By the evening, the tsunami was relegated to number of dead, number of dollars, anecdotes of elsewhere. Seth imagined that this was what other households might have felt like in the days after the Air India bombing: there but for the grace of name-your-deity; and then the newspeople make as much hay as they can until some other disaster drives it off the front pages.
Seth recalled Bantry Bay, the sea calm as surely the Indian ocean now was, lapping at its own debris, the way their cat ate its own vomit.
They drove to the caterer’s the next morning, with the car radio blaring news, still all-tsunami, all the time. Seth switched it off as they arrived. Inside, at one of the three tables, an old man buttoned into a brown cardigan sat playing a game of Chinese checkers with a boy of nine or ten, who bore some resemblance to Sundar. Twenty years. Sundar might have been coming to the velaikappu with his own children. Or not: Brinda had none. Seth had to stop thinking in the old terms. Sundar was dead and nothing ever turned out the way you expected.
Ah, why not dream? That maybe someday, ten years from now on an afternoon much like this, he would be sitting across a Chinese checkerboard with his own grandchild, watching that hidden girl or boy wrinkle Seth’s own eyebrows, still too large on the child’s serious, heart-shaped face.
MONDAY, THE 27TH, I went to the High Street post office to send back my colleague’s manuscript. The weather had turned foul. Clumps of snow, like hairballs, criss-crossed the air as if borne on competing winds. I marched along miserably, a scarf wrapped about my head, my eyelashes freezing together. Driving would have been worse. En route, I passed an outdoor-wear shop doing brisk business, and stopped to get a Gulag-guard hat: nylon shell and earflaps lined in fake fur. My eyelashes still froze on the way back.
I was surprised when Brinda kept our four o’clock appointment.
“Why didn’t you postpone?” I asked, as she stamped and shook outside, then entered and gingerly removed her thawing things on the mat.
She twisted her lips and bit a cuticle.
“Something happened?” I asked.
The kettle called. She moved to sit on the sofa, but then rose again and came to where I was making tea.
“I …” She looked away and then back at me. “You’ve been great, about all this, meeting, talking.”
She didn’t want to meet anymore? Melancholy lines from yesterday’s book, Chekhov stories, rose in my mind: Don’t leave me, my darling. I’m afraid to be alone.
“I somehow, accidentally, mentioned to my dad that I had talked to you, last summer, about my problems. He took it wrong.”
They would both leave me. I would have no one. Again.
“I told him I had twisted your arm, and that I needed to speak to someone who wasn’t a friend or relative. I said I trusted you. I think that was right. But he just—he’s still in shock about all this.”
I was having some trouble breathing. I focused on not letting her see.
“I thought I should tell you. Because you see him, right?”
I nodded, but still couldn’t speak.
“So I had to tell you. But I don’t think it matters much. He’ll come around. I told him how helpful you’ve been. So generous.”
“Nothing like that,” I said. My mouth was dry. I poured two cups, added milk and sugar, sipped. Hot tea: why don’t doctors prescribe it?
We moved on: she had much to tell. Her pain at seeing Ranjani, who was supposed to have been the lost one, afloat on all the satisfactions Brinda herself had wanted. The self-hate her jealousy brought on. Christmas morning; the soup kitchen; the fight with her father, partly about me (again, the stab of fear); Christmas dinner with Venkat.
“My dad said he asked you to treat Venkat Uncle, after his breakdown or whatever that was, in October?”
“He did.” I would have said more—to hell with confidentiality—but she was rising, donning her coat.
“I don’t know what my dad thinks you should have done for him. Can’t imagine Venkat Uncle’s big on introspection.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I was filling with panic again and took deep breaths through my nose.
“I saw your name on the velaikappu guest list.” She pulled on a turquoise wool hat, waterproof gloves, an improbably long scarf. “So we’ll see you Thursday?”
What could I say to that?
“Come!” she said.
I remembered last summer, when I told her I was coming to the memorial, and she had wanted me to stay away.
“If you need to talk in the meantime, do not hesitate,” I said, with difficulty. “Call me.”
She raised the edge of her scarf, beneath smiling eyes, to cover her mouth–nose–cheeks, and turned out into the blizzard.
Oh, what was Seth thinking now? I poured a small draft of port and took it to the window seat. The outlines of Trismegistus—those lines where the layered mountains bumped the sky and footed the lake—were faint enough to make me think I was imagining them. Was all this to be lost to me?
My journal lay on the window seat. I took it up, but couldn’t bring myself to open it. The last entry recorded my last meeting with Seth. Naturally, he felt betrayed: I had known all along what he was not telling me, all of it, and more—much more than he knew. I knew intimate details about his daughter. What man would not feel invaded?
When I picked up my journal, I uncovered my phone. I had spent three quarters of an hour in this same nook last night, hearing about Rosslyn’s recent work, telling her a little about mine. Telling her how it would bring me back through Ottawa late in spring. “You should time it to see the tulips,” she said.
I flipped my phone open. Her number, first of the Recent Calls. I shouldn’t, I knew. Two calls in two weeks was fine, all things considered. But two calls in two days?
I pressed “redial.”
“Ashwin?” She sounded guarded.
Last night, I had lapped up the happy surprise in her voice as if it were a sweet splash of port.
“I wouldn’t have called, Rosslyn, but …” The phone heated the brain cells beneath my throbbing ear. I could kill myself this way, with absence and longing. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called.” She was waiting, wondering. “Did you have a good day?”
“Yes, sure. The boys and I took my mother for lunch. They’re out seeing friends now. I’m finishing my Sunday book.”
“You still do that.” We could suture up the lost time. I could be with her again.
“I do. Ashwin. I need to tell you something. Listen. I am seeing someone.”
I won’t describe how that felt.
Now that she had got the information out, her voice gentled a little. “Just for the last three or four months. My first relationship since John and I split up, and since he died.”
“I see,” I said.
“A roller coaster,” she said at the same time. “It’s not that … Okay, you and I are too old for games. Life is way shorter than I ever realized. So let me lay it out. I am excited to see you. Even though you live in India and I don’t imagine twenty years of living alone—You said you never married, right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t imagine all these years of single life have made you any easier to be with.”
“No.” I was seized with an urge to protect her, particularly from me. “I am very difficult.”
“I know. Better than anyone. I’m an authority.”
“I shouldn’t come.”
“Let me decide that. I’m not the naïf you once knew. And I am really looking forward to seeing you again. I don’t know where things are going with Henri. Maybe not anywhere. But I didn’t want to be dishonest. You have hopes, clearly. But let’s both be sensible enough not to have expectations.”
“Henri?”
She laughed. “Got a problem with that?”
“With ‘John’ maybe I could compete. But ooh-la-la, zis Henri, avec ’is champagne and pâté de foie gras et je ne sais quoi. Oui ou non? Pop goes the Indian.”
I thought, no
t for the first time, of the last time we met, when she was pregnant and full of her future, and how she looked at me like I was a brother, a brother’s friend. Compassion, no eros. I couldn’t settle for that now, but her voice didn’t sound like that now either. I had been brought into many marriages in these years, even if I never had one of my own. They contain shades of feeling, phases of being, informed by all the other kinds of love—fraternal, paternal. He was like a mother to me, Lakshmi had said of Seth.
Rosslyn and I talked. Of what? Barbara Gowdy, the tsunami, the weather in Canada, her kids. My brain simmered in the phone-heat. The snow continued to fall.
The next morning, I woke late. The Canadian darkness had thrown me off, but it wasn’t only that. The chat with Rosslyn had been everything I wanted and needed, without my having told her why I called. She would have wanted to know. Did I need to tell her? But how to begin, to tell her what Seth was to me, the loneliness I feared falling back into, the way Brinda had drawn me out, the potential significance of this year and her place in it, how? How?
And if I couldn’t tell her, why call at all?
There was to be no work that day. For twenty years, I had hidden in my work. The lives of others, indeed. I took up my journal, intending to write what Brinda had told me. Should I attend the velaikappu? I wanted to, badly, but was simultaneously dreading it. Where had I heard that before? I flipped back in my journal: I had said the same about the memorial, and about the trial. And I’d written, I seem to learn as much about myself through my writing as I do about others.
Rosslyn’s voice, in my head, said, Write it! Not just events, briefly noted in your journal. Try to tell the story. Why you left, what happened. Who you are.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, velaikappu day, was bright and unseasonably warm, so that green and yellow tufts of the gardens around the pavilion showed through melting snow by the time we guests gathered, mid-afternoon. The paths were shovelled but slippery. Slush-puddles meant many of the women entered with dark rings edging the borders of their saris. The guests segregated themselves naturally, men gravitating toward the back, where hot and cold beverages were available throughout the ceremony, at Seth’s insistence, while the women came toward the front.
I had so many sound reasons to flee. Instead, I forced myself to enter, organic baby-gift box in hand. Seth, greeting guests at the door, extended a hand robotically to shake mine. No smile. Nothing from the eyebrows. I could have fallen at his feet.
“Welcome,” he said.
“Seth. I would like to meet you to talk, soon.”
He looked past me, and his eyebrows moved for someone else.
“I understand Brinda told you she saw me, last summer, about her situation. I would like to explain—she had me pledge confidentiality—but I would like to tell you in what spirit I let her talk to me.”
He wasn’t thawing, but he assented. “Next week. After Ranjani leaves.”
“Brinda’s a wonderful child,” I blurted. His eyes narrowed a little. “She will be fine. I predict this,” I went on. Now it was as though a warm breeze melted the lines of his face. “A wonderful girl,” I repeated.
Lakshmi approached from behind him, and I put my palms together. Why I would do this now, when we had greeted one another much more informally in the past, I’m not sure, except that the gesture is one of worship. She wore an amethyst sari in that thick, lush South Indian silk I remember from my childhood. She greeted me, warmer than Seth, if a little self-conscious, and gestured me into the hall.
Brinda was beside her sister, positioned to receive gifts and otherwise run interference as needed. I gave my box to her and she granted me the gift of a smile, before introducing me to her sister. The ceremony began, and I moved to one side.
Lakshmi was the first to give the blessing, taking a selection of bangles from the tray Brinda held out to her and pushing them onto each of Ranjani’s wrists before pinching a dab of vermilion from a silver cup on the tray and rubbing it into the part of her pregnant daughter’s hair. Brinda imagined it gave her mother more than a little satisfaction to do so: the vermilion signalled a married woman. Brinda’s own scalp felt naked. She watched her mother kiss Ranjani and whisper something, and Ranjani whisper back, “Thank you.” Lakshmi wiped her eyes.
Next was Lakshmi’s mother, who, though widowed, had been included. Among Brahmins back home, widows were disqualified from wishing happiness to young couples and families. Lakshmi overrode custom’s dictates, to her mother’s pleasure, though both were also a bit anguished. She smoothed Ranjani’s hair with trembling hands and cracked her knuckles against her own head, defences against the evil eye. She embraced Brinda too, and said, “You will be next!” before she turned away.
No one had asked Brinda, You don’t want a baby? but the omission was almost as bad as the question. Their concern was evident, brightened with curiosity, as though each person had reassuringly patted her face until it was stinging and raw, as good as slapped.
She herself entered the line next, biting back her own emotion as she put the bangles on her sister, willing herself only to acknowledge the genuine love and good will she felt toward Ranjani and her future niece or nephew, not the rancid jealousy and lip-chewing fears rubbing hot, prickly flanks against the better emotions. She didn’t believe in drishti, the evil eye, but she knew it was most often cast inadvertently. Anyway, her mother, who lived to deny all such superstitions, had broken down and waved a fistful of salt around Ranjani’s glowing visage that morning, muttering the ancient incantations to make them safe from all they didn’t believe in, and then flushing the danger down the toilet to the Kootenay River. Brinda laid a hand on her little sister’s cheek and kissed the other, saying, “I’m so proud and excited for you.”
The rest of the Tamil Brahmin ladies came forward, and then the other academic wives behind them. The smell of each woman, as she bent over the tray, her perfume–breath–aura, brought back the smell of each house, which Brinda now realized she knew as well as her own, even though she hadn’t been in their houses for ten years or more. Despite her glued-on smile, she felt real affection for them, and for her complicated history with them, with their kids, adventures and dramas in their kitchens and basements, while adults were occupied elsewhere.
Next, their neighbours, the Aidallberrys. He was a classics prof; his wife, Thomasin, a poet who wrote in a garret at the top of their dilapidated house. Then a small raft of Shivashakti devotees, Indian and white, who had become Seth’s friends over the years. Several of Seth’s colleagues, one or two of Lakshmi’s, three of Brinda’s friends who were still based here, hippies and academics, also with families in tow, and, finally, friends of Ranjani’s who had come from Vancouver—women in their thirties, several with men at their sides holding toddlers. She didn’t seem to have any friends left in Lohikarma.
One after another, they ascended to bless Ranjani and her baby. Brinda watched them approach, clink-clack the bracelets she offered from the tray, ching-chuck them onto Ranjani’s heavy-growing wrists, smear her scalp blessed red and kiss her glowing cheeks, the brush of aging lips telling their own disappointments and desires and the thrill of their role in this renewal, while Brinda felt herself to be a wraith at Ranjani’s side. Exit ghost.
Seth watched from within the masculine rank, with his son-in-common-law and his friends. He was aflood in sentiment, watching the infinite ascension of the women’s backs, curved-straight-old-young-wide-narrow, in bright silks and pastel sweaters: the women. Without them, there is no continuity, no ceremony, no courage.
And, receiving the women, his daughters. His daughters!
NEW YEAR’S EVE, AT NOON, Seth and Lakshmi were arrayed on the sectional, waiting for Brinda to join them—ready, finally, to watch the Shivashakti documentary. They had put him off for days. No longer.
In front of each of them, on a floral TV tray, was a full thali. It was a Sunday-and-holiday tradition that had evolved since their kids left home: a rice-meal at noon, two side dishes, n
o cutlery, accompanied by daytime television (Oprah, if she was available), followed by a nap. Seth had learned to sous-chef in response to Lakshmi’s objections that the meal was too much work for midday.
Brinda crossed in front of them to sit, cushion-cocooned, in the sofa’s corner.
“We left your food on the stove,” Lakshmi told her.
“Thanks. I’ll eat after.”
“Ready?” Seth asked, and pressed “start” on the remote, before handing it over to Lakshmi, who always controlled the volume.
Ranjani and Greg had left that morning, after gift-opening and packing into the wee hours. They had New Year’s Eve plans back in Vancouver, a party with some of the friends who had come for the velaikappu, which made Seth suggest they all stay and celebrate here, but no one had responded.
Lakshmi’s mother and brother had left, also—the brother was on-call New Year’s Day, and the mother would not fly alone. The Sethuratnams had broken the divorce news to her the prior evening. She took it much better than they had feared. “You are a good girl,” she told Brinda, gathering her in with hands that trembled, not from weakness, just from age. “Focus on your studies. Chamathu. Don’t be afraid.” It had felt like the blessing they all needed to go forward.
Seth scooped and mashed rice into okra sambar. The texture—crumbling lentils imbued with tamarind, cumin, coriander, coconut—against his fingers was an inoculation of sorts. It felt like stability, timelessness, a time before snow, before distance, before “divorce” and “my daughter” could ever be spoken together. The second inoculation was the taste. A recipe for time travel.
In the days after Brinda told them her news, he had been unable to eat. Lakshmi had made her peerless idlis, but for the first time in his life, the steamed dumplings tasted, to Seth, exactly like what they were: fermented paste. Rancid, gluey, no transformational magic, as though, in the West, their food was exposed as inferior, as though it should never have left India. But as he had digested the news, food and its illusions began to work on him again.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 31