ve been great, about all this, meeting, talking.”

She didn’t want to meet anymore? Melancholy lines from yesterday’s book, Chekhov stories, rose in my mind:
Don’t leave me, my darling. I’m afraid to be alone
.

“I somehow, accidentally, mentioned to my dad that I had talked to you, last summer, about my problems. He took it wrong.”

They would both leave me. I would have no one. Again.

“I told him I had twisted your arm, and that I needed to speak to someone who wasn’t a friend or relative. I said I trusted you. I think that was right. But he just—he’s still in shock about all this.”

I was having some trouble breathing. I focused on not letting her see.

“I thought I should tell you. Because you see him, right?”

I nodded, but still couldn’t speak.

“So I had to tell you. But I don’t think it matters much. He’ll come around. I told him how helpful you’ve been. So generous.”

“Nothing like that,” I said. My mouth was dry. I poured two cups, added milk and sugar, sipped. Hot tea: why don’t doctors prescribe it?

We moved on: she had much to tell. Her pain at seeing Ranjani, who was supposed to have been the lost one, afloat on all the satisfactions Brinda herself had wanted. The self-hate her jealousy brought on. Christmas morning; the soup kitchen; the fight with her father, partly about me (again, the stab of fear); Christmas dinner with Venkat.

“My dad said he asked you to treat Venkat Uncle, after his breakdown or whatever that was, in October?”

“He did.” I would have said more—to hell with confidentiality—but she was rising, donning her coat.

“I don’t know what my dad thinks you should have done for him. Can’t imagine Venkat Uncle’s big on introspection.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I was filling with panic again and took deep breaths through my nose.

“I saw your name on the velaikappu guest list.” She pulled on a turquoise wool hat, waterproof gloves, an improbably long scarf. “So we’ll see you Thursday?”

What could I say to that?

“Come!” she said.

I remembered last summer, when I told her I was coming to the memorial, and she had wanted me to stay away.

“If you need to talk in the meantime, do not hesitate,” I said, with difficulty. “Call me.”

She raised the edge of her scarf, beneath smiling eyes, to cover her mouth–nose–cheeks, and turned out into the blizzard.

Oh, what was Seth thinking now? I poured a small draft of port and took it to the window seat. The outlines of Trismegistus—those lines where the layered mountains bumped the sky and footed the lake—were faint enough to make me think I was imagining them. Was all this to be lost to me?

My journal lay on the window seat. I took it up, but couldn’t bring myself to open it. The last entry recorded my last meeting with Seth. Naturally, he felt betrayed: I had known all along what he was not telling me, all of it, and more—much more than he knew. I knew intimate details about his daughter. What man would not feel invaded?

When I picked up my journal, I uncovered my phone. I had spent three quarters of an hour in this same nook last night, hearing about Rosslyn’s recent work, telling her a little about mine. Telling her how it would bring me back through Ottawa late in spring. “You should time it to see the tulips,” she said.

I flipped my phone open. Her number, first of the Recent Calls. I shouldn’t, I knew. Two calls in two weeks was fine, all things considered. But two calls in two days?

I pressed “redial.”

“Ashwin?” She sounded guarded.

Last night, I had lapped up the happy surprise in her voice as if it were a sweet splash of port.

“I wouldn’t have called, Rosslyn, but …” The phone heated the brain cells beneath my throbbing ear. I could kill myself this way, with absence and longing. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called.” She was waiting, wondering. “Did you have a good day?”

“Yes, sure. The boys and I took my mother for lunch. They’re out seeing friends now. I’m finishing my Sunday book.”

“You still do that.” We could suture up the lost time. I could be with her again.

“I do. Ashwin. I need to tell you something. Listen. I am seeing someone.”

I won’t describe how that felt.

Now that she had got the information out, her voice gentled a little. “Just for the last three or four months. My first relationship since John and I split up, and since he died.”

“I see,” I said.

“A roller coaster,” she said at the same time. “It’s not that … Okay, you and I are too old for games. Life is way shorter than I ever realized. So let me lay it out. I am excited to see you. Even though you live in India and I don’t imagine twenty years of living alone—You said you never married, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t imagine all these years of single life have made you any easier to be with.”

“No.” I was seized with an urge to protect her, particularly from me. “I am very difficult.”

“I know. Better than anyone. I’m an authority.”

“I shouldn’t come.”

“Let me decide that. I’m not the naïf you once knew. And I am
really
looking forward to seeing you again. I don’t know where things are going with Henri. Maybe not anywhere. But I didn’t want to be dishonest. You have hopes, clearly. But let’s both be sensible enough not to have expectations.”

“Henri?”

She laughed. “Got a problem with that?”

“With ‘John’ maybe I could compete. But ooh-la-la, zis Henri, avec ’is champagne and pâté de foie gras et
je ne sais quoi. Oui ou non?
Pop goes the Indian.”

I thought, not for the first time, of the last time we met, when she was pregnant and full of her future, and how she looked at me like I was a brother, a brother’s friend. Compassion, no eros. I couldn’t settle for that now, but her voice didn’t sound like that now either. I had been brought into many marriages in these years, even if I never had one of
my own. They contain shades of feeling, phases of being, informed by all the other kinds of love—fraternal, paternal.
He was like a mother to me
, Lakshmi had said of Seth.

Rosslyn and I talked. Of what? Barbara Gowdy, the tsunami, the weather in Canada, her kids. My brain simmered in the phone-heat. The snow continued to fall.

The next morning, I woke late. The Canadian darkness had thrown me off, but it wasn’t only that. The chat with Rosslyn had been everything I wanted and needed, without my having told her why I called. She would have wanted to know. Did I need to tell her? But how to begin, to tell her what Seth was to me, the loneliness I feared falling back into, the way Brinda had drawn me out, the potential significance of this year and her place in it, how? How?

And if I couldn’t tell her, why call at all?

There was to be no work that day. For twenty years, I had hidden in my work. The lives of others, indeed. I took up my journal, intending to write what Brinda had told me. Should I attend the velaikappu? I wanted to, badly, but was simultaneously dreading it. Where had I heard that before? I flipped back in my journal: I had said the same about the memorial, and about the trial. And I’d written,
I seem to learn as much about myself through my writing as I do about others
.

Rosslyn’s voice, in my head, said,
Write it!
Not just events, briefly noted in your journal. Try to tell the story. Why you left, what happened. Who you are.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER
30, velaikappu day, was bright and unseasonably warm, so that green and yellow tufts of the gardens around the pavilion showed through melting snow by the time we guests gathered, mid-afternoon. The paths were shovelled but slippery. Slush-puddles meant many of the women entered with dark rings edging the borders of their saris. The guests segregated themselves naturally, men gravitating toward the back, where hot and cold beverages were available throughout the ceremony, at Seth’s insistence, while the women came toward the front.

I had so many sound reasons to flee. Instead, I forced myself to enter, organic baby-gift box in hand. Seth, greeting guests at the door, extended a hand robotically to shake mine. No smile. Nothing from the eyebrows. I could have fallen at his feet.