Seth ferreted out that I had not yet eaten, and Lakshmi started pulling containers out of the fridge to fix me a plate: rice, kootu kozhambu, cabbage curry with coconut.
“A pukka Tam-Brahm thali!” I exclaimed. They looked uncertain. “It’s become fashionable, Tamil Brahmin cookery. Kids sent from Chennai to work in Delhi and Bombay banks imported their pattis and mamis to make the food they missed. When they invited their friends, it caught on.”
“It’s very healthy,” Seth said modestly. “Vegetarian and so on.” He fetched me a glass of water, then asked his wife, “Is Brinda home?”
Lakshmi widened her eyes, shrugged one shoulder. Preoccupation tensed her face as Seth went to the bottom of the stairs to call up, “Brinda?”
“She must have gone out while we were walking,” Lakshmi said to him as she put my plate in the microwave. Not surprising that she was attuned to Brinda’s distress, even if the girl wasn’t giving her parents any details.
“And how goes your work?” Seth asked, putting the plate in front of me.
Lakshmi added, “I imagine it’s tough going.”
I had to agree. “And tough to assess, at this stage.”
“Have you met with Venkat again?” Seth asked.
The food was delicious and I wished they would hush and let me eat.
“I haven’t,” I told him. “He was very forthcoming, that one time, but I’d be surprised if he’ll see me again.”
“I’ll arrange it,” Seth assured me.
I didn’t respond.
It was a nice opportunity, me, at their table, with the both of them. Lakshmi, like Venkat, had not volunteered to be interviewed, but here I was again, in her house at Seth’s invitation, and she was not acting terribly guarded. Perhaps I could draw Seth out on the remainder of the story. We had left off, I reminded him now, on the verge of Venkat’s return to Canada, after spreading Sundar’s ashes in the Kaveri River.
Seth and Lakshmi nodded. “He spent a few weeks at the Shivashakti ashram, I think, and then maybe a month or so with his mother,” Seth began.
“Yes, he came back to Canada mid-August or so,” Lakshmi confirmed.
“Bala, that Vancouver friend Sita and Sundar stayed with before they left, drove him back.”
“Long drive,” I said, thinking that I would be making it at the end of this week.
“Yes, and it would seem even longer given the company,” said Seth. Lakshmi scolded him with a gasp, but didn’t disagree.
The Sethuratnams had gotten ready to host both men that night, and assumed they might be putting Venkat up for some time, but when Seth greeted them and asked to carry their bags in, they told him no.
“Venkat has said he wants to go stay in his own house,” Bala explained, jogging in place to wake his cramped body, flinging arms out to crack his elbows in the mountain air. “One is not used to sitting so long! I will take him after the meal and sleep there tonight.” He was tall, lean, exacting. And a Shivashakti devotee, which might have been how he and Venkat met.
As Venkat and Bala entered ahead of him, Seth murmured the news to Lakshmi. She was skeptical, as was he: Venkat’s house had been left exactly as it was before the crash. How could it be healthy for him to go back to it?
Lakshmi had laid out an idli buffet, and as Bala headed to the dining table, Seth approached Venkat. “Why on earth do you want to go back home already?” he said softly. “Take it easy, stay here for awhile. I’ll take you there when you’re ready and we’ll …” He had to stop here because, as he and Lakshmi had discussed, they had no idea what Venkat’s plans were.
“I want to stay at my house, Seth,” Venkat replied. “All I have now are their memories.”
“You could see he was a man who had been crushed, emptied,” Lakshmi said now. “It struck us even more, after not having seen him for a couple of months. We were already starting to get on with life, a little. We had our kids and work, and so on. Isn’t that right?”
Seth nodded.
“But Venkat returned here to nothing. Worse than nothing, I suppose.”
“All those reminders,” Seth said, “but he wanted to be back among them.”
I imagined him saying that to Lakshmi that night, on Venkat’s return, as he watched his wife get ready for bed, her nightgown frill scooping the smooth expanse of her sternum.
The scent of Nivea cream crossed to him from her cheekbones, knuckles, elbows: all her sharp points. Seth thought of Venkat, in his own bedroom, which would be cold and unanimated by any feminine spirit. Would he turn on Sita’s bedside lamp, open a jar of cold cream and hold it under his nose, maybe even leave it open in the bathroom, along with her jewellery box? Would he put his nose among the hangers, drizzle a little of her shampoo on the pillow?
How long would Venkat be able to recall Sita’s own scent? Had he already forgotten it?
Seth felt enveloped as his wife got under the covers. He put his arms around her waist, his muzzle in her neck. He trailed his nose down between her breasts; the nightgown pulled down easily to let him kiss them. It pulled up easily to let him kiss her belly. Those other scents carry you to this one; you fall to your knees before its regal advance, its crazy-making, uncatchable variety.
Erotic reverie: I was tingling lightly. It had been a long time. I shifted in my chair, swallowed hard, uncrossed and recrossed my legs.
Seth and Lakshmi were talking, not to me, to each other, about how their daughters confided in Lakshmi (but not everything, as I knew), about how women are trained for empathy. While I saw in my mind’s eye Seth watching Lakshmi as she curved, sleeping, through the dark. The mood of terror had subsided and yet his need for Shivashakti remained as pressing as ever. He had not missed a satsang all summer.
“I have a recurring nightmare,” Seth admitted to me now.
It went like this: He fell asleep, almost. He wakened, falling, gasp, thump, on the pillow. Not uncommon. Happened to him all his life, as it did to others. Except that, since the bomb, it always came with the same nightmare: he was naked on a clifftop. Dark night, rubble beneath his toes, arms outstretched, a breeze in his face, on his back. Pushed or lifted, he toppled into the void.
“I get it once every year or so,” he said.
“Really?” Lakshmi asked. “You never told me.”
“I did,” Seth answered.
“You never,” she said.
“I did,” he said. “Years ago. You forgot.”
“Maybe, if you only told me years ago.”
“I assumed you would remember, so why would I tell you again?”
Seth felt a keen disappointment in Venkat and Bala’s early departure that night: he had been anticipating, more than he wanted to admit even to himself, conversation on the subject of their now-shared God. He had left the latest lecture compendium on the coffee table, but the men never made it into the living room.
Still, he couldn’t completely restrain himself, and had asked Bala, over dinner, “I recently acquired Shivashakti’s lectures from last year. Have you read it yet?”
“No, no,” said Bala. “But of course we attend satsang every week, so we never miss a lecture. When did you become interested?”
Lakshmi glared across the food at Seth.
“I’m not sure when …” Seth kept his gaze averted from his wife, on Bala. “Well, was there any one address or topic that you specially liked? I’m very taken with his ideas on family and community life. To think he could have such wisdom on both though he himself has neither!”
“You could as well say he has both.” Bala prissily dabbed small bites of idli in ghee and melagaipodi, making Seth feel bizarrely compelled to stuff himself. “His devotees are family and community.”
“Ahmama. True.” Seth wagged his head in agreement with Bala, and wagged it again in appreciation of his wife. “Lakshmi: mallipoo idlis. Wonderful.” They were. Nothing like Lakshmi’s idlis, particularly with eggplant sambar. He addressed Bala with renewed cheer. “And the best part is that it is eter
nal, isn’t it? There is no death, in his family. Because it is not the individual who loves or is loved by him. It is the mind of God.”
“I think it is correct to say the individual devotee is loving him.” Bala tossed bites of banana into his mouth without touching his lips, Brahmin-style, and folded the peel neatly onto his plate. “But we are also part and parcel of his makeup.”
“Yes, yes.” Seth licked his fingers, then his whole palm, as noisily as he could. What did Venkat make of this? Was he even listening?
It was Seth who took the lead in the work of assisting Venkat to re-enter his former life. He asked a hundred questions about Venkat’s routine in the morning: What time did he get up on weekdays? How did he get up? What did he do first? What did he do next? And together, step by step, they worked out a new routine, without the sounds of Sita first readying the puja corner for his prayers and then preparing his breakfast. Venkat would set his alarm clock. He would mix an oatmeal packet into a bowl of water and put it in the microwave before sitting to pray, so that it would be ready when he was done.
Did Venkat say, Seth, I’m not a baby? No. As an Indian man and a psychologist, I will attest that there are very few useful generalizations to be made about the Indian male psyche, but this may be one: Indian men are raised to be cared for. An Indian woman might have told such a friend as Seth to back off, but Venkat meekly accepted this instruction and Seth’s monitoring, in the first few weeks of the semester, to make sure that he was following the routines Seth had devised. In those weeks, everyone wanted to visit and bring food. Venkat’s already-full freezer was packed to the hinges until the Sethuratnams, the unofficial but undisputed organizers of his life, asked friends if they could hold off, please, until the stores were depleted.
One other generalization to be made about Indians—they don’t tiptoe around death. You could even say that about me, as hyper-perceptive and socially hapless as I am. This is not to say that Indians’ ways of coping up are better. There are the hysterics, who will fall down and thrash for you so that you are numbed, the depths of your own emotion unable to compete with the heights of theirs. There are whole communities that insist on immediate remarriage. Many of the women bereaved in the Sikh pogroms complained of being remarried to a relative of their late husband’s in such rapid order they felt they were supposed to throw their love and grief out the window on the way to the wedding. But to the extent that Indians have failed fully to progress into secular modernism, we understand that death is part of life, while books about Westerners and grief all talk of people who stayed away from the bereaved, possibly out of fear of becoming sad, possibly because they don’t know what to say and fear saying the wrong thing.
Lakshmi also raised the question I had been waiting to ask the families on my next round of interviews: their thoughts on the bombing as an act of brown-on-brown terrorism that a (nearly) white government failed to prevent or even properly to investigate.
“I wondered at the time if that was why the white-Canadian colleagues avoided Venkat,” she said, her elbows on the glass-top table. “Maybe they were afraid, if they talked to him, he would blame them.”
“Some Indians also felt ashamed that the conflict in India had spilled over here,” Seth said. “You can feel you’re all being lumped together.”
“You felt isolated?” I asked.
I remembered this myself—I had lived in Canada from 1969 to 1983, and every new person I met asked where I was from and whether I agreed with his assessment of some Indian restaurant’s authenticity. To Rosslyn’s family, I was always intractably foreign. Her mother was shocked that I ate meat; her father asked me about suttee. He asked her, in private, how she could be sure I didn’t have another wife and family back home. When she told me, we laughed, but he must have read a news story that frightened him. Poor man: he was concerned for his daughter. And they were never unkind to me.
Seth nodded slowly. “I haven’t felt like that, for a long time.”
“Is that so?” I hadn’t been back long enough to tell what had changed.
“Yes, I think I mentioned. You raise your kids here, they feel more Canadian than Indian, they marry Canadians, or …”
His voice faded there, quickly and strangely, and I was convinced that he had somehow sniffed out what was happening with Brinda. My best guess, in retrospect, was that his faltering was related in fact to his other daughter, who had called that afternoon with unsettling news.
“For me, it has been Shivashakti,” he went on, his voice strengthening, his back straightening, “more than anything, who has helped me feel at home here. Our centre has members from all over—Indian, not Indian, it makes no difference—and the community service means you reach out, you get to know people in a way that is impossible otherwise. My guru gave me the way to see and feel how I belong here.”
Lakshmi had straightened too. “But even those of us who are not devotees have found a way to feel that we belong too.”
I mentioned her eyes, right? They blazed.
I helped them remember what they had been speaking of when I had diverted them: settling Venkat back into his life.
The only subject of disagreement (on this, they could agree) had been his house. Seth tried to suggest that Venkat come to stay at their house while he and Lakshmi packed away Sundar and Sita’s things and shifted the rooms around a little. But Venkat was categorical. The house stayed as it was.
Venkat’s courses that fall were ones he had taught before, Statistical Methods, an intro course that rotated among faculty members, and Theory of Experiment Design. Neither was particularly challenging.
Lakshmi and Seth asked him to come every Friday night to dinner. He complied, though Seth usually had to remind him, either catching him at the office before he left or, on a couple of occasions, phoning him when, after waiting some time, they realized he had forgotten.
Also, at least one night a week, Seth would take Venkat to a Shivashakti satsang. It was odd to feel that he was guiding Venkat back into his own fold. Seth was also uncomfortably aware of having ranked the rest of his fellow devotees according to his own arbitrary standards of temperament and authenticity.
Daisy and Irene were in the middle somewhere. “Where’s your pretty wife?” one or the other would often ask. Maybe if he told Lakshmi they made him uncomfortable, she would come with him more often. Carsten, the leonine young man who read the lecture the first time Seth came, was on the lower end. Seth sensed his ambition and didn’t much like the way Carsten talked down to him. Very near the bottom was the Reverend Jonathan Dunn, a Unitarian pastor whom Seth found suspicious for no good reason. One night, he had persuaded Lakshmi and his daughters to come to satsang. On the drive home, he wondered aloud whether Dunn attended every kind of service in town. “Is he hoping to get people to come to his church?” Lakshmi and the girls replied that the Unitarian philosophy might be closer to their own even than Shivashakti’s.
“What?” He turned around to look at them, three captivating, dusk-lit strangers. “You would go to that guy’s church but I have to beg you to come to satsang with me?”
“It’s nothing personal, Dad,” Brinda said.
He would think about this exchange for years. Nothing personal? What the hell did that mean? How could it not be personal?
It was an irony of the worst sort that those devotees most visibly buoyed by a surging elation in their Lord were the ones Seth least liked to talk to. The ones he liked best—Nick Copeland and Kaj Halonen—for all their steadiness and dedication, tended not to effuse in the way Seth himself wanted and needed. He had pinned some hopes on the Indian families. Maybe, he thought, he needed people who knew what his ideas of God had been before. But they, too, disappointed him.
Unlikely as it seemed, he wondered now if Venkat might understand. Venkat so often came across as insensitive, mostly because he was preoccupied with his own moral agendas. But he had also, occasionally, surprised Seth with an insight, proving not so absent as Seth’s women ten
ded to think. And Venkat had travelled to Shivashaktipurum, many times, had sprinkled Sundar’s ashes there and prayed and meditated at the lotus feet of his Lord. What did he find there? What did he feel? Seth asked him one night on their way home, trying not to sound too eager, nor merely curious.
“Did you have an audience with Him?”
“I did,” Venkat said, glancing at him, then back out the window at the purpling dusk, perhaps smelling the approach of autumn. His face in the half-light seemed illuminated in pixels, shifting dots that emphasized, if anything, the rigidity of his features.
Seth waited. It seemed rude to ask what Shivashakti had said, though he wished Venkat would volunteer it. What was it like to meet your God in person?
“You should go, Seth,” Venkat said. Insight or prescription? It didn’t make a difference. It was what Seth wanted to hear.
“I will,” Seth said, leaning over the steering wheel to release a sudden stiffness in his back. He had to go. There was no other way. He was expecting from his fellow devotees what could only be found in himself and in his God. He would go. The only question was when.
It was nearly dark outside, that’s how long I stayed: much longer than I had intended. Such a strange bubblement of feelings, to be with them—I was stung by the fullness and inviolability of their love, but wasn’t it exactly that which made them so satisfying to be with?
Still, I could stand it no longer, and they had work in the morning.
Seth wanted to drive me home—he seemed to spend half of his time ferrying people about town or trying to—but I refused in favour of a starlit stroll. I stumbled only twice, unable to look away from the inner dome of heaven.
I HAD ALREADY STAYED in Lohikarma several days longer than planned and would leave the following afternoon for Vancouver, with less than twenty-four hours until my first appointment there. But what could I do? Brinda needed to see me once more before she left.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 19