The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (18 page)

The sound did not hide the void, but it filled it with a kind of light: nothing that would stop you from falling, but maybe stop you from being so afraid.

Venkat faltered, felled, he told Seth, by a recollection of Sundar receiving his holy thread in Shivashaktipurum, the ashram his guru had founded in India. Venkat and Sita had taken Sundar back home for his coming-of-age ceremony. In the land of his ancestors, surrounded by his relatives, their beautiful boy slouched between them, covered by a silk cloth, cowed by the grandeur of the ritual, his rebellions still incipient. Seth felt the knife in Venkat’s ribs at the memory of that adolescent cheek slightly glowing, his lips brushing his son’s ear as he whispered these words.

A
poonal
ceremony back home. Venkat was that kind of Hindu, full of orthodoxy and energy, sincere in devotion both to the old gods and this new guru who had revivified and reinvented the ways Hindus practised their faith, the ways they believed.

He and Sita conducted a special
puja
on Sundar’s birthday each year until he left for university, at the Shivashakti Centre downtown. Seth recalled the last one, Sundar’s seventeenth perhaps. He had started shaving the peach fuzz from his cheeks and lips. It made him look younger. He had come to Seth for help around then: he wanted to go on a school ski trip, and had had a massive fight with Venkat over it. Seth talked to Venkat, who said that skiing was dangerous and that he had heard from a colleague about kids on such trips drinking, doing drugs. Seth couldn’t, in good conscience, push. Sundar stayed home.

The episode now clouded Seth’s consciousness in a single black burst—no start, no finish, self-contained and sodden with loss. Why not let Sundar go, be with his friends? So he might have drunk alcohol, maybe even been tempted into
s-e-x
. But probably not: he was a sensible boy. You have to trust them at a certain point.

He looked over at Venkat, whose mouth hung open, almost panting, and who was swaying a little, at least in Seth’s strained vision. He himself was only functioning for Venkat’s sake. Otherwise, grief could easily have unhinged him.

Seth resumed chanting, and Venkat, when he regained his breath, did too.

A half-hour later, the doorbell rang: it was a group of other Shivashakti devotees, mostly strangers to Seth, a mix of whites and Indians. Venkat
didn’t rise, nor pause in his chanting. The devotees greeted Seth at the door with their customary phrase, “
Jai Shivashakti
” (“What’s wrong with them?” he had joked to Lakshmi, once, at an ashram event. “They can’t say ‘hi’?”). Here, they seemed to show, in contrast with what he had seen in devotional sessions, far
less
emotion than was appropriate. Moving with clear purpose toward the kitchen, they sat in a circle around Venkat and joined the chant. Then, as if they had received a cue from some distant conductor (all their eyes were shut), they began to sing together, a Shivashakti bhajan. Westerners’ Sanskrit pronunciation always grated on Lakshmi like nails on a chalkboard. But she wasn’t here.

Its tune was one Seth knew well, from the traditional repertoire, but just as Gandhi had rewritten religious lyrics to deliver pacifist messages, Shivashakti’s people had turned songs for other gods into songs for him. But really—and this was their point—all gods are One. It’s simply easier, especially if a god has been so kind as to manifest in your lifetime, to conceive of the Ultimate Reality as embodied in a particular man.

Seth stood and watched them from the kitchen entrance. The devotees’ faces radiated a confidence and certainty he had never felt. They had wordlessly enclosed Venkat in their protective circle. No sobbing, no chatter. It was as though each had carried here a piece of a one-person-size geodesic dome, and they unanimously and simultaneously put their pieces in place with the first note of their song, enclosing Venkat, along with his grief, his regrets, his love and hate. They didn’t pretend to share what he was feeling. They didn’t try to relieve him. They just reminded him, as if by prescription, that there was something more.

Something more. Seth stood on the outside, watching a moment longer, and then began to sing. No eyes opened. Nothing changed. He seated himself amongst them, and he sang. He felt a sensation akin to what he had felt while praying with Venkat, but greater and clearer. The words and whatever they signified dissolved in their own sound, each syllable striking at that rigid cloud of grief that kept blowing up and obscuring Seth’s vision. The relief, sitting shoulder to shoulder, a sense of warmth and solidity from sacrum to sternum, his own voice only as audible as all the others, no more no less, but made
greater by the joining—it wasn’t joy, don’t think that, but it shrank the pain of grief.

Among their friends in Lohikarma and Vancouver, one in ten was a Shivashakti devotee, as were half their relatives in India, to some degree. But then, for Indians, and Indo-Canadians, religion was more general and informal than it was for whites. Hinduism was full of options—which god? which form? pick a favourite—and the finding of a guru a respected, even mandated, path. In this way, to attach to Shivashakti was no radical act. He was a teacher in all the old ways, though he also brought something new—a greater comfort with modernity, internationalism, a disregard for barriers between cultures and belief systems. The fervent light in the devotees’ eyes, also, was new. None of the anonymous, itinerant teachers of Seth’s childhood had had the charisma to attract such a following. He and Lakshmi had visited the Shivashakti ashram when it first opened here. Lakshmi, both a skeptic and a seeker, found it lacking, as she had all the local ashrams. Seth wanted a temple: formal prayer followed by food. He had been hopeful about Shivashakti’s establishment, but its new style of worship didn’t fit his bill, and the fervency had made them both uncomfortable.

Seth felt its draw, now, though, a craving answered.

When the phone rang, as it did every fifteen minutes or so, he would answer it. Other families and other friends came, with or without notice, most bearing food. They would sit for a time, and Seth would talk with them, while Venkat would not. The Shivashakti devotees continued to sing throughout, keeping Venkat under their protection, for some three or four hours.

Each time Seth was interrupted, the spell broke a little. He thought that if Lakshmi had been here with him, he never would have joined the circle, and when friends came to call, the devotees’ behaviour seemed a little rude to him—they were keeping Venkat apart from his closest friends in Canada, his surrogate family, those who had known Sita and Sundar the way Lakshmi and Seth had. Calling Lakshmi to check in, he mentioned this, wanting to criticize them to her, unable to tell her how moved he had been in the singing-circle, or even that he had joined in at all.

“Venkat shouldn’t have to play the host,” she said. “Everyone will understand. He is doing what he needs to do.”

Seth felt bad. “It’s true. That’s not exactly what I meant.” She waited for him to explain. “I suppose that’s why I’m here.”

“Yes.” She was quiet, and he wondered if she was crying. “Though I think we were closer to them than anyone else.”

That evening, after everyone else had gone, Seth heated some food. He and Venkat ate in a vast and liquid silence. He didn’t know when the TV news had been turned off, but they turned it on again at eleven. The second day of the search was beginning in Cork. There were still no survivors, and every reporter, every report, repeated the unlikelihood of finding any.

Seth made Venkat go to bed, actually tucked him into the bed he had shared with his wife, pulled the covers up to his chest in the bluish heavy air of the room. The slack of Venkat’s neck against the pillow, the thin hairs spread on his large, bald head, his bulgy reptilian eyes with their yellowish whites—all were grotesque and made it seem as if his body was some discarded casing with a small creature hiding inside. Seth was glad to leave the man.

He thought of calling Lakshmi again, but it was past midnight. He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee and walked out into Venkat’s backyard. This close to the solstice, the northern sky retained some hint of light just gone or light soon to come.
Tat savitur varenyam
. The familiar silhouettes of fence and trees projected a sinister air.

In India, people died easily and without much fanfare. Canada had so many resources dedicated to keeping every single person alive. And yet, in India, even on their visit last year, Seth felt safe, irrationally so, in the bosom of country and family.
Home
as he might never be here. He pictured his loved ones in their beds. He always felt nervous away from them. Was this because he thought he could keep them safe? That was part of it. He was a man, after all, and they were his charges. Or was it that in such a time of separation, something might happen to them and not to him, so that he could be left, alone, with nothing?

Nothing.

Bomb
. Terms and facts associated with explosions cascaded in sheets through his thinking, his physics mind activating in self-protection. Detonation: a supersonic, exothermic shock front accelerating through a medium, solid or liquid. Dynamite: composed of nitroglycerine and …

He saw a plane breaking apart over the ocean, bodies and people flying out, sailing away into nothing, children falling down through clouds, lungs collapsing, passing out from oxygen deprivation or fright before hitting the steel grey water—or worse: seeing the water ascend, as ungiving at that speed as steel itself, who knew what awaited you at the bottom, flying out and falling, falling, flying out and falling.

The chanting, and the visitors, had crowded out the images that the mild, chill night now sent at him, as though these peaceful heavens, the sky he could see, were discharging legs, heads, pregnant bellies. Is that what Venkat saw, circling in his hollow eyes, as soon as the chanting stopped? Nothing and no one could survive what they knew had happened.

No one.

He sat on a bench enclosed by Sita’s rose bushes, breathed in their scent and felt his body heave and sob, at last. Sundar: a funny, sunny child, curious about Seth’s own babies when they came along. He had continued to be one of the few kids in their circle of friends whom his daughters genuinely liked: not square, nor pretentious. He had developed a brooding side as he got older. Once or twice Seth’s girls had been hurt by his seeming standoffishness. But then he would make it up, once letting Brinda help him build one of his model airplanes. (Oh God.) Some of them flew: he used to fly them in Willard Park.

Sundar was now between his third and fourth years of engineering at UBC. He hated engineering, which they guessed from the way he refused to talk about it when they saw him, but Sita had also confided to Lakshmi that it was Venkat’s insistence that kept him there. He was doing well despite devoting an inordinate amount of time to outside interests, particularly improv comedy and friends’ films.

Seth, Lakshmi and the children had gone to Vancouver for spring break, just a few months ago. They had taken Sundar out for dinner at a vegetarian place near the water. He seemed excited to show them
around the city, his city, and was open and candid in his dad’s absence. Slightly self-centred perhaps—he was only twenty-one—but he did talk to the girls. He had had the same Grade 8 Language Arts teacher that Ranjani had now; they agreed that she was very cool. He asked Brinda how she was liking high school. She said anything was an improvement on junior high.

Afterward, Sundar took them to a rinky-dink theatre, a black-painted box off a back alley—not a place Seth ever would have sought out, but Brinda thought it was “so cool” and Ranjani echoed her, faintly and perfectly.

The actors would shout questions to the audience, and improvise sketches based on the answers: “A fruit?” “Pomegranate!” “An animal?” “Gila monster!” “An illness?” “Kwashiorkor!” Kwashiorkor? It seemed nothing was off limits. Sundar and the others would leap onto the stage, already speaking, competing to see who could get funniest fastest.

When Sundar had come home to Lohikarma—only a week ago, could it be?—for a quick holiday and to drive his mother back to the coast with him to get their flight, the girls had repeated back to him some of the lines from the show. He had already forgotten, having done so many shows since, while the jokes were now part of their private repertoire. “Crazy!” Sundar had laughed. “I’m sure it wasn’t as good as you’re making it seem.”

Earlier memories began to surface. One of their basement dance parties of the late seventies. Sundar was holding Ranjani’s hands—she must have been, what, five? He would have been eleven or so. He was clowning, and she was hanging off him, laughing so hard the gums shone above her baby teeth. He whirled her in circles, her feet rose, and Jaskaran Singh’s disco ball glittered over them as the grown-ups backed off the dance floor and watched. With all their degrees and their accomplishments, the families they had abandoned to seek their fortunes and send money home, these kids, with their shiny hair, their wisecracking English, and all their other mysteries, these kids were the best they had to offer. To offer … offer to whom, to what?

Seth wiped his eyes and stared past the blurry stars. What had Sundar
seen, felt, thought as the plane cast him out, up, down into the Irish dawn?

An earlier memory still: Sundar at four, playing Hanuman, kitchen towel for a tail, jumping off sofas, inspired by the Amar Chitra Katha comic books that taught all their kids the Hindu myths. Seth’s own kids were yet to be born then, so he was fully available for Sundar to monopolize. Seth felt again the restless pressure of those small bones bundled against his arm as Sundar crouched on the sofa beside him, holding his breath for the story to start, but maybe he was remembering his own girls, their own little ghosts. How many times had he read the opening page of Hanuman’s story to that little boy? It held a single image, Hanuman as a child, and the text:
Hanuman, thinking the sun was an apple, leapt toward it
.

Tat savitur varenyam
.