The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (54 page)

Ranjani emerged, holding him, from some other room. “Who wants him?” Kieran squinted in his aunt’s direction, his chin bumping out from a yellow terry sleeper, forehead outlined by an uneven scraggle of black hair, thinning at the top. “Baby-pattern baldness.” Ranjani grinned as she handed him to Brinda.

“What’s that about?” Brinda asked.

“They go through a phase in the womb where they’re covered with lanugo, monkey fur.” Ranjani reached to stroke his head. “They’re supposed to lose it in the ninth month of gestation, but my theory is he’s still losing his.”

Brinda was relieved. He wasn’t beautiful, not yet. But he felt-good-smelled-good, the little parcel, and was already more appetizing by multiples than his repulsive newborn pictures. She could only hope that as he grew cuter, her ability to withstand it would grow commensurately.

“Don’t you love it? He’s still becoming human.”

“Aren’t we all. Eh, baby?” Brinda searched his hooded eyes, and rotated him to kiss the nape-fringe of his weird tonsure.

The next morning, a lazy one. Ranjani went back to bed after breakfast while the others played idly on the floor with Kieran’s small fists, wound his fuzzy-buzzy bee, read his
Goodnight Moon
. At lunchtime, Ranjani and Brinda suggested they all walk down to Sointula’s main strip, but it was chilly and blustery. “The baby could get an ear infection,” Seth told them irritably. They got in the car.

Their first stop was a café, homey and a bit shabby, much like the town. Seth was more amenable to strolling a few blocks in the centre, so, after lunch, they walked to the local museum, full of historic photos and artifacts telling the Sointula story: injustice and hardship, utopian failure and more hardship, soldiering on … to more hardship. The docent, an old-timer descended from the original Finnish settlers, gave them a tour. “In the sixties, the hippies started arriving,” she said, pointing to pictures of grubby but well-nourished people holding banjos and wooden flutes. “Draft dodgers from the States, and others. They took to our culture, though. Learned how to bake bread and build saunas.”

“Saunas, eh?” said Seth.

They learned a new word:
sisu
, a Finnish word for maritime stick-to-it-iveness.
Sisu
mingled with desperation and hope in the windblown streets as they passed galleries and storefronts, buildings of weatherworn candy-green or peeling melon-pink, and others that had been permitted to silver into age, a more dignified option, perhaps, but also sadly final. Ranjani carried Kieran in a long strip of fabric, knotted around her waist and shoulders, and Seth walked with one arm always half outstretched toward them, in case she should trip, or need a hand up a curb or a cloak thrown over a puddle. Their final destination was T
HE
S
OINTULA
C
O-OPERATIVE
S
TORE
A
SSOCIATION
E
ST
. 1909.

Seth came in, but when the groceries mounted, left to bring the car to the parking lot of the co-op. He entered again, holding the door for a woman behind him, who an over-the-shoulder glance revealed possibly to be Indian. He nodded as he always did, didn’t smile, exactly, but showed some slight recognition, perceptible only in the contact of eyes, the mirrored intention of the other Indian in the store, theatre, airport. The woman made reciprocal eye contact, perhaps unintentionally, a blink of distracted thanks for the door-holding. As Seth tussled with Brinda over who should carry the bags and their party of five—five!—bundled toward the door, he saw that the woman still stood there, a hand over her mouth, so he nodded again, more slightly, as one does on passing a stranger twice. Her hair was so short it looked shaven.

The others may not have nodded. They weren’t as inclined as Seth to act as though every Indian were someone they should know. In the car, though, Lakshmi said, “Did you see that woman?”

Seth grunted agreement through a mild frown, a lip-shrug. He glanced in his rear-view mirror before turning the car. The woman had come out and was watching them depart. “I didn’t expect to see an Indian up here.”

“I wasn’t sure she was Indian,” Brinda said from the back. “Hispanic? Native, maybe.”

“She looked like Sita,” said Lakshmi.

“You’re thinking that because we were here with her and Sundar last time,” Seth said. They had all, without yet having spoken of it, thought more than once of Sundar and Sita since their arrival.

Lakshmi sighed and leaned her head back in her seat. “I suppose.”

They were back at the cabin within minutes, and unaccountably sleepy. Even the baby slept.

Late afternoon there came a knock on the thin front door. Who in the world? “Can someone get it?” Lakshmi called, her hands wet with onions. Ranjani was staring down a diaper, and Seth put down his newspaper, but it was Brinda, on her way to make tea, who answered the knock.

The strange-looking woman from the co-op. A buzz-cut of silvering hair, deep eye sockets, hollow cheeks, a wide brown mouth held tight. A dark coat with frayed wrists, wrinkled pants, boots whose creases slashed deep the toes. As she stepped inside, Brinda smelled her: woodsmoke, earth, breezes, but above and beneath it all a large, pervasive sourness, not unpleasant until it filled the room, not a smell she would want to live with. The woman looked famished, and gazed at them as though she would eat them. Ranjani hung back with the baby.

“You don’t know me?” the woman asked, sounding breathless. Was that a smile or a grimace? “You don’t know me.”

Seth came to the front of his family, the man of the household, to face the stranger. Strange and stranger: that voice, with a little more
force; that face, with a little more flesh. “Sita,” he said, not meaning to, and felt it catch at his throat.

Ghost doubles. Schrödinger’s wife. Dead until they opened the box to find her alive.

Her story first: Years of profound unhappiness with Venkat, no surprise there, though she had never exactly said as much in life.
In life
. Was she in their life now? Or in another one?

Until that drive from Lohikarma to Vancouver twenty years earlier, when she confessed her desperation to Sundar. He understood what she didn’t say, how it had worsened since he had left for university. She no longer had her joy morning and night. “It wasn’t his job, to cheer me up. But he did. I lived for him.”

Her nostrils flared and her mouth re-tightened, and Lakshmi put a hand over Sita’s. Seth saw his wife’s sympathy as a foregone conclusion, saw it as though from a distant, imperious height, his wife’s hand over that other one’s.

That drive wasn’t the first time Sita and Sundar had talked in this vein. Her son had, a couple of times, tried to address Venkat’s dominance, his failure to listen, all that Sita could demand and didn’t. “But Sundar’s feelings, about me and how I was wronged, these were too mixed up. He was still an adolescent. I didn’t see what I could do.” She had at times defended Venkat to him, at other times promised to try harder to defend herself; she had also tried to intercede with Venkat on Sundar’s behalf. She met with no success. “He was a wonderful boy, a perfect boy. He never gave us one single thing to complain about and still Venkat complained. Fought with him. Why? Why could he not enjoy, not appreciate, Sundar?” To Sundar, she would say that Venkat’s advice was not bad; engineering school was a practical choice; Venkat was reliable, steady, “a good man,” but she believed this less and less with time. She started to feel instead that Venkat’s behaviour was governed not by love, but by abstract convictions or some fidelity to a noble self-image that
had little to do with them, more to do with a monstrous, narcissistic pride. Not that he was monstrous, he loved his wife and child, but abstractly—he didn’t feel any obligation to know them in their particulars.

“He used to criticize me for not being harder on Sundar. Those days, when his father was criticizing him for not working harder, not being more serious, those were the only days my son had on this earth.” Her voice cracked and she rubbed her face with a practised-seeming motion, up the cheeks to the forehead, down and across the mouth, too many times, a gesture that looked obsessive. (I asked her about it, later, when I met her and saw her do it. She said she felt tears stinging her face from inside, so she rubbed until the surface burned. No tears fell. “I don’t get to cry,” she said.)

“I was dreading the trip to India, three weeks in his mother’s house. His sister was very sweet, though tiring. I pitied her. Is she still alive?”

“Yes,” said Seth. “Not the mother, though.”

“The brother’s wife was frightful. And his mother, too. She would pinch me, sometimes. Hard.” She took hold of her upper arm to show how and where her mother-in-law would abuse her. “I screamed the first couple of times, and then I learned no one, not even his sister, believed me.

“Sundar told me, on the way to the airport, don’t come. He had once already been to India by himself, two years earlier. You know, he was planning to go to film school, after engineering. He wanted to finish his engineering degree. He was not rash. But he was going to apply, not only UBC but UCLA and NYU. He had a new video camera with him. He liked his cousins, enjoyed his grandmother, he was excited, but he told me, ‘Don’t come,
amma
. There’s no need.’ ”

She hadn’t thought of this until he suggested it:
don’t come
. She could never have defied Venkat so completely in his presence, but there, on the road, far away, without him there to challenge her—even though the aftertones of his voice rang in her head, the aftersmell of him, the afterfeel—the idea began to gain plausibility. But where would she go instead?

“ ‘A hotel,’ Sundar told me. He didn’t seem to think it was so hard.
Find someplace nice. Maybe on the waterfront
. And how long would I stay there? I asked.
Until you feel ready to go home, I guess
. I thought about it. As we approached the airport, I noticed how many hotels there were, so cheap, so close. Shuttle buses from the airport. We checked in for our flight. I hadn’t quite got the courage up. I didn’t know where to stop, or when, when to tell Sundar goodbye. So I kept going, right onto the plane. I don’t remember exactly when I decided. There wasn’t a moment when I thought,
yes, this is right
. There were factors. Sundar could tell his relatives I had had a last-minute crisis at work, and by the time they called Venkat, I would already have called him. I think that made me hesitate, that I would have to call him to tell him what I had done. But I would have twenty-four hours of solitude first.”

That seemed as much the reason as any other: a full day and night of solitude, when she would not be accountable or self-conscious. She would be invisible and Sundar well looked-after. “I got him settled on the plane. He wanted me to have the window seat. That’s when I turned to him and said,
I’m not coming. I’m going now. You’ll be all right?
” Her voice cracked, her face cracked, she started rubbing-scrubbing-scouring her visage again. A hoarse whisper, “That’s what I asked him.”

Lakshmi got her a glass of water and she sipped. Her tea, which she had been given despite refusing the offer, sat cooling.

“
Okay, kanna
, I said.
I’m going. I’ll call Daddy tomorrow so that I know you have arrived
. He said,
Great, Mom. Go for it
. He moved into the window seat. The aisle was crowded, last-minute passengers. I must have kissed him but there was no particular moment, nothing memorable. They were checking the passageway, wanting to close the door, and I was suddenly—I got very afraid that I would change my mind, so I picked up my handbag and ran out the door, down that tunnel, I remember it seemed very long, and they perhaps shouted, but I didn’t stop. Took the first shuttle. Took the first hotel. It was a strange … euphoria.”

The euphoria might have wobbled, as she slept and woke through dreams, nightmares and the thrill of unsettlement, but it didn’t desert her till morning, in the hotel coffee shop, where people were eating and staff swabbing tables to the accompaniment of breakfast-hour TV news.