He put his hand in his jacket pocket, as he always did at his narrative’s worst moments. “Thank God I thought to press the button, open the garage door, before I went to get him out. I don’t know how I thought to do that. I could have died too, passed out. I was holding my scarf over my mouth but the carbon monoxide made me sleepy even when I was turning the car off. I ran and took a breath of fresh air, or I think I did, then I dragged him out of the garage, around the front, so the carbon monoxide wouldn’t get in the house, and pulled him up the stairs. Concrete stairs, and it was snowing, wet snow. I was worried I’d slip, kill both of us.” His tension made him laugh at his inadvertent joke. He rubbed his eyes, then continued. “I think I laid him on the rug in the hall with the door still open. He had begun to regain consciousness by the time the ambulance arrived. He must have started his car just about the time I started my car, at home.”
“Do you think Venkat wanted to be rescued?”
Seth looked appalled, as though this had never occurred to him. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Was he angry with you?”
“How could he be angry at me? I saved his life! I saved his life.” His tone was insistent. “He told me, much later, when he was in the hospital, that he had wanted to hurt himself but didn’t have the courage. He was afraid to use a razor, so he did this instead. ‘Totally Canadian, eh?’ he said. ‘No garages back home so we have to use more primitive methods!’ I’ll never forget it. The guy has never made a joke in his life, and when he finally jokes, it’s about this! I was so relieved when he went into the hospital, and then, after that, to India for a few months. We were scared when he came back to Canada again, the next year. Geez.”
“Truly, you felt him to be your responsibility.”
“Who else does he have? Someone has to look after him. Poor guy. We felt terrible: we should have insisted he would stay with us. We should have insisted.” He ran his hand from pate to nape and made the shrug, his tic, twice.
“If I can ask, did his suicide attempt affect your feeling that Shivashakti had saved his life, after the crash? Didn’t you believe, to that point, that his faith in Shivashakti was giving him something to live for?”
“Well, I should have said Shivashakti saved his life by getting me up in the night and making me go over there.”
I didn’t ask if Shivashakti got him up every time or only the one time it mattered. “Let me just—you said, if I’m not mistaken, about your own devotion to Shivashakti, which started that summer, you said you came to God because God is eternal, and would survive anything and so help you survive anything. Clearly, Venkat’s faith was not enough to sustain him through the loss of his family.”
“He was in shock,” said Seth.
He wanted me to drop it, but I waited. And in time, perhaps because he was not accustomed to shutting people off, he resumed.
“In fact,” he said, “I asked him about that, when he was in the hospital.”
Venkat spent several days in the ICU before being transferred to the hospital’s psychiatric ward. His doctors were hopeful of a full physical recovery.
Seth and Lakshmi were permitted to visit him but had no legal status to influence his care and Venkat had no immediate family in Canada. Even in India, he had only his widowed mother and three sisters, two of whom had families of their own. When his elder brother died six years earlier, Venkat had brought his mother and youngest sister to live with him, but the experiment ended when winter began. His mother begged to go back to her home and friends; his brother’s widow in India said she needed the help. Venkat’s sister had no choice in the matter, and Sita, to put it mildly, didn’t object. Now there was no one who could come to be with him. The doctors listened to Seth, however, on what Venkat had gone through, and when they asked where he would go when he was released, Seth told them he had written to Venkat’s family in India to tell them what had happened and suggest that Venkat return home for a time.
He visited Venkat several times a week in hospital and tried to stay off heavy topics. If Venkat occasionally made reference to the suicide attempt or its precipitating causes, Seth typically would do nothing more than listen, although, once or twice, early on, when he himself was still too shaken, he changed the topic. Then, six weeks after the ambulance ride, shortly before he was due to be released straight onto a plane to India, Venkat mentioned he was planning on visiting Shivashaktipurum again with his sister. Before Seth realized it, he had asked the question that had been troubling him.
“I know you still pray,” he had said. “You still have Shivashakti. So how, why, could you try to take your life? Is his love, and your love for him, is that not enough?”
Venkat frowned and looked away. “I am paying, Sethu, for some sins of a past life. And worse than this, my wife and child paid also for my sins. They died to punish me. My mother has written to remind me that if I had succeeded in killing myself, my spirit would anyway have wandered on earth until my destiny said I should die. But I don’t know. What if it was my destiny that I should die by my own hand? And then how much better to come back as some unfeeling animal …”
“No. It is a betrayal of your God.” Seth was livid. “Shivashakti says be humble. It is your egotism letting you think you are to blame when all of this is God’s will. The fact that you lived …” He held up a hand to stop Venkat, who was attempting to interrupt. “No. The fact that you lived is proof that you were not meant to die. Come back as an animal—pah. These matters are not in your hands. Go to Shivashaktipurum. Go and pray. You cannot know the mind of God. Your part now is to love him.”
“All right, Seth. I understand.” Venkat nodded. “You are a good friend.” He patted Seth’s hand, and Seth shook his head, no, no thank-yous, please. Venkat went on. “But don’t forget that Shivashakti is both a God and a path to God. Even this guru-attachment—you will need to renounce it someday. Attachment is pain. Our guru says that, too.”
Venkat lay his head back on the cushions of the sofa where he sat, and closed his eyes. Seth looked around at the rest of the crazy people in their hospital-issue pyjamas—watching Dallas; being talked to in stern tones by their families; trying to extract a candy bar from the vending machine with a fat hand that couldn’t fit through the flap, so that the inmate was forced to drop his prize, over and over. Seth tried to summon again the anger that had made it so neatly clear how wrong Venkat was, but found himself, instead, close to tears. He went to help the large man get his Kit Kat out of the machine.
After his two months’ recovery in hospital, Venkat went to India, to stay with his mother. That was right before the winter holidays. Lakshmi said something to Seth about her surprise that he continued attending satsang so faithfully. Seth didn’t respond. His desire to visit Shivashaktipurum, to experience his God as a corporeal reality, had become fierce. He saw no need to detail for Lakshmi this burning, but told her simply, in spring 1986, that he needed to go.
“So what is this about?” Lakshmi asked, the question that forced him to try to explain.
“I think a pilgrimage would somehow …” He wanted to say that it would formalize his commitment in some way, make his relationship to Shivashakti more real in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world, much as marriage does. But he wasn’t sure Lakshmi would take that very well. “Somehow it would make things clearer for me.”
She didn’t look as though this made anything clearer for her.
“Besides, listen. I’m due for a trip.” This was true: Seth had been the only one of his siblings to leave India and so was obliged to visit his widowed mother at decent intervals. Lakshmi had not gone the last time: her mother had come to live with her only brother in Toronto and so she had no pressing reason. “And I’ll check in on Venkat.” It was a question they had already discussed: what risk, or responsibility for his safety, Seth and Lakshmi would be put to if Venkat returned.
They agreed that he would go when their daughters’ school let out.
He wanted to take both gi
rls, but Ranjani didn’t want to go without her mother. India was never an easy trip for the girls. Last time, Seth had persuaded them to come, but it had been even harder managing in relatives’ homes without Lakshmi to anticipate the compulsory cultural adjustments and mediate their missteps. Brinda, by contrast, felt ready to try it. They decided it would be her high-school graduation present.
They flew Air India, whose ticket prices had gone down and security practices tightened up to the point where most people thought they were the safest airline going. It had been a full year. He’d flown Air India himself less than a week after the … bombing—the word he was trying not even to let himself think. But still, it was quite another thing to bring his child aboard with him, and Seth was aware of holding a lid down tight on his anxiety.
The flight was two hours late departing. They received meals within ten minutes of takeoff—although the airline rarely ran on time, they always had lots of food. Their flight attendants were gorgeous and snooty, as always, and Brinda and Seth in a mood to make fun of them.
“They all look like sari models,” Brinda said. “But mean ones.”
“Yes, I’m scared to even ask for a glass of water,” Seth murmured.
“Don’t even think of asking for an airsick bag.” Brinda poked him with her elbow. “Vomit in your coffee cup, if you need to.”
He hadn’t said anything about his nauseating nervousness. Had he? “So.” It seemed a good time to talk about their plans. “I was thinking we would recover from jet lag in Bangalore, spend time with your grandmother, maybe five days or so, and then head to the ashram after that.” He had failed to specify veg or non-veg, and was tucking into a chicken tikka. “Does that sound all right to you?”
Brinda had not specifically said she was planning to accompany him to Shivashaktipurum, but he wanted her to come; he thought it might be good for her; he thought she might finally understand why this was important to him. He didn’t want to force her, though.
She stirred her dal and mutter paneer. “Okay, but so, when would we go to Mysore? From the ashram?”
“We could do that. The last week or so. Three days there should do it.”
“Three days at the ashram, so how many days in Mysore?”
“No, three days in Mysore: one day for the city, one day for Srirangapatna, maybe a day at the bird sanctuary. I was thinking ten days, maybe two weeks, at the ashram.”
“Are you kidding?” That look, of North American teenagers. Do they teach it to one another? Learn it from TV?
“Why don’t you wait and see how you like it, and … really, why are you deciding in advance? We’re only talking.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, looking at him as though he had been the one to get exasperated, when it had been the other way around, entirely.
The flight attendants were marching through the cabin, reaching across passengers without a word to slam down their blinds. The first movie was Shanghai Surprise, which turned out to be good for almost as many laughs as Three Amigos, the movie that followed right after. By the time their third dinner was sullenly popped in front of them (“Shut up and eat,” Seth said, channelling the air hostess), they were happy to compare the relative comedic merits of Martin Short and Madonna and to worry about crossing the Shivashaktipurum bridge when they came to it.
“You want to leave?” Seth asked. “We just now arrived, only yesterday!”
“I know.” Brinda was leaning on the wall by the window and now turned to look out. Their room was no more than seven feet wide. He stood in the corridor between the cots, befuddled. They had attended their first satsang that morning. Brinda had seemed willing enough.
“Why don’t you give it a few more days, at least? I really …” He was the father here; he was within his rights, even his responsibilities, to guide her. “This could be a very good thing for you. I think you need this.”
“I’m not comfortable here.” Her arms were crossed and brow knitted, everything hunched toward her centre.
“You won’t even tell me what the problem is?”
“Part of the problem is that I don’t feel comfortable talking about it,” she stormed, but then, when he sighed, she softened. “I think faith is, like, one of the most private things there is. I hate all these people coming at you, presuming you believe. You can’t seek; if you’re here, you’re supposed to have already found what you’re looking for, and I haven’t. Oh, and it’s totally creepy the way they use his name as a substitute for other words. Like when those bossy, usher types were trying to get us to move over, instead of “excuse me” or “thank you,” they went ‘Jai Shivashakti? Jai Shivashakti.’ ”
Seth smiled a little at her imitation.
“I know you love it, you really feel it,” she said, sounding more cautious now. “But I don’t. And it’s suffocating to be surrounded by people who do.”
He sat on a cot and reached awkwardly to stroke her hair. “You are young, still, Brinda. I wish I had, at your age, been guided in this way.”
“That’s condescending.” She pushed herself away from him to lean back on the wall. “I said I respect your feelings. You should respect mine.”
Where do they come up with these things? She’s seventeen! An Indian child couldn’t imagine saying something like this. But Lakshmi had set the path and he had gone along with it.
“You always do this,” Brinda went on. “You don’t ask how I feel or what I can handle, but just decide, as though I’m a baby. I’m leaving for Bangalore tomorrow. I know how to get to the train. I’ll call Periappa to come and get me from the station. I’ll see you there when you’re finished here.”
He’d never figured out how the more authoritarian—the more authoritative—parents did it, made their kids obey. He looked at the stubby fingers of his clasped hands, and reclasped them so that his fingers were shut inside. “I’ll take you back to Bangalore tomorrow.”
“I don’t want you to have to give up your dream for me. I’ll be fine.”
“That’s enough, all right?” He stood. “I’ll go with you and come back. It’s only a couple of hours each way.”
“Then why can’t I do it by myself?”
“It’s not a good idea,” he said, his speech slowing—a sign that trouble was afoot if she pushed further. She didn’t.
He had been so proud and happy to have her with him. Walking out of the dorm, yesterday morning, down the ashram’s shady lanes, he had imagined the four of them coming someday. And beyond—retirement, maybe here; grandchildren, maybe here.
And then, this morning, the excitement of seeing his God. Shivashakti had entered the arena at a point unseen, but Seth could tell, everyone could, it was as though a current had run through them. He himself felt faint, until God entered his view.
Shivashakti seemed to him less distinct, more mutable, than in pictures he had seen, as though his outlines were drawn in shifting light. The sunlight in the outer court seemed to blend into his features, as though He were continuous with it, instead of reflecting it as did every mortal creature on God’s earth.
But others, he came to realize, saw something—someone—different.
One devotee later made reference to the benevolence of his aspect. “What do I see when I look at him? I see goodness. He shines it. Out of his eyes.”
Another seemed to find him simultaneously unreachable and omnipresent: “He is, for me, like the sun, moon and planets. He governs my life’s motion, the rhythm of my days. So when I meet him, it is like he is always with me, anyway.”
After seeing him, that first time, Seth rubbed his eyes the rest of the day. They felt warm and tired. He didn’t want to sleep, though; he wanted to meditate, to contemplate that which is without form.
Every August, before beginning teaching, he reread Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics. For him, Feynman was the greatest, his model, the scientist and theorist Seth would never be, but a teacher in Seth’s own mold. He thought now of Feynman’s lecture on Brownian moti
on, and his citation from biology, since, for Feynman, all sciences were connected, and the connections were love and physics: Everything that animals do, atoms do.
Seth knew this to be true, but had not felt, before, his own atoms animalized. Here he felt not simply at peace, but somehow beyond the knowledge that he was a mortal composed of immortal particles, which, after him, would recombine in infinite ways determined by the universe and the laws that he had been made to preach. Felt there was no separation between being and truth.
Even the fight with Brinda left only a mild residue of discomfort, easily washed away in a satsang he attended that afternoon, while Brinda explored the ashram grounds and read. He took comfort in her seeming strength and confidence—surely these would serve her? He did feel detached from conflict, he thought. Such a disagreement, before, would have shattered him. That night, he lay spinning in his cot, skewered on an axis that also pierced the earth’s centre and the ever-living heart of the cosmos.
The train for Bangalore left in the morning at ten, but Seth wasn’t able to catch another back the same day and by the time he arrived back in Shivashaktipurum, he had missed two darshans. He wasn’t happy about that, but was coming to recognize that his dream of worshipping in happy communion with his family was unrealistic, and, in light of that, felt a dawning relief on arriving back in Shivashaktipurum alone.
That afternoon, as he sat reading in the shade of a margosa, he was approached by a severe-looking young woman in a dark red cotton sari, the uniform worn by acolytes living at the ashram.
“Jai Shivashakti,” she saluted him. “You are Sri Sethuratnam?”
Seth had grown irresistibly drowsy, bent over his book in the still and fragrant shade, and had been wondering if he could succumb right there on the grass or haul himself back to his cot. As he rose to face the woman, he wondered if she had, in fact, awakened him. He brushed at his face: neem pollen or the cotton wool of sleep?
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 21