The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

He felt his eyebrows dampen and wiped them with his thumb. His mother had been right. And now it was too late.

  Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai.

  What was he praying for? Peace? But he didn’t want peace. He wanted to be angry. He wanted his daughters to be happy. Goddammit, why couldn’t he make them listen to him? Well, Ranjani did seem happy, so maybe Seth didn’t have a leg to stand on there. But Brinda: No husband. No job. No proper degree. It was his fault, for not being firmer. This country robbed parents of their dharma. He heard Lakshmi enter the family room behind him. It was her fault. She was always disagreeing with him. And now Brinda was paying the price. He heard her sit on the sofa, but as though from a great distance. A heat in his ears was obliterating the sound of his prayers.

  Lakshmi waited a time, and when he didn’t stop or turn, came to sit beside him. She waited again, and then put a hand on his thigh. “Seth?”

  His rage concentrated at the point of her touch. He was inside the head of Shiva, as the Lord sat deep in stone-cold meditation atop Mount Kailash. And here was Kama, now disguised as his wife, approaching as if innocently even while taking aim with a flowery arrow. Don’t look, Seth! The eye of your enlightenment will open and the cold beam of knowledge burn her to ash.

  Seth fixed his gaze on the engraved-silver vessel of vibhuti on the hearth. Shivashakti materialized holy ash after each address, and Seth had replenished his supply on his last trip to India, standing in line as a devotee scraped portions into bits of paper torn from the Hindu newspaper. He had carried it home in his breast pocket.

  Jai Shivashakti Jai, Jai Shivashakti Jai, Shiva Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti, Jai Shivashakti Jai.

  Lakshmi withdrew.

  And from inside the mind of his Lord, Seth now heard him speak, the silence of the everynowhere voice, so that the hiss in his ears dissolved. Yes, my son, Kama is an arrogant imp—Desire, the great disruptor. If not for him, the cycles of creation and destruction would halt! And well might your thoughts be disrupted! Please, sir, ask Vanity and Illusion to stand aside. All you have suffered, Lakshmi has suffered too. Every decision she has taken was also yours. This crisis has tipped your rajas out of balance, and so you show your flank to anger and desire. Think again. You can slow time by speeding motion, but you cannot reverse it. Right your rajas. Slow yourself. Open to your other half.

  Seth put his rudraksha mala down and took up a pinch of vibhuti in a single gesture, smearing it on his forehead and neck as he rose. He found Lakshmi upstairs in her own meditation corner, in Ranjani’s old room.

  Ranjani had fled to Vancouver straight after high school. He and Lakshmi could never understand. Brinda was still living at home, going to Harbord. She seemed happy. Ranjani made it clear she would never move back—took all her albums, posters, knick-knacks and doo-dads. By contrast, when Brinda left, she said she wanted to return, and so took only the bare essentials.

  The first few years, he and Lakshmi left the girls’ bedrooms as they were. They hoped Ranjani might at least come home for summers; she didn’t. They hoped Brinda might find a job at Harbord after finishing her PhD. She didn’t finish her PhD. And when she married, Lakshmi helped her pack up her sentimental items to take to Edmonton, since they could all now finally accept that she would never again move back home. Seth thought of her now, in the queen bed they installed so that she and Dev could use it together when they came for holidays.

  Gradually, too, they had made changes in Ranjani’s room. She told them not to wait for a wedding. She told them, a few years after she met Greg, that she was living with him and that she wouldn’t come home for holidays unless he could come too, and stay in the same room with her. Seth and Lakshmi meekly got a larger bed for her room also. There were other guests, from time to time, they reasoned, for whom it would come in handy.

  And Lakshmi, increasingly serious about a certain godless, soundless, structureless and yet (to Seth’s way of thinking) horribly demanding school of meditation, had chosen to practise it in Ranjani’s former bedroom, saying the relative isolation and lack of decor helped her focus. Seeing her there now, he chose not to disturb her, but hearing him, she rose and followed him, past Brinda’s closed door, each of their hearts crumpling like a damp tissue in the palm.

  In their bedroom, she told him, “I was angry, that you went first to pray to Shivashakti instead of coming to talk to me.” Was it in the nature of a confession? She held her head and neck stiffly. “And then I thought I should calm down and realized you were probably trying to find a way to calm down also, and that you would come to me when you were ready.”

  He nodded. Let her think that he was trying to calm down. She would not believe the truth, that it was Shivashakti who bade him be reasonable and return to her.

  “We have to be calm. No one has died, after all,” she said, and he saw in her liquid eyes all his own terror and disbelief.

  He moved to take her into his arms, be taken into hers. “What does it mean?” he asked into her hair.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” She held his arm around her neck as she would a buoy. “These things happen, these days. Not in our family, okay. Not among our friends … But even back home, young people are choosing not to marry.”

  “She did marry, unlike Ranjani.”

  “Ranjani may as well be married.”

  “Fine.” He could admit now that he wasn’t worried about Ranjani. If she was happy, he was happy. And she was happy, while Brinda—oh, his poor little girl. “Divorce?” (He pronounced it “die—.” Distasteful foreign word, yet another his daughters had tried to teach him to pronounce correctly: “ ‘Div,’ Dad. As in div-ide.”) “Perhaps I’ll talk to Ashwin Rao about it,” he said. “He is unmarried. And he has seen how things have changed, in India, in the last twenty years.”

  “Brinda is not living in India, Seth.” She backed out of his arms, got her nightclothes from the back of the bathroom door and began changing. “And I don’t know that I’m interested in telling that Ashwin Rao much about our family life.”

  “He’s very highly thought of in his field,” Seth said, but under the exasperation at her quick judgements, his pleasure tinkled minutely. She liked him best. Even if Ashwin was like her—iconoclastic, reclusive, skeptical—Lakshmi liked Seth best. She was Seth’s other half.

  Ashwin didn’t have one.

  And now, neither did Brinda.

  In bed, at last.

  Nearly asleep, then gasp, thump, and the image came back—naked, clifftop, night, falling into the void—once a year the nightmare returned with an eerie familiarity. Oh, how his heart thumped, still.

  He remembered: this is what drove him into the arms of his Lord. The bhajan songs: An aged man is but a paltry thing / Unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress … The sound, filling the void: nothing that would stop you from falling, but maybe stop you from being so afraid.

  IT WASN’T ENTIRELY TRUE that no one knew Brinda was coming.

  When I left Lohikarma in November, I had continued east across the country. I had thought to stay and work in Montreal, except that Suresh and Lisette were insisting on putting me up, for months, if needed. They had the room and were away all day, they said, but I wasn’t positive of my capacity to live with others for that long a stretch.

  All right. It wasn’t only that.

  On my way to Montreal, I had stopped in Ottawa. After my single interview, I drove again to Rosslyn’s neighbourhood. A sunny Wednesday, four o’clock, early for a commuter to be home, unless she worked in schools.

  She was in her front yard. I drove past, no more than five metres away, but she didn’t see me; she had eyes only for the chainsaw she held with both hands, her lips clamped as she severed a massive tree branch. She looked just the same—at that distance, from a moving car, through the veil of my shock—just the same. Papery skin; mild freckles; determined eyes. Scrunching her face as she use
d to do twenty years ago, when she manoeuvred an eighty-pound manure sack on a wheelbarrow through the community garden, or showed her nephew how to do chin-ups. She wore unflattering jeans and a sweatshirt, but she was still lithe as she strained with and against the chainsaw.

  I drove around the block, assuming I would pull up short to park and watch her some more, but instead I veered off, out of her neighborhood, and kept going, and kept going, until I surprised Suresh by showing up at his house that same night.

  Where was her husband? Suresh asked me, when I told him. Surely she wouldn’t be doing that if she were married.

  Maybe her husband hadn’t returned home yet? I couldn’t remember what line of work he was in. Her husband. It could have been me. She hadn’t wanted to live together before getting married, her reasons more romantic than moral. Why rush the courtship? She wanted marriage eventually, but said cohabitation was nearly as tough to revoke, and equally mundane.

  I felt the same about the marital institution as I do now. She should have agreed to move in with me. Perhaps then I might have given in and married—she was right that it would hardly have been different. Certainly, I thought, I would not have left. Even as I thought it, I felt how partial was that sentiment: I could no longer feel whatever drove my decisions of twenty years ago. The past has as few certainties as the present. Who knew?

  Where was her husband?

  Suresh encouraged me to return to Ottawa. I did, and spent a month working there, dining at our old haunts, driving down her street every few days, and did not see her again. I had begun playing with the notion of staying on, through the holiday season, at least. There was nowhere I had to be. No one expecting me, though I had seen a couple of old friends and colleagues in Ottawa, and might be asked to join them. Suresh did not insist I return to Montreal: Christmas is not our thing—in India, it tends to be strictly for Christians, and a bit dour—and I think he didn’t want to be reminded of how we used to celebrate with Asha and Anand. He and Lisette surely had plans, maybe with her family, maybe not. Lisette had her own memories to avoid.

  But then Brinda lit my cell phone.

  “I’m in Calgary,” she told me. I hadn’t heard from her since our parting last June. Her voice sounded as though she were shivering. “I decided I’m not staying in Edmonton. I’m going home for the holidays. Where are you now?”

  “I’m in … it doesn’t matter. Do you want me to meet you in Lohikarma?”

  “Not if … Can you?”

  “Yes, yes. I was planning to be there soon, anyway.” I had not planned on travelling west again for another six weeks, had planned on doing another set of interviews as I drove west and arriving in Vancouver for the verdict. Oh well. “I will see you in three or four days.”

  It’s what I would have done for Asha.

  I reassembled toiletries, bundled laundry, coiled computer cords. Packing took me less than twelve minutes. What I would have done: even in my mind, this sounded forced. I would have done this for Asha, yes, but I wasn’t doing it for her. I would do it for Brinda too, apparently.

  This was, what, early afternoon? First stop, Sudbury, a seven-hour scramble at ninety-five clicks per, up the Canadian Shield: hard over the country’s snowy breast, under which beat its riddled heart, en garde for thee! The sunset? I glanced and it was gone. Six further hours to go in darkness. I turned on the radio: all snow, but for two country-and-western stations, and one smug CBC voice, whose plummy tones were soon blizzarded into obscurity. Sudbury, I recalled vaguely, was the kind of place Brinda would want to epidemiologize: nickel mining, acid rain. Astronauts came here for basic training, a moonscape-on-earth.

  My own pathetic fallacy might have seemed funny, as the desolation went on and on and on, had my pride not been both slightly inflated by my mission and also damped by my cowardice. I was skimming Canada’s vast armoured plates toward Brinda, but, despite my vow to act, I had failed to see Rosslyn, failed to stop, failed to knock, failed to stay, failed.

  I recalled my one glimpse of my one true love, as I had so many times that month that the image had become cartoonish in my mind’s eye: a gallant maiden defeating an evil tree with her chainsaw. I checked into the Moonlight Inn by moonlight; installed myself at the Tim Hortons with a bowl of chili; I found Rosslyn McAllister in my phone and pressed.

  She picked up before I heard a ring, saying, “Hi, honey. Sorry about that. Where were we?”

  Honestly. Twenty years: a wrinkle in the fabric of time, neatly mended shut. Where were we, indeed? You were pregnant by someone else and I was half a world away, that’s where we were. I’m sorry, too.

  Except she couldn’t be talking to me. “Hello?” she repeated. Just before I pressed “end,” I heard “Alistair?”

  Alistair: her husband? But why would he be calling her, this time of night, for a long conversation? I flushed: a lover. Wait: the birth announcement. The baby got his father’s surname, while his given name evoked his mother’s. He would be nineteen now, away at university, in all likelihood.

  I dialled her again. She didn’t pick up. I had spooked her. It went to voice-mail. No leaving a message.

  Spooked her. Hardly. She was on the phone with Alistair. Girlfriend problems. Trying to choose classes. Their conversation must have lasted as long as my dinner. I was about to go to my room when my phone rang.

  *Rosslyn McAllister*

  I had to pick up. Letting it go to my voice-mail would be worse than my leaving a message for her. “Hello, Rosslyn?”

  “Oh. Hi? Who is this?”

  It would be cheesy (is that the word? It has the right sound, but I have fooled myself before) to give every detail here, which, anyway, I would have to invent: I was at such a pitch of anxiety that I have no memory of the conversation until it was nearly done. When had I ever been so anxious? Not at first sex: by the time I realized the opportunity was upon me, so was the girl. Not at my dissertation defence: cocky to a fault, that way. Not on first meeting Rosslyn: I noticed her, when she sat beside me at a conference keynote. Citrusy-smelling, sea-green dress, aloof. Audrey Hepburn-ish, with russety hair. The speaker was a blowhard, an idiot. Within minutes, I was in fear my head would explode. I was holding it together, elbows to knees, fingertips to temples, when I looked sideways and saw Rosslyn in the same posture. Same fear? Or mocking yours truly?

  She, from beneath the columns of her hands, caught my eye. Who started laughing first? We were both helpless, within minutes, and beat an exit through the sparse crowd; rude, yes, but it would have been ruder to stay.

  The highlights of our phone conversation:

  She was no longer married. She and her husband had separated, some three years before (his instigation, a potential affair that fizzled, she said, her tone unclear), but then, a year later, he was killed by a car as he cycled to work.

  Two boys, Alistair and Griffin, the elder now at McGill (“Your alma mater,” she remembered), the younger struggling a little with some subjects. (“Amazing with math, physics and industrial arts,” she said. “Reading, not so much.”) I remembered then that she had sent me a holiday card with a family picture, once, when the boys were young, and she said, “Yes, you never acknowledged it.” I apologized. No need to mention that I had put it straight in the rubbish.

  How long did we talk? It might have been an hour. Or longer. Not without awkward pauses, but also evident interest, on both sides. And, yes, I told her I would be coming to Ottawa (I mentioned that I had been through town already, though I omitted some stalker-ish details) and that I would call again to let her know when. It wasn’t only that I wanted another excuse to call; I needed to recalculate my research plan now that I was sacrificing a set of interviews to drive straight across the country.

  How could I have thought to do the trip in three days? Five driving days later, some of them very long, I pulled into the parking lot beneath my little apartment, available through the holidays, miraculously, despite Lohikarma’s skiing, its pubs, its unhurried jollity. Snow-blind, lu
mbago in full flare, I bumped my roll-aboard up the stairs, blowing through the knife-thin ridge of snow atop each iron slat, and extracted the key from its combo-lock safe. I was in bed in 30 minutes, and slept on my back, exuding avuncular exhaustion in snores so loud they woke me.

  Brinda came to see me next morning, bringing an Italian-style coffee for me (very nice), and full of news. Her hip points jutted beneath her jeans—she had lost weight she couldn’t afford—and her skin was shiny and blotchy. I smelled insomnia on her—a musty scent, as of slept-in clothes or sheets. It was magnified by the crystalline scent of snow that blew in with her entrance.

  “Not sleeping?” I asked her.

  She started and looked back at me as she made her way onto my sofa. “Not much, no.” Her hair looked lank, and she wore at least two bulky sweaters. And yet there was also something frantically cheerful there.

  “Tell me.” I took the armchair, my hand warming on my paper-cup cappuccino.

  “Yeah.” She exhaled through her lips, not a long pause. “Now that I’ve decided I’m leaving Dev, I can’t understand how I stuck with him for so long.”

  Had she said this last summer? Our minds often work cyclically.

  “He’ll never change. We tried counselling when I went back last summer, but he never properly admitted a thing. It was all still unresolved when I left, and then he came to see me in October, and it was terrible. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. As soon as he left Baltimore, I started—I, like, fell into an affair.” Her mouth crept up, an involuntary smile.

  “Good,” I said, more emphatically even than I had intended.

  “It’s … friendly. A French guy. Nothing that will last.”

  “Sounds perfect.” I let caution ring in my voice.

  “I think so. You can’t totally control your emotions in these things, but I would be surprised if we ended up anything more, or less, than friends. He’s a, you might say, a libertine.” She looked amused at the term, but perhaps was trying to gauge if I was shocked.