The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (47 page)

“Welcome,” he said.

“Seth. I would like to meet you to talk, soon.”

He looked past me, and his eyebrows moved for someone else.

“I understand Brinda told you she saw me, last summer, about her situation. I would like to explain—she had me pledge confidentiality—but I would like to tell you in what spirit I let her talk to me.”

He wasn’t thawing, but he assented. “Next week. After Ranjani leaves.”

“Brinda’s a wonderful child,” I blurted. His eyes narrowed a little.
“She will be fine. I predict this,” I went on. Now it was as though a warm breeze melted the lines of his face. “A wonderful girl,” I repeated.

Lakshmi approached from behind him, and I put my palms together. Why I would do this now, when we had greeted one another much more informally in the past, I’m not sure, except that the gesture is one of worship. She wore an amethyst sari in that thick, lush South Indian silk I remember from my childhood. She greeted me, warmer than Seth, if a little self-conscious, and gestured me into the hall.

Brinda was beside her sister, positioned to receive gifts and otherwise run interference as needed. I gave my box to her and she granted me the gift of a smile, before introducing me to her sister. The ceremony began, and I moved to one side.

Lakshmi was the first to give the blessing, taking a selection of bangles from the tray Brinda held out to her and pushing them onto each of Ranjani’s wrists before pinching a dab of vermilion from a silver cup on the tray and rubbing it into the part of her pregnant daughter’s hair. Brinda imagined it gave her mother more than a little satisfaction to do so: the vermilion signalled a married woman. Brinda’s own scalp felt naked. She watched her mother kiss Ranjani and whisper something, and Ranjani whisper back, “Thank you.” Lakshmi wiped her eyes.

Next was Lakshmi’s mother, who, though widowed, had been included. Among Brahmins back home, widows were disqualified from wishing happiness to young couples and families. Lakshmi overrode custom’s dictates, to her mother’s pleasure, though both were also a bit anguished. She smoothed Ranjani’s hair with trembling hands and cracked her knuckles against her own head, defences against the evil eye. She embraced Brinda too, and said, “You will be next!” before she turned away.

No one had asked Brinda,
You don’t want a baby?
but the omission was almost as bad as the question. Their concern was evident, brightened with curiosity, as though each person had reassuringly patted her face until it was stinging and raw, as good as slapped.

She herself entered the line next, biting back her own emotion as she put the bangles on her sister, willing herself only to acknowledge the genuine love and good will she felt toward Ranjani and her future niece or nephew, not the rancid jealousy and lip-chewing fears rubbing hot, prickly flanks against the better emotions. She didn’t believe in
drishti
, the evil eye, but she knew it was most often cast inadvertently. Anyway, her mother, who lived to deny all such superstitions, had broken down and waved a fistful of salt around Ranjani’s glowing visage that morning, muttering the ancient incantations to make them safe from all they didn’t believe in, and then flushing the danger down the toilet to the Kootenay River. Brinda laid a hand on her little sister’s cheek and kissed the other, saying, “I’m so proud and excited for you.”

The rest of the Tamil Brahmin ladies came forward, and then the other academic wives behind them. The smell of each woman, as she bent over the tray, her perfume–breath–aura, brought back the smell of each house, which Brinda now realized she knew as well as her own, even though she hadn’t been in their houses for ten years or more. Despite her glued-on smile, she felt real affection for them, and for her complicated history with them, with their kids, adventures and dramas in their kitchens and basements, while adults were occupied elsewhere.

Next, their neighbours, the Aidallberrys. He was a classics prof; his wife, Thomasin, a poet who wrote in a garret at the top of their dilapidated house. Then a small raft of Shivashakti devotees, Indian and white, who had become Seth’s friends over the years. Several of Seth’s colleagues, one or two of Lakshmi’s, three of Brinda’s friends who were still based here, hippies and academics, also with families in tow, and, finally, friends of Ranjani’s who had come from Vancouver—women in their thirties, several with men at their sides holding toddlers. She didn’t seem to have any friends left in Lohikarma.

One after another, they ascended to bless Ranjani and her baby. Brinda watched them approach, clink-clack the bracelets she offered from the tray, ching-chuck them onto Ranjani’s heavy-growing wrists, smear her scalp blessed red and kiss her glowing cheeks, the brush of
aging lips telling their own disappointments and desires and the thrill of their role in this renewal, while Brinda felt herself to be a wraith at Ranjani’s side. Exit ghost.

Seth watched from within the masculine rank, with his son-in-common-law and his friends. He was aflood in sentiment, watching the infinite ascension of the women’s backs, curved-straight-old-young-wide-narrow, in bright silks and pastel sweaters: the women. Without them, there is no continuity, no ceremony, no courage.

And, receiving the women, his daughters. His daughters!

NEW YEAR
’
S EVE, AT NOON
, Seth and Lakshmi were arrayed on the sectional, waiting for Brinda to join them—ready, finally, to watch the Shivashakti documentary. They had put him off for days. No longer.

In front of each of them, on a floral TV tray, was a full thali. It was a Sunday-and-holiday tradition that had evolved since their kids left home: a rice-meal at noon, two side dishes, no cutlery, accompanied by daytime television (Oprah, if she was available), followed by a nap. Seth had learned to sous-chef in response to Lakshmi’s objections that the meal was too much work for midday.

Brinda crossed in front of them to sit, cushion-cocooned, in the sofa’s corner.

“We left your food on the stove,” Lakshmi told her.

“Thanks. I’ll eat after.”

“Ready?” Seth asked, and pressed “start” on the remote, before handing it over to Lakshmi, who always controlled the volume.

Ranjani and Greg had left that morning, after gift-opening and packing into the wee hours. They had New Year’s Eve plans back in Vancouver, a party with some of the friends who had come for the velaikappu, which made Seth suggest they all stay and celebrate here, but no one had responded.

Lakshmi’s mother and brother had left, also—the brother was on-call
New Year’s Day, and the mother would not fly alone. The Sethuratnams had broken the divorce news to her the prior evening. She took it much better than they had feared. “You are a good girl,” she told Brinda, gathering her in with hands that trembled, not from weakness, just from age. “Focus on your studies.
Chamathu
. Don’t be afraid.” It had felt like the blessing they all needed to go forward.

Seth scooped and mashed rice into okra sambar. The texture—crumbling lentils imbued with tamarind, cumin, coriander, coconut—against his fingers was an inoculation of sorts. It felt like stability, timelessness, a time before snow, before distance, before “divorce” and “my daughter” could ever be spoken together. The second inoculation was the taste. A recipe for time travel.

In the days after Brinda told them her news, he had been unable to eat. Lakshmi had made her peerless idlis, but for the first time in his life, the steamed dumplings tasted, to Seth, exactly like what they were: fermented paste. Rancid, gluey, no transformational magic, as though, in the West, their food was exposed as inferior, as though it should never have left India. But as he had digested the news, food and its illusions began to work on him again.

Were they illusions? He was revising his lectures for the spring and finding himself particularly interested in the ones on time and perception. He considered now whether to insert something about the physics of memory and imagination, how it is that a smell or taste can transport us to a different time, so that we are living simultaneously in our imagined past and in a present that is what we call reality.

Images of Shivashakti appeared on the television screen as the narration commenced, a woman speaking in a nasal South London accent. “Man and woman, God and human, Shivashakti is a religious leader with power that many think will someday rival the Pope’s.” Seth indicated the screen with his eyebrows, but his wife and daughter looked unimpressed, if carefully neutral. “Born into poverty in rural India, Shivashakti has long since transformed the village of his birth into a bustling town, eventually renamed Shivashaktipurum, with a clinic, schools, and a large ashram where his followers live and worship. All were built on donations
from this guru’s devotees. It is rumoured that he is in the top ten Indian charitable organizations for receipt of foreign funds. But the rumours don’t stop there. In the wake of an attempted suicide by a teenage follower, stories have begun circulating that, for years, Shivashakti has habitually forced young devotees to participate in clandestine sexual activities.”

Seth’s ears began to ring.
He is God
. In temples back home, in the moment when the priest did the
arathi
, circling the god’s features with a lamp of burning camphor, another priest would ring a bell as worshippers bowed to the deity. The space would empty of all sound save the ringing, in the silence of worship. Was Shivashakti ringing a bell now to drown out the documentary’s harangue, to create a corridor through which Seth could return to him?
Tat Tvam Asi. That thou art
. His wife and daughter appeared frozen, either genuinely attentive to the TV or permitting him to nurse his humiliation in private. On Seth’s plate, sticky okra seeds glistened as if with thwarted sexual will; flecks of spices corroded slickly congealed peaks of rice. He stared at the TV, willing his God, Shivashakti, who had sustained him all these years, to give him
darshan. My lord. Look at me. I am here
.

It seemed an eternity before Shivashakti looked out at the viewers. It was old footage—the guru twenty years younger, the age he was when Seth first went to the ashram—but still, his glance appeared to Seth not to be the blessing gaze of divine upliftment that he knew so well. It was now the hollow look of a hunted man.

Whatever the accusations, true or untrue, they changed nothing. Shivashakti’s wisdom, which was your own. His strength, which was your own. The good he brought into the lives of his followers.

He couldn’t look at his wife and daughter. They were saying nothing, but their thoughts—“We knew it! We knew it all along!”—radiated toward him like a stink. They knew nothing. Which used to be fine. Now they would never know.

He rose. “I need to go out.”

Lakshmi asked, “Where? You don’t want to see the rest?”

Not with you
, he wanted to say. “No.”

“Do you want us to stop it?”

“As you like,” he said. “The office, I’m going to work.”

Lakshmi looked at Brinda, who asked her father, “Do you want me to drive you?”

He shook his head and was gone.