“Sri Swamiji wishes to speak to you. You will come, today at six o’clock p.m.,” she said, in the dice-tumbler accent of south Indians to whom English doesn’t come easy. “You know where it is?”
He tilted his head in the affirmative. “I know, yes.”
He had asked for a tour, the first day, and had seen the bungalow that had recently replaced the thatched-roof huts of the original ashram. The house was set in a garden, the garden within a grove, so that the impression one had, viewing it from a distance of fifty metres, was that it must be a very inviting place, if one were so lucky as to be invited.
No one knew the process by which visitors to the ashram were asked to come to the bungalow for a personal audience with their guru, but everyone heard about these encounters, and everyone hoped. Last year, Venkat had been granted a semi-private audience, together with another family who had lost relatives in the Air India bombing. Shivashakti had materialized vibhuti, holy ash, from the heads of the children there, and given it to them all to take home.
There were other stories, from other visits, other devotees. Venkat had told him that his first time there, he had been waiting to see Shivashakti when a man emerged, weeping, from the inner sanctum. He was from Finland or Sweden, Venkat hadn’t been sure, and grew up speaking a language now known by fewer than a hundred people. Shivashakti had spoken to him in his mother tongue.
Why was Seth being called? Perhaps he already knew. When he needed a guru, Shivashakti had come to him. Now he needed to meet Shivashakti in person, although he hadn’t recognized it until now—there it was, a gnawing hunger. And he had been called to satisfy this, as well.
Any remaining mental mistiness had been burned off by the invitation, which seemed to issue directly from the sun. Tat savitur varenyam. He walked out of the shade into its warmth and paced the grounds, a walking meditation that took him, three times, past the evening’s destination, before he returned to his dorm to bathe and dress.
By five thirty, he was walking toward the western end of the compound, and the house of his Lord. He realized he was thinking of the bungalow and garden as though they were a temple complex and wondered whether Shivashakti’s acolytes performed for him similar rituals to those done for deities in the usual temples, where the gods were represented in wood or bronze instead of taking the form of living beings.
Seth had loved, as a little boy, to visit the Krishna temple when the priests were getting the deity ready for bed. He and his mother would watch them give the idol his dinner of yogourt, milk, ghee, all those rich foods beloved of the child-God and of all children, then bathe the small figure and dress him in silk garments before parading him around the temple and singing him to sleep. Seth’s mother donated such a garment once a year.
Seth once told his mother that he wanted to come and look after baby Krishna when he grew up and his mother had shushed him—“Become a priest with your marks?”—as though the priests were grown men playing with dolls, rather than men invested with the holy offices of worship.
The density of margosas increased around the path, absorbing the heat of the day and releasing a slight, oily pungency into their shade. Sound, dust, the enmity of the common world, all seemed held at bay as Seth climbed the steps. A veranda, terra-cotta roof tiles, rooms and people, as with a temple or a home. One or two muttered “Jai Shivashakti” toward him, and understanding both Seth’s purpose and his uncertainty, pointed him ever farther into the interior of the house. He saw a bench, finally, outside a closed door, where a middle-aged white couple sat.
“Jai Shivashakti,” he greeted them. “You are waiting to see Swamiji?”
“Jai Shivashakti,” they answered.
He sat and waited.
Shortly before six, the door opened and a family exited, a frolicky little girl, a sombre adolescent boy, and a man and woman—Indian but prosperous and progressive, to all appearances: she with bobbed hair, he a gold watch—who leaned into each other. He wiped tears from his eyes and cheeks as her manicured fingernails dug into his starched shirt sleeve.
From behind them, an acolyte beckoned the white couple. The Indian family shifted to let them pass. When the white couple exited some twenty minutes later, looking brave and buoyed, Seth thought of The Wizard of Oz, which Ranjani loved and had made him watch every time it came on TV. The Wizard, we were to believe, possessed no special powers other than making people (or lions, or scarecrows) see what strengths were already within them.
“Jai Shivashakti,” the usher said now to Seth. We’re off to see the Wizard! Seth’s mind sang—not what he wanted to be thinking.
“Jai Shivashakti,” he said, feeling one part of his mind quiver in readiness, a blossom in the wind, while another part raced, a greyhound of analysis: The Wizard lets us see what is already in us, but, as with Krishna to Arjuna, his powers also reveal his divinity to us … The two parts joined in silence as he entered the chamber and his God came forward to greet him. Seth bowed, palms together.
“If you are God, so I am God,” Shivashakti said to him, and Seth repeated it back to his god.
“Your daughter has gone,” his guru said. “But you remain.”
Seth flailed briefly in panic and incipient grief. His daughter had died? Which one? Was this an instruction? Then he grasped, easy as snatching a firefly out of dark air, the obvious meaning. “Yes, yes,” he said.
“You feel somehow alone.”
How did he know? Seth could not recall later whether they spoke in Tamil or English, or in words at all.
Remember that I am always with you and within you. Think on my name, you will feel my presence.
Close up, Shivashakti radiated a hypnotic stillness. He had wide black eyebrows above a strong nose and below the silvering bangs of his still-thick pageboy. He was a small man with large features, something like a big-boned bird, feathers fluffed into a saffron robe. His keen eyes, too, had something of a bird’s intense attention.
In his presence, Seth was, almost against his will, more aware of his God’s humanity than his divinity. His divinity inheres in his humanity, he reasoned afterward, savouring the experience. At close range, then, you must feel less God-warmth, and more person-warmth. Else, how could you approach him? At such close quarters, you would be burned.
Seth felt himself surrender, felt love surround him, absorb him, perfect him.
“I am here, Swamiji,” he said, and fell at the feet of his lord.
During his weeks at the ashram, Seth called his brother’s place in Bangalore every few days to speak to Brinda. Or rather, he would go to the Shivashaktipurum Post Office and place a call to his brother’s neighbour, hang up, wait ten minutes, then call again to find Brinda there or to be told a time to call back. His brother had applied twenty years ago for a phone line, but claimed he hadn’t gotten it yet because he refused to pay bribes.
These things—India!—increasingly drove Seth nuts: corruption, congestion, poverty, dust. To his daughters, he defended the conservatism, the rituals, the sex-segregation, but inarticulately, and with decreasing conviction. It had long been a reflex for him, in his adopted country, to imagine that there was another place where he felt at home as he never had in the Great White North. Returning to India, though, he learned, over and over again, that the country of his birth was no longer his to claim. He was suspended, as if in mid-bound, between two shifting-drifting continents whose appearance, texture, even location, changed even as he watched them from his great-seeming distance. That was the other problem: he couldn’t fully know either country because both were transforming, not even glacially. India was visibly more urban and modern than when he first left; Canada, too, was more cosmopolitan and open than when he first arrived. So maybe that problem would turn out to be the solution.
These were his thoughts as he rode the train out of Shivashaktipurum, on his way to his sister’s place in Chennai. His brother would bring Brinda from Bangalore to meet him there. Before they arrived, Seth planned to pop in on Venkat.
The agrarian landscape of his boyhood scrolled past. The exposed dirt, in mounds beside rice paddies, in furrows beneath bullock hooves, was a different shade of red or brown every half hour. The air, too, would smell different for brief periods, though this was not all natural: sometimes he would smell manure, or dampness, the smells of childhood rambles; sometimes a putrid, nose-burning smell of chemical exhaust, some factory, plastics or fertilizer, employing an entire village and likely giving everyone cancer and holes in the heart. It happened in Canada—Lohikarma, the environmentalists liked to remind them, was downstream from the pulp mill, and who knew what they were getting in their water? But Seth was sure more precautions were being taken there than here. Canadians would insist.
He was in a third-class compartment, which he had always enjoyed, even in his youth, when his school performance and the Brahmin ethos (Brahmins are under siege, he heard his uncles saying, our advantages are disadvantages) meant he was far snobbier than he was now. A third-class carriage was a place between places, and within an hour, he had gotten to know his neighbours: the cringing Tata Company peon with his wife and three crusty kids; the Marwari trader, with waxed moustache points that stuck out past his earrings, who was no doubt toting gold or diamonds; the retired Tamil Brahmin couple who, on learning they shared Seth’s sub-caste, talked doggedly through their entire family tree until they figured out how they were related to him—by marriage, at a distance of more than six degrees.
They all then drowsed in the rocking carriage, as Seth’s thoughts drifted sleepily back to Canada. A few weeks before he left, he had run into Kaj Halonen, with his family, at the mall food court. As Kaj chatted, his wife left them without smile or excuse. Their children were waiting: a sullen-looking dark-haired boy, and a blond girl with long, misshapen limbs, flailing in some kind of kitted-out wheelchair. Kaj had never made reference to his kids before and didn’t now. Seth was left thinking about children—or adults—who never fully grow up.
Sundar would always be twenty-one to them, floating, in his own way, in some Neverland. If and when Venkat returned to Canada, he and Lakshmi might forever be responsible for him. Was that what terror did—give us unwanted family, weird and delicate alliances; did it drive us into the arms of people who were then forced to embrace us? Did Venkat see it that way? He had turned to Seth and Lakshmi, but then Seth had turned to God.
Venkat’s house, in a Chennai suburb, had been built by his late brother, whose widow and children still lived on the second floor, in a roomy three-bedroom flat identical to the one on the ground floor where Venkat’s mother and sister had long been installed. Venkat met him at the door with a handshake and some back-patting and his sister Parvati appeared immediately behind him with a stainless steel tumbler of lime-water balanced, reflected, on a stainless steel plate. They gestured him to a sofa.
Parvati had been widowed at nineteen, weeks after her marriage, and her in-laws hadn’t tried to keep her with them. She wore a silk nine-yard sari and a fleet look of cunning desperation that Seth recognized from others who had lived their whole lives with overbearing parents.
Venkat’s mother, lurking noisily in the kitchen, called out, “Enna, Sethu? Sowkyumaa?” She, too, wore the traditional nine-yard, which accented her broad middle, and she had her daughter’s thick hair, parted and combed severely over a wide head. Their silhouettes were almost identical, the mother’s only a bit wider and taller. Self-similarity, Seth thought, fractals, infinite regress.
Venkat was dressed neatly, in a white dhoti and pressed mauve kurta. He didn’t appear to have gained weight, but didn’t look any thinner either. There was an alteration, though—what? Seth sensed, not calm (that would be asking too much), but less bewilderment in Venkat than he had become used to.
“You’re looking well,” Seth told him. He would have said this either way, but how nice that it was true.
“I’ve heard back from Jerry Czaplinski,” Venkat said. The statistics department head.
“Ah?” Venkat had told Seth he was thinking of returning to work in the fall. The university would be virtually obliged to comply if he did.
They both reached out to receive saucers of fresh-hot onion bajjis from Parvati.
“So you are coming back?” Seth wanted to know.
“Very much coming back, Sethu. Very much coming back.”
“We think it’s a bad idea,” Parvati said from the kitchen entrance at the other end of the living room, not precisely observing the customary rules against women mingling with outside males, but, by staying in the doorway, not exactly violating them either.
Seth remembered Lakshmi telling him once that Sita complained a little about Parvati, who had worshipped Venkat and his wife and the now-deceased elder brother who used to live on the top floor. Parvati would stifle them with attentions, insist on carrying Sundar everywhere, even when he was so old as to feel uncomfortable with it. She wanted to comb Sita’s hair, make Venkat’s coffee; she became a Shivashakti devotee when they did and came with them whenever they went to Shivashaktipurum. Sita pitied her and tried to be kind, unlike the other sister-in-law, who lived upstairs and spoke sharply to Parvati. Venkat, too, indulged her: the youngest, their father’s pet, a widow. Now Parvati had fixed all the largesse of her immature affection on Venkat.
Seth looked at her with polite bemusement. Could Parvati sway him?
Their mother passed another plate of bajjis through the kitchen doorway to her daughter. “Chi! He’s a man. He needs to work. Is he going to sit around the house with you, reading Stardust magazine?”
Seth sneaked a look at Venkat, whose face was a mask of bizarre, unreadable neutrality. Was it his mother who convinced him to return? But that wouldn’t quite account for the sense of energy behind his declaration, a rumbling of determination greater than any he had felt from Venkat since before the disaster.
When Seth called Lakshmi later that day, he tried to give an account of Venkat’s mood. “I suspect that being home with his mother and sister has reminded him of his obligations. Who else can support the family now, with his brother gone? I don’t think his mother would put up with him quitting his job and moping around the house.” There was something else Seth was grasping for, something he himself had been cheated of. “I think it’s been healthy for him to be back where he truly feels at home. He even seems to have made some new friends.”
“Then why is he coming back?” Brinda asked later. “Isn’t he going to get sad and lonely, and, you know”—she didn’t say “suicidal” but the word puppeted, herky-jerky, between them—“all over again?”
Lakshmi had asked the same thing. Seth said, “He didn’t tell me why, exactly. He probably needs to feel more productive and important than he can here. And he will earn enough to support his mother and sister and come back every summer if he wants.”
In August 1986, Venkat came back to Canada. He flew in to Vancouver, as before, but this time Seth drove out to pick him up.
Venkat was thinner, which almost never happens on a trip home. He sat with his shoulder bag clutched in his lap, the same one he had in Ireland, filled, back then, with the photo albums and his family’s clothes. Seth wondered what it had in it now.
They were on their way to stay with Bala. Seth had been to the house two or three times, but the suburb was dramatically altered every time. New residential roads, first with nothing at all around them, then with new cul-de-sacs tacked at intervals by spindly trees; new mini-malls, their exterior decor meant to evoke Switzerland or California; new houses of worship: a Pentecostal church; and, now, a Chinese temple in red and gold, rising up from the wayside earth.
Bala’s wife, Vasu, answered the door with a smile, then stood aside for them to enter as Bala came to greet them. His starched short-sleeved button-down looked like a packing box, thought Seth. If he lay on his back, his torso would be perfectly flat. What was that book Brinda had liked so much? About the boy squashed flat one day who mailed himself to a friend for vacation. Flat Stan
ley, that was it. Flat Bala.
He smelled sandalwood incense, coconut rice. The Balakrishnans’ daughter was reading on the sofa. She would start Grade 12 in a few weeks, a girl in her parents’ mould: A for academics, A for athletics, All About Achievement. Their son, Sudhir, not at home, a different story, as they say. Pudgy, shortish, darkish, sweet. Daddy’s pet. They kept Sara Lee brownies in the freezer for him, even while Bala—who strode laps around his little street each morning before staging a grand finale on his lawn, bopping bony knees to palms, jumping his jacks, pushing his ups—made subtle cracks whenever anyone hoisted a samosa at a party.
Bala offered Seth a Johnnie Walker, a gesture that Seth, as the only drinker in the room, felt was laden with moral condescension. He accepted. It was good, that caramel burn, after the long drive. He looked forward to an oversoft bed. He wondered if he and Venkat would be sharing a room, as they had in Cork.
“Our Mahalakshmi temple?” Bala was responding to a question Venkat had asked. “Coming along, coming along. We think we’ll have the groundbreaking within the year. All of us out here are exceptionally committed.” Bala handed plates to the men and began murmuring insistently that they should help themselves to the buffet Vasu had laid out.
“Is that so? Excellent,” Seth said, making reciprocal gestures that Venkat or Vasu should really go first. Venkat, with an absent air, began, and Seth followed.
Bala took a linked set of measuring cups from a drawer to serve himself, three-quarters of a cup of vegetable kootu atop a half-cup of rice. “Even some of our white Canadian friends from the Shivashakti Centre, they have made contributions to the temple fund. They think it can only be good.”
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 22