The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  “She might yet become one,” I interjected. Was I reassuring or challenging him? “In writing or journalism or some such.”

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed so fast it was as though he were contradicting me. “How many jobs of that sort are out there?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Writing these articles about others … She has been married six, seven years, but still they don’t seem settled. No children. And now she’s off to Baltimore.” He brightened, falsely: the eyebrows stayed low. “Questions, questions!”

  “What does her husband do?” I asked.

  “Dev? He is a Chemistry PhD, but he works as a lab technician. I don’t know what happened. His father teaches at the University of Alberta.” Seth leaned back to pull a peony toward his nose, from a bush that spread behind him. He indicated the flower with his eyebrows. “Very nice.” He resettled in his chair, the hand back in his sport coat pocket, fingers working at something in there. “Dev is a bit of a funny guy. Doctorate. Employed at a university. But he puts down academia, acts as though it is beneath him somehow. It’s not for everyone, as I well know.” He seemed now to regret his candour. “But what does all this have to do with the bombing? What am I talking about?”

  I offered a hook. “Brinda talked to me a little about Dr. Venkataraman’s family.”

  “Yes.” He met my eyes, giving me, again, that strange feeling of collapsing toward him. “My wife and I, and Dr. Venkataraman and his wife, when we were all young, we used to get together every weekend. A small group of us, young academics, from all over India, but Venkat and Sita were the only Tamilians so we saw them even a bit more. He is my wife’s relation. You have seen him yet?”

  The question was not merely casual, but I couldn’t say why. “We have an appointment, Monday morning.”

  Seth nodded. He spoke slowly. “I have two girls, no complaints, but I was very attached to Sundar. Different, you know, a boy. Even before I had my daughters, I used to play with him. Venkat is not so much the type to give horsey rides, that kind of thing. I enjoyed that. When we went to their house, I would be on my hands and knees the whole time!

  “The children grew up together. Once, Sita and Sundar joined us on our holiday, at a cabin, for a week or two. We had never done that before, and this place was a bit remote—Malcolm Island, off the west coast. Can’t remember how we chose it. Venkat didn’t want to come. Not his cup of tea. So Sita brought the boy. We had an excellent time. Board games, swimming. Absolutely relaxing. We still talk about it. A beer on the …”—he waved his hand horizontally—“the veranda, in the evening. Sita and Lakshmi used to get along very well also, a bit like sisters. Sita was a quiet type, but that week she talked and laughed. Venkat had, well, you’ll see—he used to have a bit of a temper. And Sita, just as we were attached to Sundar, she doted on our daughters.” His eyes went a bit glassy. He paused. Sniffed. Went on.

  “One day, Sundar and I went fishing. I wanted to try it, but my daughters were still too small, and they were never the type to fish. We’re Tamil Brahmin, raised strictly vegetarian, but we started eating meat when we came to Canada. It was hard to be vegetarian here, back then, not like now. But both my daughters turned vegetarian again when they found out where meat came from! Soft-hearted girls.

  “Sundar was very eager to go fishing. He must have been eight or nine. We got the poles and bait from a shop in town, and they told us a good spot to go to, a kind of fishing hole, a dock area, where you could sit. We had a bucket, in case we caught something. We had packed sandwiches, candy bars. We sat around with the other fishermen. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! But Sundar didn’t get bored, all day. And he caught one fish, a little thing.” He held up one hand, putting his other pointer finger to the wrist. “One of the fishermen told me I shouldn’t keep it, so I said to the guy I would throw it back, but I was afraid Sundar would be disappointed. We took it home, kept it alive in water in the bucket. But then I didn’t know what to do with it—kill it? Take out the bones? He had been talking all the way home about frying it or roasting it, but Lakshmi and Sita had made supper, and by the time we took baths and ate, he was tired, and forgot about it. After he went to bed, I checked on it, but it had died. I threw it out in the woods.”

  Again he stopped, rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. A vein throbbed on his temple. He worked his mouth, swallowed, put his hand back in his pocket.

  “A couple of years later, Sundar came to Disneyland with us. Once more, Venkat didn’t want to do it. He only ever shelled out for trips back home to see his mother. Sita had just begun a part-time job at the bank, so I think maybe she didn’t have holiday time yet. So we asked, could Sundar come with us? Venkat and Sita insisted on paying his portion. I think Sita must have put pressure on, and Venkat didn’t like to be seen as cheap. Sundar was very excited. Our daughters must have been, perhaps, six and eight? And he is about four years older than Brinda. We drove. It was a bit awkward. Motel rooms are made for four, but we would get him a cot, and he behaved perfectly, an angel, the whole trip. He was old enough to even help with the kids. One night after our daughters were in bed, Lakshmi and I went out, to the restaurant attached to the motel. We could see our room from our table, but still, we would not have done it without him there.

  “But there was one thing that happened on that trip. Sundar was old enough for some ride, I don’t remember what it was, but our kids weren’t big enough. I can see now, one of us should have gone on it with him. I don’t know what we were thinking. Probably we were tired, and he said he could do it by himself. We agreed to wait for him, but the kids were restless, that must have been it, end of the day, so we told him we would get a snack and meet him, right at the exit to the ride. Well, we came back and he wasn’t there. We thought we were early, he hadn’t come out yet, but we waited, twenty minutes, half an hour, and then we started to panic. There wasn’t anywhere for the kids to sit, so they were whining. Lakshmi and I were sweating, let me tell you. So finally I left to find an information kiosk.

  “They put out an all-points bulletin and finally, maybe an hour or two after that, some person in a Donald Duck costume brings him. Disneyland. It’s huge. Thousands of people. Sundar couldn’t tell us how we missed each other. But, really. What would be worse, losing your own kid or losing someone else’s? Oh God.”

  He had noticed me watching his pocket, and now pulled his hand out a little to show me what occupied it in there. No ancient cigarette pack, but a japa mala, a rosary of rudraksha beads, each wrinkled, tobacco-coloured seed like a dwarfish pocket idol presenting in a queue for worship. “I am a devotee of Shivashakti. Heard of him?”

  Said with a straight face: my introduction to Seth’s deadpan humour. No Indian could avoid Shivashakti, a “spiritual leader” of tremendous fame and, dare I say it, fortune. Shivashakti’s cult was massive and international, as with Rajneesh and his ilk, nearly on a par with Satya Sai Baba’s.

  I do not like godmen, and reserve my greatest dislike for those with the wealth and adulation it seems to me should belong only to rock stars. My attitude, common enough among self-styled intellectuals, is to see religion as infantilism, unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own decisions. True, certain thinkers I admire intensely, including Erich Fromm, have thought differently, but I had never gotten far with these ideas myself, not least because meeting a devotee shuts me up tight, their fawning and mindlessness. I had vowed, as a therapist, to help people to think for themselves.

  What to do? Religion has hobbled my countrymen. It has poisoned my country.

  And yet. “I’ve heard of him,” I said to Seth. None of my usual bile, despite the japa mala snaking out of his pocket, despite the lack of a therapeutic frame—historically the only harness that can restrain me from telling someone what I think. I wasn’t thinking it. I wasn’t even feeling it! What strange spell had this man cast?

  Many people who know me imagine I must be a cruel sort of therapist, an old-fashioned abusive Freudian,
hastening transference by becoming the problem itself. Not at all. I’m not a misanthrope, even if I don’t like most people. I am indescribably touched by anyone who has been moved to dig in the embers of his life and find what glows there. I stoke, blow, add wood or dung chips as needed … the metaphor founders, but I think you understand. Seth provoked in me a glow: credulity. He had started to break my longstanding habit of skepticism. It felt good and strange. I wanted to see what he saw, or, no, not that. I wanted to be seen by him? It wasn’t only that. He had guessed, about me. He had seen.

  “You must come home,” he said, still using that expression after how many years in Canada? I, too, live between my Englishes, and claim them all. “On the anniversary, we typically have an evening at our place, a remembrance, short prayer, a meal.”

  I said I would see, yes, perhaps, my heart dropping a little. Such gatherings are not my thing.

  “No need to confirm. Just come.” He wrote his address on a card. “Can I give you a ride back to your hotel, or … where are you staying?”

  “No, no, it’s very close.” I gestured behind me, toward town. “I walked. Less than twenty minutes.”

  “I live even closer, but walking? Bad enough to have to work!” The habitual deadpan. “I do a forced march along the lake each evening in summer.” Eyebrows up, tilted asymmetrically. “My wife.”

  His wife. I was curious about her, about his home, his other daughter. Curious about the daughter I had already met. Also his friend, the excuse for our meeting: Venkat. Also to see Seth again.

  I took a long-cut home and was on a bench by the lake, watching the geese, someone diving off the opposite bank, white legs disappearing into the green water, when I looked up to see thunderclouds running in again from the horizon, dangling sheets of rain that darkened the shining town against the sun, until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

  I don’t like to get wet, and so did my best to defy my knees, going up, up, up the side of the town, so steep that sidewalks alone cannot cut it. Rather, the sidewalks have been cut into steps, several flights per block. (A “flight” of stairs—that’s a good one.) I only made it a third of the way before the rain hit. Torrential. Lashings. My notepads would be soaked. I was trying to cross a wide thoroughfare when I saw two punks huddled with their dog under a dry cleaner’s awning, who waved me in. They told me they were from Montreal, hitchhiking west, where berries, they said earnestly, were bursting to be picked. Their German shepherd wore the standard-issue homeless-dog bandana, a splash of purple amongst punk-black clothes and punk-white faces. We peered out into the rain, avoiding leaky spots and eye contact, at least on my part. I didn’t want more conversation. I wanted to think.

  I hadn’t needed to explain to Seth that someone who had not lost immediate family in the crash could still be intimately affected by it. He, like his daughter Brinda, was self-effacing, but in a way that had nothing to do with self-hatred. I couldn’t name it, but it was powerfully attractive. Gracious forbearance. His admiration for his daughter. His bemusement at her life-course. I remembered a book by someone who taught in that science writing programme at Johns Hopkins. Perhaps she was still there. Ann Finkbeiner. After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss Through the Years. An unexpectedly good book, one of the few I had returned to out of the dozens on the subject that I had picked up and, mostly, dismissed.

  For many years, researchers searched and researched for proof of “recovery” from bereavement, the very term suggesting that a person could return to fully robust being by accepting that “dead is dead” and letting go. Freud himself appeared to believe this, until he lost his own child. I remembered this: therapists I knew, in Canada, shepherding bereaved persons through identifiable stages toward recovery. Rosslyn argued this with me at some point, or, at least, that was what I thought she was arguing. She seemed sometimes to think I was misrepresenting her positions. No doubt she was sometimes right.

  Finkbeiner says that researchers finally are starting to admit that we perhaps never recover. They still look at stages in grief. Not the old, hard-and-fast ones: Denial: Anger: Bargaining: Depression: Acceptance? Check. But changes of some sort—erosion, shape-shifting. Grief is as subject to the forces of time as every other real thing, from love to trees to stones. Finkbeiner matter-of-factly says that “… letting go of a child is impossible.” And yet, with time, the great sloth heart may move.

  The storm began to thin and dissolve, and the Montrealers moved out toward the road. I gave them some money, enough for a couple of bowls of noodles at the Chinese restaurant, if they could get in the door smelling as they did. Before going home to make my notes, I bought a rainproof jacket at a second-hand store on High Street. Black, urban-looking, nothing I would wear back home, but it cost less than my recent investment in the Youth of Canada and rolled up neatly into a little packet that I swore never again to be caught without in this volatile little town.

  I had it with me the next day, Sunday, when I went, as I have every Sunday of my adult life, to find a novel. I had spotted the bookstores downtown, and already decided where I would go, a cavernous store stacked with books organized according to mysterious rules, and attached to a vegetarian café.

  Rosslyn and I had loved Sunday, loved our system, both profligate and restrained. You buy only one book, and sometimes not even that; sometimes the other already owns the book you most want to read, but if you want a book, you buy it. Only one. You spend the whole day reading it. It keeps you from worrying, the rest of the week, over whether you’ll ever get to read fiction again. It keeps you from being acquisitive. It is calm, measured, stately.

  Although I always have several titles in mind, I also like to browse. Today: CanLit. Had to be. What a plethora of books I’d not heard of! Canadians do love their authors. This was coming, when I left, with the Mordecai Richler this and the Margaret Atwood that, but it hadn’t achieved anything like these proportions. I’d read the Globe and Mail Saturday books section yesterday, over (and under) my solitary meal, but it only brought home that I was Out of Touch.

  This week’s winner: Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, nosing out Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I paid the chatty, bearded fellow at the cash and went through a set of aquamarine-painted doors to order a breakfast burrito at the café. The book’s cover bored me but I wouldn’t hold it against the novel. Our era in book design is dominated by photos-from-behind.

  Earlier this year, back in Delhi, Vijaya, my upstairs neighbour, the widow, had begun inviting me to meals. Somehow she learned about my Sunday routine and somehow I invited her to join me. She was an MA in literature, after all, teaching at the college level. Perhaps she had seen me leaving one Sunday or another for Chandni Chowk, Oxford Books, Bahrisons? I sometimes thought she conspired casually to run into me in our stairwell—evidence not of my allure, but rather of her desperation.

  So one morning we went to look at books together. I was sweating lightly and already regretting it. So self-conscious! We had no idea how to behave. There is no template, back home, for middle-aged dating. Others out and about were mostly younger, students, bachelor profs. Occasionally a middle-aged couple, but terrifyingly chic; women with short hair, men with long. It was Sunday: anyone who looked like us was at home, the men lounging on divans, the women cooking.

  Vijaya chose a Jane Austen reissue, one of the few, she said, that she hadn’t read. I hate Austen. Artificial, sentimental claptrap. I chose Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. She peered politely at the blurbs.

  Impossible to think of going to a coffeehouse, sitting among shouting, pretentious would-be poets. It would have compounded the awkwardness unbearably. As I hesitated, she invited me home for lunch. We entered her flat and followed the script: I lounged on the divan with Chatwin while she cooked. Her children telephoned: chatter-chatter-chatter. She switched on the television or radio, the blare of Bollywood. We ate and made small talk in Telegu. A hot midday meal induces a siesta, so I made my farewells. It w
as late afternoon by the time I woke. I never finished the book. I doubt she even opened hers. What piercing solitude. I recalled it now, here in the Big Bean Café. I was alone with my book and my meal, but it was that day with my widow that I felt in full my loneliness. How the other half lives, the variety, the social engagement: would this have been my life if I had succeeded in having a family? How would I have coped up with all that?

  The breakfast burrito was passable, despite hard-core vegetarian ingredients requiring long mastication. The coffee was better than expected. And the book was excellent—Highly Recommended for All Collections. Indelible characters, and a view on a corner of Canadian history. I wondered if Seth or Brinda had read it. I was feeling very warm toward Canadians just now.

  I remembered, randomly, as always, my parking-garage cat. Would Vijaya give it some yogourt rice to keep it going?

  It probably had run away or been struck by a car.

  At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, the longest day of the year (sun-up at 4:42! Rise aaand shine!), I was walking from one greystone building to the next in Harbord’s lush quad, looking for Sonnet Hall, where, funnily, the department of math and statistics did its thing. Professor Venkataraman’s office was on the second floor. He seemed to be on the same teaching schedule as his friend Seth, and had asked me to come immediately after his class.

  His door remained closed to my knock, so I sat on one of several smallish wooden chairs in the hall. They were scattered, like hard, uncomfortable throw pillows, for use by anyone waiting for tardy profs. Several were decorated with angry words, deeply inscribed. I waited nearly an hour, but refrained from deepening any of the inscriptions. I called his office number and listened to it ring; I called his home number and left a message saying I would try again the next day at the same time, and could he please confirm?