The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (16 page)

Did they always simply let Venkat say whatever he wanted? Did they agree with him? Poor Ms. D. The truth of her life was probably unimaginably small, but now it—she—was magnified by mystery. The accused bombers, also, were subject to this: they had opted not to testify, not to tell their own versions, and their silence made them larger than life.

Gaps. Voids. Each track, each trail, yielded nothing. It was driving Venkat nuts. Not that he would have believed the truth, necessarily. Not that any of us was equipped to discern it.

But there was something else. Venkat doth protest too much, I thought. The way he spoke at dinner was the way he had spoken to me in our meeting: obsessively tracking command chains, purse strings, the accused not the dead. He thought about what happened in ways that allowed him to not think about what happened.

I met Seth for lunch in the Student Union the next day.

“I’m sorry for my hasty departure last night,” I said as we stood in line at a food kiosk.

“Did you feel unwell?” he asked.

“A little.”

“Lakshmi was concerned.”

“Not the food! It was wonderful. Hit the spot. A difficult occasion, simply. I suddenly felt I needed to be alone.”

“Can I ask you something?” Seth chose a table amid the clatter of brightly flashing youth, between industrial lighting and shiny brick floors, small matching tables joined by bent and painted steel pipes that also supported small matching chairs. “What are your impressions of Venkat?”

I used the business of unwrapping my sandwich to gain some time. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, as a professional,” he said. “You met with him?”

I waved my head,
yes
, still very busy with sugar, cream, the stirring of coffee.

“And then you saw him at our house, last night.” His tone was that of someone acknowledging the obvious.

I inclined my head again, but more cautiously.

“Does he give you the impression that he is stable?”

My neck stiffened.

“I’m not looking for guarantees,” Seth said, rushing into my silence. “You understand me? But he had seemed to have stabilized, over so many years. Now the trial …” He slurped his coffee. “He has us worried. I pulled strings to get him a summer teaching session this year. Get him out of the house, some structure, distraction. I was trying to make him see someone, a psychologist, you know? He’s very resistant. So when your letter arrived, I told him, if you don’t think you need help, at least you can perhaps help others.”

I felt a flush of annoyance creep up my face.

“At least he would be seeing a psychologist, right?” Seth seemed satisfied with this. “An eminent one.”

What is it with these people, waiting for a therapist to come from India and find them? Even I could tell, after less than a week, that Lohikarma was a hot spot for narcissistic mindfulness and spiritual questing, as well as uncertain self-employment. Therapists here probably outnumbered potential clients.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m not in a position to give an evaluation.”

“Even an informal one?”

A very strange position, all around. How resentful could I be? Seth, Brinda—they were grasping me, pulling me into their midst, across clinical distances. Even here, Seth seemed so at home in himself. Every line of his face and his body sloped outward, giving that sense of ready embrace:

OPEN!

I wanted to walk into his arms. I wanted to give him what he wanted. If Seth wanted to help Venkat, I wanted to help him.

But it wouldn’t do to respond rashly. “Last night was a very particular occasion,” I said. “It is not surprising that Venkat would be emotional. As for my meeting with him, I didn’t have diagnosis as an objective, and if I had, it would be a breach of confidentiality for me to tell you …” A thought occurred to me. “Do you have any medical power of attorney, for him?”

Seth’s eyebrows preceded his answer: “Perhaps I should back up.”

SETH MOWED THE LAWN
as the morning turned hot. He retreated to his recliner to catch up on recent issues of the
American Journal of Physics
. His children’s school had let out recently, and though he was teaching an adult education class, it was a lazy time. The house was quiet, kids gone off with friends. He found a response to an article that had intrigued him, “Rumors of Transcendence in Physics,” on “intimations of a real world beyond the natural order.” Seth never got to talk about this stuff as much as he would like. Students had enough trouble with the concrete.

As he read “We can never know more than the mind can assimilate and process, nor can we discuss any aspect of the world for which there is no language,” Seth nodded off. The line must have repeated in his dreams; he still remembered it twenty years later, though he had never made it to the end of the short letter.

The phone interrupted his nap. When he picked up, he might have thought it would be one of the children, asking to bring a friend for lunch. That part, he didn’t remember. He remembered the strangeness of the sound at the other end, and repeating, once, “Hello?” before making out what it was: someone’s sobbing, but not one of his daughters’, and his wife was at home.

“What?” he asked. “
Enna’idhu
? What is it?”

“It’s gone down.” Venkat’s voice, or some version of it. “Crashed.” And in Tamil, as he began again to cry, “
Ayoh!
My son! Sita!”

Venkat’s son and wife had left day before yesterday, for India. They had driven to Vancouver and their plane would have departed, what, last night?

“Lakshmi and I will be right there. Venkat? Venkat! We’re coming. Wait for us.”

There was no reply, but the sobbing receded as though Venkat had wandered away from the phone. Seth, too, left his phone receiver on the counter at first, not wanting to hang up, and then realized he had to try to locate his daughters.

He shouted for Lakshmi, trusting that she was within earshot. She came running at the emotion in his voice, saw the phone off the hook. Horror filled her eyes, and Seth had to say, “No, no. It’s Sita and Sundar. Their plane has crashed.” He saw two quick ripples, each effacing the expression that went before: relief that it was not one of their daughters, then horror again.

Ten minutes later, they were in the car. They had asked Ranjani’s friend’s mother to keep her there until they came to pick her up, but they hadn’t been able to find Brinda, who might have been at the pool or ice cream parlour. They left a note on the front door telling her to wait at the neighbour’s until they came home. Lakshmi had snatched their list of phone numbers from the telephone table in the hall as they left and now clutched it in the passenger seat, the names of everyone they were connected to.

Venkat’s front door was locked and he didn’t come when they rang the bell. After several tries, Seth went around to the patio doors and peered in. Venkat was sitting on the floor in the family room, his back against the sofa, not crying, after all, but staring as though being spoken to by an authority expressing grave disappointment and possibly anger. His was the look of a man accepting judgement. Seth never saw such a look on his face again.

The news was on, loud enough for Seth to hear it through the glass doors. He knocked twice, hard, before Venkat started and stood.

Reports from Cork, where rescue efforts were fully underway, squawked from both televisions as well as from the radio. Lakshmi took Venkat’s hands and his sobbing resumed. He withdrew his hands to put them over his face.

An Air India plane, which had left Vancouver Saturday afternoon, picking up more passengers in Toronto and Montreal before heading for Heathrow, had disappeared off Irish radar at quarter after eight Irish time, a little after seven GMT, round about midnight for Canadians. It had simply vanished: no panicked messages, no blinking diamond wandering off the screen. Even a plane that passed through the same airspace shortly after saw nothing. In place of more than three hundred people,
the void
.

As Lakshmi led Venkat back to the family room, Seth turned off the radio and the kitchen TV, replaced the beeping phone in its cradle. He wanted so badly to see his daughters that he was tickled by a shard of resentment for Venkat, whose need was holding Seth here.
Venkat’s need
: first thing was how to find the survivors. The news from the TV sounded bad. He had to call Air India, but didn’t have a Vancouver phone book and they wouldn’t be listed in Lohikarma’s. Travel agencies here would be closed on Sunday. He settled on calling a friend in Vancouver, an Assamese chemist who had left Harbord for Simon Fraser University. He occupied a line on their list with three previous phone numbers scratched out, an immigrant academic’s history.

“Mukund? Seth here.”

“Seth. Are you … Were Lakshmi or the children …?”

“We’re all fine. So you have heard?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“Your wife?” Seth asked. Mukund had brought a young bride over a few years back.

“No, we are fine, but one of my colleagues, his whole family was on the flight: wife, children, mother-in-law.”

Was? “Mukund, I need a contact number for Air India. It’s Sita and Sundar.” He heard his own voice crack a little, saying their names.

“Oh, no, no.”

“Can you get the number for me?”

Seth was writing it down when Venkat jumped over to wrench the receiver out of his hand. “Sundar might be trying to call. He always calls.” He choked, pressing the receiver to the cradle so hard that his palm looked waxen while the dark brown skin on the back of his hand crinkled. Lakshmi had had a Benares silk sari exactly that colour that tore on a door hook, once, before she even realized she was caught. Seth put his hand on Venkat’s back and looked over at her.

She came and guided Venkat once more toward the family room, but Venkat peeled away, toward the stairs. “I’m going to pack a few things. It’s good you’re here, to stay by the phone. They’ll be in shock. I must go and bring them home.”

This, at least, made sense to Seth. It was what he would do. They let Venkat go. “Lakshmi,
kanna
, maybe I should go call Air India from home, find out what is happening and also find out about flights to Ireland. I’ll pick up Ranjani on the way.” Though she was fourteen, Ranjani’s baby fragrance, like sweetened milk, had never changed. He still smelled it when he hugged her, especially where her neck met her ear. He wanted—needed—to hold her.

Lakshmi wiped her cheeks, hard. “Maybe you should go with him, Seth. To Ireland.”

She was right. He would have to go.

He fetched Ranjani from her friend’s house, and found Brinda sitting on the doorstep with her friend Jenny when they pulled into the driveway. “Did you hear about the Air India crash?” she asked. “Jenny’s dad had the radio on in the garage. What’s going on?”

He told Jenny she perhaps should go home.

Inside, he looked at his daughters and quaked.

“We went to Venkat Uncle’s house. Sweethearts.” He felt his face crumple and was filled with shame at seeing his daughters grow afraid, but he couldn’t stop his tears, not even for them. More shame: he may have been carrying Venkat’s pain, but he was crying for himself. It could have been his family. He told his daughters, “Oh, sweethearts. Sita Aunty and Sundar were on that plane.”

The girls started crying.

“We don’t know, whether they are alive or …” He could see they were crying as much out of fear as anything—fear of the possible impending grief, or of whatever else would come. He, too, had never faced such a thing, didn’t even know yet what they were facing.

The girls wanted their mother. He told them Lakshmi had stayed with Venkat Uncle, and that they would go there as soon as he got through to the airline. He turned on the news. There was no way to protect them from this. Brinda comforted her younger sister on the sofa. He watched them, so glad to have two, and both girls. You can’t expect that kind of affection from boys, and affection is what counts in a family. He had thought this many times, but now his mind fled guiltily toward Sundar, such a good boy, very affectionate toward his mother. Where was he now?