The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (21 page)

Poor man. Seth looked over at him, now paging through the albums. He must always have known, in some inadmissible corner of his psyche, that she really was his better half.

Was
.

The digital clock at his bedside glowed 3 a.m. when Seth woke. He didn’t see Venkat at first and sat up, afraid he might have gone out. His eyes, adjusting, lit on an empty, chintz-covered armchair in a corner. Venkat was seated on the floor in front of it. Seth stood and breathed in the air of the room, which could have been that of any hotel room, anywhere: vacuum cleaner, tinted with the faintly chemical scent of roses. Their expedition, the reason for it, the sea-water slicked bodies, the shards of aircraft corkscrewed to the white breast of the dim sea, all
felt less and less real—farther away, not closer.

“It will mean much to Sita that you have come.” Venkat spoke, their eyes, in the dark, unmeeting. “She’s not the type to chatter, you know, it’s hard on her. She can feel very alone, at gatherings, everyone else making small talk. But with you and Lakshmi, she relaxes.”

Seth moved to sit on the corner of Venkat’s unmussed bed, across from him, and then slipped to the floor to join him.

Venkat’s voice sounded small and private in the gloom. “Her own parents died before she ever had a chance to go back to see them.”

Seth had known this: Sita was the only daughter of elderly parents, in their sixties when they married her off to Venkat, then a promising post-doc at the University of Victoria. It was six years before they could save enough money to go back, taking their toddler son, not an unusual length of time, but by then the only close relatives they had were all Venkat’s.

Seth saw, in Venkat’s hands, a mala of rudraksha beads, the sort prescribed by Shivashakti for his followers. Rudraksha: eye-of-Shiva. The story, in Seth’s vague recollection, was that the rudraksha tree sprang from the earth wherever Shiva’s tears watered it—what was he crying about? Seth had forgotten, if he ever knew. It suggested watchfulness, though,
eye of Shiva
, and Seth somehow recalled that was why Shivashakti came to adopt it as his emblem, enjoining his worshippers to carry with them the eyes of lord Shiva’s incarnation, their god, so that he might always be watching over them. “You are like my eyes to me,” Seth recalled one of the devotees reading from a speech at the ashram, out of one of many such compendia Shivashakti published to be read to his followers worldwide. “So dear to me you are.”

Onne, onnu; kanne, kannu
. The Tamil proverb popped into Seth’s head now: when had he last heard it spoken? Possibly by his mother’s sister; she had a proverb for everything, though this one was common:
an only son is as precious as an eye
.

He and Venkat meditated on the name of the god who rules the realms of destruction, until it was time to prepare the way for the light
of day, when they started praying to the sun. Sister Bernadette had set their alarm before she left them, and when it rang, at six thirty, they had been chanting the Gayatri Mantra for over an hour.

Seth showered first, then Venkat. Dressed, they went down to the breakfast room, where they had beans on toast, oatmeal and strong, scalding tea. At seven thirty, while they were waiting outside for the coach, a young woman with short brown hair exited the garden of the house beside them, pushing a pram and holding the hand of a small boy. As she turned toward Seth and Venkat, her pretty mouth froze and she yanked her son back. Seth, without turning, saw this from the corner of his eye. He felt the familiar pinch of shame and rage that the few instances of overt racism he had faced in Canada had brought on. His children had had it worse: for several months, there was a little gang of older kids who harassed Brinda and Ranjani as they walked to school. Once the kids threw eggs. “Pakis, go home!” they would shout.

The woman reversed back through her gate and Seth wondered what she found threatening about two middle-aged men in neatly pressed trousers. Accompanied by a nun, no less! He had heard about the U.K., riots in London, a racism entrenched, practically institutionalized, by a hundred years of colonial migration. In Canada, it was rare and random, as though they hadn’t figured out yet how to do it properly. Seth had found some older children to walk to school with his own; identified the culprits; met with appalled parents who assured him that they would discipline their children. The bullying stopped after that. Clearly, even Canadian parents had some control over their kids, if they chose to exercise it.

Then the Irish mother emerged again from her front door, biting the insides of her pink cheeks. Her son gripped a plastic bag encasing a wad of wet newspaper wrapped around half a dozen bent and thorny stems of fat pink roses. They came up to Seth and Venkat, and the woman said, “We’re all so very sorry for your loss. Please, can we give you these?” The little boy held the bouquet out to them with stiff arms.

Venkat took the roses and wrapped the boy in a hug, which he accepted for a moment before wiggling free. A little sister with her
mother’s eyes watched, unsmiling, from the pram.

In the coach, Seth stared out the window at a landscape he couldn’t decipher, though the rocks, water, rolling hills reminded him more than a little of Canada.

Ireland.
That is no country for old men
, he heard ring out in childish voices from his mind’s past. Seth and his classmates, ten years old, shouting Yeats’s lines back at Father O’Sullivan, to see the joy come upon his sweet face, he the ringer, they the bells.
An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
. Seth had understood almost nothing of the poem and so learned that he could love what made no sense to him. The sounds,
Of what is past, or passing, or to come
.

Father O’Sullivan, past. Childhood, past. Sita and Sundar, past. What was passing now? What was to come?

He dozed, his forehead smudging the window, and woke as the bus eased to a stop and the families aboard rustled their belongings together, so many Venkats with so many duffle bags pressed to their laps. Several carried roses. Seth stood, head bowed under the luggage rack, as the others filed off. He followed them out and over grass and rocky shore toward the water.

Because he didn’t really know what they were doing there—scanning for injured swimmers the sharks and rescue boats had missed? Sifting for bracelets and comic books?—Seth’s mind divided between its two most familiar paths: physics and his family. He re-saw Bantry Bay, even as he saw it for the first time. Not only the water molecules, but the forces holding their atoms in formation, and within the atoms, the subatomic particles in their inviolable, preordained roles. Zoom out again: NaCl, N
₂
, crude oil and C
₆
H
₆
. Zoom out further, again, to see other creatures and refuse, sinking and floating, life and the detritus of life, ambergris, algae, sand and stone. Boats. Swimmers. (Sharks. No.) See now the waves and tides, note the position of the moon, see its gravitational pull;
see water reflect sun, moon, sky; now see those light rays reach your eye.

As a scientist, he fully accepted the indifference of nature. Did that mean he had also to believe that God was impassive, impartial, impersonal? He wasn’t sure his religious upbringing had a good answer for that one. Karma: we make our fate and God helps us execute it—is that impartiality? But any observer of fate and nature could tell that it made practically no difference in a given life whether a person was good or bad: bad things happened to good people; bad people were only rarely punished. Where did God enter? Was His only role that of observer, the only observer between one life and then next?

Seth looked down the row of them on the beach, dots and dashes, a telegraph to that indifferently watching God—
Distress! Distress!
—and then back out to the massive bay, where he saw, bobbing in the surf, a head. He looked at the others, pointed, gasped, his jet lag amplified, it seemed, by his snooze aboard the bus. He tore off his jacket and waded out into the surf.

“What is he—?” someone asked behind him.

“The rock!” another shouted. “He’s …”

“Sir! What is his name? Sir!”

“It’s a rock!”

Merely a rock. Seth could see it before he was twenty feet out, the waves having wet him to the crotch. He receded, to shore; the waves receded, to sea.

“It’s okay,” said one gentleman, who grabbed his sleeve, needlessly, tugging Seth toward shore as he waded back. “Good man.”

“I thought the same thing,” said a woman in a pink sari, “when I first got here—two days ago it was.”

Someone wrapped his jacket around his shoulders and his hand around a Thermos-top cup of steaming tea. Venkat stood back from the ranks of the hovering solicitous. He glanced at Seth, and Seth at him, impersonal and sombre as the sea.

He sat on the shore. The woman who gave him the tea crouched beside him. “You think, why would God have brought you so far unless it was to give you a chance to bring them back?” Her face crumpled and
Seth reached toward her, but she rose quickly and walked away, holding her sari end to her mouth.

For the same reason God would let your family be killed
, Seth thought, his brain kick-started by the water and her tears. Then someone else shouted. There really was a head progressing steadily through the surf at a much greater distance than that rock that had tricked his foolish heart.

Seth himself was not a terribly good swimmer, none of them was, but their kids were and that was why they hoped. The husbands and wives wouldn’t have made it, but there were life jackets, seat cushion flotation devices, all the things the attendants pointed out at the start of a flight. Who was that and how would they reach him? He didn’t seem to be headed for shore—disoriented? He wasn’t shouting for help—good sign or bad?—and he was moving pretty fast.

A man had binoculars. “A seal,” he told the rest. “It’s a seal.”

Each pair of hands took up the binoculars to spy the seal, traversing the bay at what may have been, for him, a leisurely pace. And when he was nearly out of sight, there came two more. Seth looked last and looked longest. Even Venkat had looked, and why shouldn’t he; was he any different from the others? That was the thing, Seth thought. Each of them bore a loss every bit as enormous as Venkat’s, one that might expand or contract with time, change shape depending on occasion and mood. Three-hundred-and-twenty-nine times infinity—that was the magnitude of what had happened, that was the size of it. Seth started to feel dizzy. He handed the binoculars back and sat down again.

The man, after unstringing the top of his knapsack and re-inserting the field glasses, sat beside him. He wore a utility vest and khaki hat, not a get-up Seth had ever before seen on an Indian man. “These people here, we have come to know each other a little, these last few days,” he said, and cleared his throat. “They say they were good mothers, good fathers, husbands. It should be true. But the Hindus believe, don’t we, that we deserve this, it is our karma, all of us—we did something in a past life?” He turned toward the water again, and Seth felt him groping around in his mind, coming up empty, watched his mouth twist.

Venkat stood on the beach in the spot where he had stood since they
arrived. He held the duffle bag tightly to his chest and seemed to be speaking, though Seth could hear nothing above the surf and the persistent winds whistling at his ears. All around him, others observed rituals of their own making, or clustered to compare notes of grief. Eventually, more than half left things for the water to take, keepsakes, offerings, roses.

They got back from Bantry Bay to find a cautious message:
Come to the hospital, please
. They believed one of the recovered bodies to be Sundar’s.

Three other families were also summoned. They all sat on melamine chairs at the morgue, waiting to be called, a father–daughter, a husband–wife, and a man, a man, and another man.

“Mr. Venkataraman?”

Venkat stood but didn’t look at the coroner’s assistant. Seth, beside him, put a hand on his back. They followed the assistant into a ward and behind a drawn curtain. There, he gestured at a wall of death-mask Polaroids, faces, swollen, cut, bruised, all eyes closed. “Mr. Venkataraman. Could you tell me, please, if you see your son here?”