The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (55 page)

“Terrible, about that plane, eh?” said her waitress, nodding stiff curls at the ceiling-mounted screen as she licked a finger and turned a page on her pad.

“
That’s
how you found out?” Brinda asked, and Lakshmi put her hand over Sita’s again.

“They never took you off the passenger list,” Seth said.

“No?” Sita asked.

Had she never thought about this? Seth wondered.

“They probably would have done it at Heathrow,” said Lakshmi.

“You could never get away with that now,” said Ranjani, jiggling the baby from one arm to the other. “They would ground the plane, locate your luggage and make sure it left with you.”

“Sure, it was because of this bomb that they started doing all that,” Brinda pointed out.

“We have been living twenty years with your death,” said Seth.

Sita looked around at them, opened her mouth, closed it again. Apologetic? “I didn’t know,” she said. Helpless. “And … Venkat? How is he?”

Seth thought of Venkat, pottering among his stinking, chattering birds, his clothes hanging off his shrunken frame. His house overheated to keep the birds comfortable; his bare feet, his toenails yellow, thick and curving, beak-like. Once, Seth himself had trimmed them. “He’s pathetic.”

Sita blinked at the blow but trembled her head,
yes
.

Twenty years they had looked after Venkat, worried for him, the worry a fixture of their lives. Accompanied him to Ireland. Seth didn’t even like the man! They were barely related! And she had been alive the whole time.
Monstrous
—she said that about Venkat? Her selfishness was monstrous.

“Why did I not call? This is what you want to know. Why did I not come back?” Sita said.

Seth sat, arms crossed, and the women of his life, for once, looked to him. He said nothing.

“I don’t remember much of those first days, months. I thought I would kill myself. Except it wasn’t exactly thinking. I was alive by accident. Sundar was dead. I had left him. But then I thought, God kept me alive to punish me.”

“It might have been a better punishment for you to return to Venkat.” Seth heard himself say this, as if from another room, as though he were eavesdropping on some other branch of his multi-furcated life. He had never been so harsh and confident.

“I tried to call, one time.” Sita wiped a gleam of sweat from the cup of each eye. “After I got here. Maybe around … it was winter. November? There was no answer at home and when I called his office, they said he was on leave.”

They all waited but Seth said nothing.

Lakshmi wiped tears from her own lashes with the palms of her hands and explained, “He would have been in India then. He, he did try to kill himself.”

She didn’t touch Sita as she said this, Seth noticed. Nothing to soften this news. In this branch of his life, it appeared that Lakshmi and his daughters allied themselves with him, followed his lead. It was what he’d always wanted and yet now it discomfited him.

“By the time I stopped believing in God,” said Sita, “I had started believing life was a kind of penance, set by, maybe by the force of life itself.”

She might so easily have slipped through history’s cracks, were it not for this chance occurrence: her favourite people from her past life, practically on her doorstep.

“And how do you live here, Sita?” Lakshmi asked.

She told them about the ATM card and chequebook she carried, for an account she had established secretly when Sundar was six, when she began working outside of the home, so she could afford small things for him—swim goggles, comic books—that Venkat wouldn’t allow. At first she put in only a few dollars weekly; she was working part time
and was wary of detection. But over time, her contributions grew, so that, when the disaster struck, she had enough to sustain her for months. “Especially since I wasn’t really eating and didn’t care where I slept. I just walked and kept walking, north, I suppose.”

She was unclear exactly how she came to Malcolm Island, but thought she must have landed there about the time her money ran low, when she took on seasonal work in the fish processing plant. (A fish-works must have been an advanced circle of hell for a Tamil Brahmin, with their fastidious vegetarian genetics. And it would have held a particular sting for her, looking death-by-air in the face a thousand times a day.) “When I got here, I remembered our holiday. Remember that?” They all nodded. “It was so nice, that week here, with Sundar. He enjoyed it so much. So did I.”

Her second winter here, she was working as a cashier at the co-op. One day, a local named George Sinclair struck up a conversation with her. An ex-American, the sort they had heard of, he had recently moved onto a single acre of his own. He recognized her from the fish plant. “He offered to let me garden a patch on his land. The first week that I worked on it, I walked six kilometres each way from my rented room, an hour and a half each way, with the gardening work in between. Sinclair had a truck, so he started to pick me up and drop me, but I felt I was a burden. A burden to people, a burden to the earth. That felt wrong. I must only give, now: a ghost should not take. So he asked and I moved in to his cabin.” She sounded impersonal, but looked somehow dreamy. “No shock, no shame.” She gestured at her torso. “This is not even a body to me, anymore.”

Then she seemed to awaken slightly, and told Lakshmi, “So this is how we get along. I sell my vegetables and flowers, late spring, summer, fall. Sinclair teaches yoga, does odd repairs here and there. He has kayaks and sometimes he takes tourists out. Can you come and see me there? Our home?” Her manner grew slightly frantic. “How long are you here? And how are all of you? Ranjani, with a baby,” she crooned a little, the volubility and animation seeming strange on her.

“Yes,” Seth said, trying to seize the lead. “Ranjani’s husband’s work
brought us up this way again.”
Ranjani’s husband
. There is no truth.
Everyone is 99 percent secret
, he thought. What had Sita not told them? What was untellable? What was Venkat doing now?

“I went—” Seth began. It seemed important to tell her this. “—with Venkat to Ireland, to look for, to claim …” Your bodies? His bodies? “Sundar’s body was found. We identified it. Venkat took the ashes to India, to the Kaveri.”

Sita had brought a hand to her mouth, her gesture, perhaps, to greet the dead or long-gone, and her eyes looked more like her eyes than ever. “He saw him.”

“His body, yes.”

“He saw him last. And took his ashes back home, to scatter, in the Kaveri.”

Seth
—boom
—was blinded by another bludgeon of fury. “You could have seen him too.”

“Not with
him
!” she said, vehement, dismissive, clubbing him with her words, thought Seth—
boom
, how he disliked her,
boom
, what kind of woman was she?

Sita looked around at them, at a spectrum of reactions that she read or misread as misunderstanding, or understanding too well. “It wasn’t my fault alone that I wasn’t on that plane. How could I—I couldn’t have stood beside him, to collect my Sundar’s, my Sundar’s …” She made a noise, guttural, desperate; and again, the rubbing of the face. “It wasn’t only God that gave me this hell.”

“Why didn’t you call us?” Lakshmi asked then, her voice gentle, her hand extended once more.

“Back then? I’m not sure.” Another sip of water. “I didn’t want to involve you?”

“But why did you pursue us here, if that was how you felt?” Seth sounded softer but felt no softening. Why did he feel no softening?

“How could I have lived with myself if I had let you go? I don’t always understand myself too well. That holiday, here, with all of you. It might have been the best week of my life.” In a yet-softer voice, she asked Ranjani, “What is your baby called?”

“Kieran.” Ranjani pulled his blanket a little higher, cupping his head so that he couldn’t be seen. “Kieran Sundar.”

Sita made a startled, lateral movement with a small noise of pain, as though someone had slipped a knife in beneath her shoulder blade. Seth felt it, too, and felt his petty moral ire drain, burst, from his own wound. Whatever she had done or failed to do, he and Lakshmi sat before her now with their girls and their grandson. Sundar had died.

“We’re so sorry.” His tears came, finally, with grand force. “Such a wonderful boy. And you—such a good mother to him.” He went outside to cry alone.

They agreed that they would come to see her at home.

“Anytime,” Sita said. “I won’t be coming into town again for a week or so, I’ll be home preparing the beds for planting. Bring towels. We have a sauna. I’ll build a fire. There’s a beach. Ocean view. I’ll make tea.” She sounded like an only child planning a make-believe party. “We don’t have a phone, so if you want to send a message to me, just ask at the co-op if anyone is coming out our way. Sinclair, and Karma—that is what I’m called now, here.”

They talked, in the days that followed, as they walked shores of stone and shores of sand; scrutinized wall-hung weavings and photos of the dead, a new kind of family discussion, where daughters talked directly to father and anyone might take any side. No three females giggling in secret, cynical rightness; no Seth stewing in solitary silence. Most often, the women felt Sita had had the right to leave Venkat, especially after Sundar was grown. And Seth had little trouble saying he wouldn’t want to be married to Venkat. He had not chosen his mate, but if fate had chosen a Venkat for him, he might have been forced to tinker.

The women were no more convinced than Sita herself had been that she was right not to show herself after the crash. Or however that went. They got tangled in the double-negatives; language failed them. They all resented that their family had been, for twenty years—twenty
years!—burdened with Venkat. But Sita had been burdened with him for twenty-five years before that. And she hadn’t chosen him or that responsibility any more than they had; in fact, they might say she had less choice—so how could they say she was remiss?

Finally, Seth asked, “What do we say to Venkat?”

“Nothing,” said Brinda, and her father nodded and said, “That’s right.”

They were over the midline hump of their holiday already, and a day dawned bright for their trip to the island’s northwest flank. Ranjani opted to stay back, because of the baby—Sita had no running water and only a wood stove for heat—so the other three went, mid-afternoon. Sita had drawn them a map and it proved itself. They exited the car “in the middle of nowhere,” except for a scarf Sita had tied to mark the path. The forest scraggled out onto a narrow strip of beach, as though a curtain had been pulled back before they were quite ready, to show them the grey-green sea.

To their left was a cabin whose walls were made of fitted and mudded wood, seven feet high at one end, slanting under large tar-coated shingles to a terminal wall of five feet or so. Seventy, eighty square feet? At most. A small chimney poked out the top of the low end. It kept its hunched back to the woods, and they walked around the front to find the garden patch on its other side. The brush had been hacked back there and Sita was turning soil in full sun, the bones of her arms all jags and points under a billowing T-shirt. Her jeans were bunched at the hips. She let her shovel drop, and dusted her hands on her pants to reach toward them, face eerie, joy-animated skin over a still-frozen skull, sunlight filling some hollows so that the others seemed darker than ever. She clutched their sleeves and showed them around.