The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  He didn’t, but I returned the next day in any case and waited fifteen or twenty minutes before giving up once more. As I pushed the elevator button (going down stairs is often harder on knees than going up) a man of about my age emerged from the stairwell. He was unlocking his door as I caught him.

  “Professor Venkataraman?” He looked at me blankly. “Ashwin Rao. I’m conducting the, er, doing the study. I sent a letter and we spoke by phone last week …” His face seemed to harden but he nodded.

  I followed him into his office, breathing his trailing scent: dusty, ammoniac, faint but distinct, perhaps intensified by raised body temperature because he had walked up the stairs. I couldn’t identify it and wondered if it might be a drug I didn’t know. Anti-anxiety medications alter body chemistry in specific ways, common enough that I often can distinguish them. The skin of his face and hands was flaccid, as if from sudden weight loss.

  He pulled a visitor’s chair out from his desk and gestured me into it, then sat on a sagging sofa, as though we were therapist and client. I reminded myself that this was something else.

  “Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?”

  There was an odd immobility to his face, not severe but noticeable. It wasn’t the slackness of stroke, but rather a rigidity that could almost have been conscious or, if not, then otherwise psychological in its origins. He also had a noticeable facial discolouration, not uncommon in Indians with a particular type of skin, which gave a bluish shading to his features. He was quite bald on top, the fringe behind his ears neatly combed. His pants and shirt were of the sort not to wrinkle, but he was not dressed with care.

  I gave him the same answer I had given Seth. He asked where I was based, my academic history. I had the clear sensation that I was being ranked.

  “So you are interested in what?” he said, at last. “How I have got on since the bombing, is it? The trial has stirred up all the old emotions. Now we are waiting, again, for it all to be over.”

  I nodded and waited. A victim’s father had been quoted in the papers, on the trial, saying, “It is like somebody putting a needle in a wound that has formed a crust. It was probably bleeding on the inside, but you couldn’t see it. Now it is bleeding on the outside.” Freud felt this himself, when his own child died, “a deep, narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed.”

  Venkat cocked his head coldly. “You want to ask some questions?”

  I sniffed and swallowed, and rubbed my nose, which was itching. “We can start wherever you like. People often want to talk first about the early days, when you found out about the bomb. I would like to know that, as a sort of baseline. And more about your family.”

  “Accha, is that so? And how will this help, who will this help? I didn’t want to do this, you understand.” He gestured in my direction, as if toward something unpleasant. “Sethu’s idea.” He sighed. “He and Lakshmi are good people. But how, what is the model for this research? Someone will publish this? You travel around and ask questions of anyone who will answer? Journalism, then? Maybe made for TV?”

  Despair filled me, a chilly blue liquid, seeping in from the ground. My feet grew cold, my fingers numb.

  Why are you dredging all this up?

  “I hadn’t realized Dr. Sethuratnam had put you up to this. Please. You don’t have to.” But if he didn’t talk with me, I would have no reason to meet Seth again, and all the unfamiliar, perhaps groundless optimism of the last couple of days would be snatched away.

  “No,” he barked. “That would not be right. Let us talk.”

  I stayed more than two hours. Don’t think this means things got more pleasant. It was simply that once he started, he did not stop.

  On my way back to my apartment, I bought two mickeys of Canadian whisky. For after I finished my notes. My steno pad, in my shirt pocket, thwapped my heart in time with my steps.

  The composition notebook marked “Venkataraman” was on my dining-table-desk. I made a sandwich, then found the first blank page after my notes on Seth. I pulled a fresh pen from the package and my steno pad from my pocket, and began to write.

  Dr. Venkataraman’s monologue (monolong?) had often seemed virtually incoherent, but I did my best to record it the way he had told it, to try to follow the lines of his thought. He began with the accused, those in the dock and the ones who seemed to have gotten away. He ranted about governmental incompetence. Air India had been threatened, don’t forget. Planes were going to be bombed, that’s what they said, payback for decades of atrocities. Air India let the Canadian Aviation Security folks know, but, as happens, the white people thought the brown people were merely asking for a handout. Extra security? Make ’em pay for it. Next! Same with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service—insecurity and stupidity service was more like it! And whatever information they could get, they refused to share with the RCMP, who were working blind, not that they would admit it! He told me in nauseating detail, much of it redundant to me—we had read the same sources—how the bomb was made, how it was planted, right under the noses of everyone whose job it was to prevent such things. The RCMP made him fill out forms, then lost them. The Canadians didn’t bother sending anyone to Ireland to help with logistics—that fell to an Indian diplomat and the Irish themselves. Over and through he cycled—details, details, details—hardly mentioning his wife or child or how he lived his wreck of a life. I was unable to interrupt, to guide him or ask questions.

  Transcription took six hours. I permitted myself coffee at the three-hour mark, while my whisky stood like a Buckingham Palace guard beside the hot plate.

  Ann Finkbeiner said that the parents she interviewed had found “subtle and often unconscious ways of preserving the bond” with their children. I had begun to see this in many of my interviewees’ stories. It sometimes took hours of talking for the subject to reveal the ways they had found, and I often didn’t recognize these until I transcribed the interview, even if it seemed obvious in retrospect. My brother-in-law, Suresh, had gravitated to hospice work, comforting other grieving parents and departing kids. Another man I talked to had given up his career as a research scientist to found a charity in India, its various branches named for his late wife and children, providing schooling and medical care for needy kids there. The dancer I had seen at the trial last year famously emerged from several years of debilitating grief to found what has become the premier academy of Indian classical dance in Canada. Eventually, she created and performed a choreography inspired by her horrendous losses.

  I couldn’t tell, with Venkataraman, how, if at all, he had “changed his life to preserve the bond.” He was the only person I interviewed who hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Finkbeiner, like me, interviewed volunteers only. Perhaps people who found a way to “preserve the bond” were more willing to talk about the course of their lives following bereavement? Would Venkat be the exception that proved the rule, the one who had felt his family float away, leaving him grasping at ether?

  Shortly after nine, I finished. Full stop. I creaked my back upright and tried to straighten my neck. I massaged my right hand with my left, then sat on it to undo the kinks. The goiter-like callus on my bird-finger’s first knuckle was throbbing. The sky was starting to pink.

  It had been good to discharge him onto the page, but the feel of him lingered in me—his quaking inadequacy in the face of the disaster; his loneliness, for how could someone like him find anyone else to be with? I had let his emptiness pass through mine onto the page but still it blew about in me, its cold surfaces shifting and tumbling freely.

  I should have boiled up some rice and dal and delivered myself early to bed with some poetry to read upon the pillow. I was carrying a leafing-apart copy of Robert Hass’s Praise, left by some tourist at a Delhi bookstall, just as I would leave it here for some other tourist, or maybe even the same one, on the same circuit as I, some invisible doppelgänger I was unwittingly trailing around the world, and who was trailing me …

  Instead, I cracked open the whisky. An aluminium
cap, perforations tearing as you twist, perhaps not as satisfying as magazine-subscription-card-tearing, or bubble-wrap-popping (this latter delight has come lately to India thanks to online booksellers), but quite good in its own special way, the brief cracking of something made to be torn.

  It was 22nd June, the eve of the anniversary. All over Canada, we were in our rooms, alone or with others, readying ourselves for the onslaught of memory. I took up a small tumbler. I poured a shot. Shhh. Ahhh. T.

  I would never have volunteered to be interviewed in such a study as mine. And now, I could not think of a way I had kept my bond with Asha. I never properly even had a bond with Anand. Let alone Kritika. Who were they? I would never know. No one would ever know. (Rosslyn. Thoughts of her lurked continuously since my return to her country.)

  My glass was already empty. I poured a second shot. Remember the Mukherjee and Blaise book? I fetched my copy, wanting to hurt myself. Now let me tell you why it infuriated me. Not the polemics—those were merely inadequate. It was the way they talked about the dead.

  They did interviews with the victim families. Suburban Indian parents, who tell their moving stories themselves, while the novelists describe them, and the scene around them, with only occasional lapses into the ridiculous: “The winding streets of middle-class Toronto suburbs, bearing names like ‘Brendangate,’ ‘Wildfern’ and ‘Morningstar,’ should never have known such tragedy.” What? Tragedy belongs to places with ugly names? “Schillong,” perhaps? “Ouagadougou?”

  But here is the offensive part. Here is how they describe the children who died:

  … truly bicultural children. They were bright synthesizers, not iconoclasts and rebels. Every day at school, where mainstream kids chatted around them about drugs and dates and at home where parents pressured them to study hard and not let go their Indianness, they negotiated the tricky spaces of acculturation. These were children with the drive and curiosity of pioneers, but they were also children who took family love, family support and family dependence for granted. They switched with ease from Calvin Klein and Jordache to saris or salwar-kameezes brought over by doting grandparents, aunts and uncles. They ate pizzas with friends in shopping malls, and curries with rice or unleavened breads at home. They were smart, ambitious children who won spelling bees in a language that their parents spoke with heavy accents; they were children who filled high school chess clubs and debate clubs, who aced math tests and science tests, who wrote poems and gave classical dance recitals while they waited to go into engineering, medical or law school; they were children who pleased their old-country parents by avoiding school proms and dances where kids misbehaved, and above all, they were newly affluent children with purpose and mission, who organized benefits for Ethiopia and Bhopal and projects closer to home.

  These were our children, reduced to some majority opinion of what they should have been, perfect little conformists, the best of both worlds, untouched by darkness or dirt. No iconoclasts. No rebels. No thinkers. No individuals. Stiff little brown Barbies and Kens.

  Tch-tch, Canada, your loss, not India’s. Is that right? Get this: their chastity-obedience-intelligence had nothing to do with whether they deserved to be acknowledged as Canadians. Those children weren’t deserving of investigative attention because of their virtues. They deserved to live because they were alive. They were Canadian because they were born or raised here.

  Besides, Mukherjee and Blaise are novelists. They should have known better.

  I hate the sentimentalizing. I hate the saint-making. I hate that I hate. I threw the book down, poured another shot and raised it. A toast! Congrats, bombers! Conviction or no conviction, you did it.

  On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—which man, which?—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took his revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.

  Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.

  Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.

  So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had taken Kritika and me as children, I dreamed increasingly of my niece. The child of my life. I hadn’t seen them since I left Canada, nearly two years back, and she already looked different in the Christmas pictures my sister had sent, skinnier, the teeth that seem so large in late childhood shrinking within the proportions of an almost-adolescent smile; that smile still, always, the focal point of the family composition.

  I tried to incorporate that new face—surely it would be different again by the time they arrived—into hazy daydreams of us playing Snakes and Ladders, or reading novels in cots set at right angles so we would lie with our feet making an arrowhead and chat over the tops of our books, she perhaps enjoying one of my childhood favourites, which still fed worms on a couple of shelves in the upper reaches of my parents’ home.

  Sometimes I pictured all of us together, my sister, nephew, parents, but those thoughts were more obligatory, more effortful. Images of time to be spent with Asha, in contrast, were like the japa mala Seth carried in his pocket. A particularly obnoxious colleague, a boring meeting, even a less than fully sympathetic client, and suddenly I was off in the clouds, quite literally: thinking of the hill station, where, if one were an early riser, one would take coffee on the veranda amidst the low clouds that settled onto the hilltops each night. I imagined Asha, wandering out to find me, trailing a quilt. She would nestle against my shoulder, watching the mist snake through the bushes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of my coffee, or perhaps asking for a contraband sip, as the rest of the house slept on.

  In steadier moments, I gave thought to Anand. He was fond of baseball, and I wanted to take him to a cricket game. He also loved books, though I had been stung by his rebuffing my suggestions, or, worse, his starting a book I had loved only to rubbish it with a few choice descriptors. Of course I had had some successes, and his expression, when something intrigued him, was particularly pleasing to me. I should have found his inability to fake interest disarming, but we were too much alike, particularly in this way. Even my sister could see it and said so. She said it was her karma: she had done so badly on her first attempt to live with me that she was being made to try it again. Except, as I would point out, I wasn’t dead yet. Kritika would roll her eyes and say, “One of God’s karmic accountants is scratching his head. Or rubbing his hands in glee.” She had her moments.

  She would tell me that I should have given her children cousins to play with. I would counter that I should then have been deprived of her children’s company. “Selfish,” she said, “as always,” though I didn’t see it that way. Of course, had I had children of my own, I suppose my craving for hers would not have been so fierce.

  The liquor was giving me courage. I would apply myself to the problem that had vexed me to nightmare for so long: discerning the moral source of the disaster.

  I went inside the apartment to fetch my journal and my still-warm pen. I saw the notebook marked “Venkataraman,” and picked it up as well. And, why not, the second bott
le.

  A mechanic, Inderjit Singh Reyat, had been serving time in England for building the bomb that went off in Tokyo. The Brits agreed to send him back to Canada to face the music for building the other one. Once he arrived, though, he struck a bargain to testify in his old buddies’ trial instead of standing his own. His testimony could and should have been a bomb indeed, but at the trial he developed sudden-onset amnesia, an unfortunate disability that later resulted in (hooray!) a perjury conviction.

  In the dock, then, two men.

  1. Ajaib Singh Bagri, the Sidekick. Big family. Received welfare payments with one hand, paid for expensive cars with the other, openly preached violence against Indira Gandhi and India as a nation.

  2. Ripudaman Singh Malik, the Millionaire. Charismatic as far as these types go. Rabble-roused in the temples, kept bad company, and ran the Khalsa School, Sikh education for the chosen ones. Ms. D’s love, the unconsummated affair. He had told her that the second bomb should have gone off at Heathrow, should have killed many more than 329.

  The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had made tapes of phone conversations, mostly coded, between the suspects prior to the bombing, but then erased them. The erasure was routine, procedure. Somehow, no one plucked these particular conversations from the conveyor belt. (“Ready to write the book?” “Ready to write the book.”)

  Imagine the lad who did the erasing. I’m fairly sure it was that, and not recording over. He loads the massive disk of tape onto the axle, threads its end onto an empty, waiting spool. He adjusts the alignment and flips the lever for the sixth time that day, the forty-fourth time that month, the two hundred-and-nth time since he got his job. Then he sits, one lightly fuzzed cheek cupped in a rubber-gloved hand. The rubber glove seems redundant, since the only evidence he is handling is to be destroyed, but protocols and procedures must be observed. He lets his eyes blur as he watches the spools go round and round …