The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (12 page)

I would never have volunteered to be interviewed in such a study as mine. And now, I could not think of a way I had kept my bond with Asha. I never properly even had a bond with Anand. Let alone Kritika. Who were they? I would never know. No one would ever know. (Rosslyn. Thoughts of her lurked continuously since my return to her country.)

My glass was already empty. I poured a second shot. Remember the Mukherjee and Blaise book? I fetched my copy, wanting to hurt myself. Now let me tell you why it infuriated me. Not the polemics—those were merely inadequate. It was the way they talked about the dead.

They did interviews with the victim families. Suburban Indian parents, who tell their moving stories themselves, while the novelists describe them, and the scene around them, with only occasional lapses into the ridiculous: “The winding streets of middle-class Toronto suburbs, bearing names like ‘Brendangate,’ ‘Wildfern’ and ‘Morningstar,’ should never have known such tragedy.” What? Tragedy belongs to places with ugly names? “Schillong,” perhaps? “Ouagadougou?”

But here is the offensive part. Here is how they describe the children who died:

These were
our children
, reduced to some majority opinion of what they
should
have been, perfect little conformists, the best of both worlds, untouched by darkness or dirt. No iconoclasts. No
rebels. No thinkers. No individuals. Stiff little brown Barbies and Kens.

Tch-tch, Canada, your loss, not India’s
. Is that right? Get this: their chastity-obedience-intelligence had nothing to do with whether they deserved to be acknowledged as Canadians. Those children weren’t deserving of investigative attention because of their virtues. They deserved to live because they were alive. They were Canadian because they were born or raised here.

Besides, Mukherjee and Blaise are novelists. They should have known better.

I hate the sentimentalizing. I hate the saint-making. I hate that I hate. I threw the book down, poured another shot and raised it. A toast! Congrats, bombers! Conviction or no conviction, you did it.

On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—
which man, which?
—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took
his
revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.

Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.

Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.

So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had taken Kritika and me as children, I dreamed increasingly of my niece. The child of my life. I hadn’t seen them since I left Canada, nearly two years back, and she already looked different in the Christmas pictures my sister had sent, skinnier, the teeth that seem so large in late childhood shrinking within the proportions of an almost-adolescent smile; that smile still, always, the focal point of the family composition.

I tried to incorporate that new face—surely it would be different again by the time they arrived—into hazy daydreams of us playing Snakes and Ladders, or reading novels in cots set at right angles so we would lie with our feet making an arrowhead and chat over the tops of our books, she perhaps enjoying one of my childhood favourites, which still fed worms on a couple of shelves in the upper reaches of my parents’ home.

Sometimes I pictured all of us together, my sister, nephew, parents, but those thoughts were more obligatory, more effortful. Images of time to be spent with Asha, in contrast, were like the japa mala Seth carried in his pocket. A particularly obnoxious colleague, a boring meeting, even a less than fully sympathetic client, and suddenly I was off in the clouds, quite literally: thinking of the hill station, where, if one were an early riser, one would take coffee on the veranda amidst the low clouds that settled onto the hilltops each night. I imagined Asha, wandering out to find me, trailing a quilt. She would nestle against my shoulder, watching the mist snake through the bushes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of my coffee, or perhaps asking for a contraband sip, as the rest of the house slept on.

In steadier moments, I gave thought to Anand. He was fond of baseball, and I wanted to take him to a cricket game. He also loved books, though I had been stung by his rebuffing my suggestions, or, worse, his starting a book I had loved only to rubbish it with a few choice descriptors. Of course I had had some successes, and his expression, when
something intrigued him, was particularly pleasing to me. I should have found his inability to fake interest disarming, but we were too much alike, particularly in this way. Even my sister could see it and said so. She said it was her karma: she had done so badly on her first attempt to live with me that she was being made to try it again. Except, as I would point out, I wasn’t dead yet. Kritika would roll her eyes and say, “One of God’s karmic accountants is scratching his head. Or rubbing his hands in glee.” She had her moments.

She would tell me that I should have given her children cousins to play with. I would counter that I should then have been deprived of her children’s company. “Selfish,” she said, “as always,” though I didn’t see it that way. Of course, had I had children of my own, I suppose my craving for hers would not have been so fierce.

The liquor was giving me courage. I would apply myself to the problem that had vexed me to nightmare for so long: discerning the moral source of the disaster.

I went inside the apartment to fetch my journal and my still-warm pen. I saw the notebook marked “Venkataraman,” and picked it up as well. And, why not, the second bottle.

A mechanic, Inderjit Singh Reyat, had been serving time in England for building the bomb that went off in Tokyo. The Brits agreed to send him back to Canada to face the music for building the other one. Once he arrived, though, he struck a bargain to testify in his old buddies’ trial instead of standing his own. His testimony could and should have been a bomb indeed, but at the trial he developed sudden-onset amnesia, an unfortunate disability that later resulted in (hooray!) a perjury conviction.

In the dock, then, two men.

1. Ajaib Singh Bagri, the Sidekick. Big family. Received welfare payments with one hand, paid for expensive cars with the other, openly preached violence against Indira Gandhi and India as a nation.

2. Ripudaman Singh Malik, the Millionaire. Charismatic as far as these
types go. Rabble-roused in the temples, kept bad company, and ran the Khalsa School, Sikh education for the chosen ones. Ms. D’s love, the unconsummated affair. He had told her that the second bomb should have gone off at Heathrow, should have killed many more than 329.

The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had made tapes of phone conversations, mostly coded, between the suspects prior to the bombing, but then erased them. The erasure was routine, procedure. Somehow, no one plucked these particular conversations from the conveyor belt. (“Ready to write the book?” “Ready to write the book.”)

Imagine the lad who did the erasing. I’m fairly sure it was that, and not recording over. He loads the massive disk of tape onto the axle, threads its end onto an empty, waiting spool. He adjusts the alignment and flips the lever for the sixth time that day, the forty-fourth time that month, the two hundred-and-nth time since he got his job. Then he sits, one lightly fuzzed cheek cupped in a rubber-gloved hand. The rubber glove seems redundant, since the only evidence he is handling is to be destroyed, but protocols and procedures must be observed. He lets his eyes blur as he watches the spools go round and round …

I threw down my pen. My brain was full of the details, but I couldn’t stick with them, the bombers, the investigators—banal, not evil. Where was the evil that wrecked my life? What happened, and how did it kill my child?

I will tell you now, dear reader, because I want to tell you everything: I heard voices. Yes, they roiled in on the whisky, the sunset, my unselfconscious grief, my uncontrollable self-pity, undeniable and loud: a multitude of tiny, tinny voices in chorus. I picked up the pen again and turned the page and pinned them down into my journal, out of my head.