The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (23 page)

These things kept happening, for days. Seth felt depressed and uncomfortably distant from his family; every time his heart leapt toward them it was backhanded by a racket of fear.

Finally, Lakshmi erupted. “I’m thankful you were available to help Venkat, I am. But Venkat has gone to be with his own family now. You have to come back to yours.”

Where was her terror—of grief, of death, of the risk of love itself? He had wondered that even before going to Ireland to confront death in person, its putrid colours and livid smells. Why was she not paralyzed? He didn’t know how to ask her—it would sound like an accusation, as though he thought her unfeeling. He didn’t: it was the opposite. She knew how to feel. He didn’t. No one had taught him how to live with these emotions. Who could teach him now? The only time he had felt at peace in these last two weeks was when he was praying.

Lakshmi accompanied him to a satsang the next night at the Shivashakti Centre. It was on the second floor of a two-storey building on High Street, above a yoga studio and an office of three accountants, one of whom, Seth would learn, was a Shivashakti devotee. When they arrived, at 6:20, a white woman dressed in a salwar kameez was unlocking the doors; Seth recognized her from Venkat’s house. He could almost feel the hairs on the back of Lakshmi’s neck rising. Perhaps he should have come alone, but he had felt compelled to ask his wife. Perhaps she had felt compelled to agree.

Daisy—that was the name of the devotee who let them in. She bade them sit while she lit incense in the largest of the three rooms. Several other acolytes arrived while she was doing this, one carrying plates of snacks to the kitchen. Others took places on the carpet, facing the shrine. By six thirty, some fifteen people were assembled in a state of cross-legged readiness, filling perhaps a quarter of the space. Most of the devotees from Venkat’s house were among them, and a few nodded at Seth in recognition.

A young, ginger-bearded man stood at the front and did a short puja to the large photo of Shivashakti on the shrine: illuminating the picture by moving a ghee lamp before it in circles and then offering the flame to each
of the assembled devotees, who waved hands over it and took its blessing by covering their eyes and gesturing over their heads with warmed hands.

The young man set the lamp on the shrine and took the blessing himself, running his hand through his long, orange-marmalade curls and adjusting Shivashakti’s sandalwood garland, which had gone slightly askew. He pressed a button on a tape player: Shivashakti’s weekly lecture, delivered in person each Sunday afternoon in India, in the Great Hall of Assembly at Shivashaktipurum, then transcribed and sent out to every Shivashakti centre in the world, along with an audiotape of the original and a spoken translation.

The theme this evening, Seth would never forget, was “Confession.”

Confession: You may wonder, why do I need to speak my doubts? God knows all—so why must I put my guilty things into words, the devotee asks, if God understands? Yes, God understands, but do you? It is through speaking that you come to know your own doubts and the sorrows of your life. You must do the work of understanding. God knows you, fine, but do you know yourself?

He felt the guru—God—was speaking directly to him.

It is the same for the Christian man, the Hindu man, the Mussulman—“Listen to my soul and hear it crying from the depth!” This is what the great Christian
sant
Augustine, he said. “Listen to my soul and hear it crying from the depth. For if your ears are not present in the depth, where shall we go? To whom shall we cry?”

“The night is yours and the day is yours.”

Seth felt small and safe, a child in a parent’s arms.
The night is yours and the day is yours
.

The congregation sang bhajans, followed by Shivashakti’s mandatory acknowledgement of non-dualism: each person present turned to another to say, “If you are God, so I am God,” a reminder of the light their guru shone at the end of the tunnel of ignorance.

A chanting meditation emerged naturally out of this ritual, then faded into a silent meditation, out of which people retired subtly to the kitchen where coffee had begun to perk.

Seth loved the sedate procession from each level to a deeper one, as though from one subterranean pool down to another, no stop too long
or too short. He loved how he and Lakshmi, nearly complete newcomers, could so easily fit in and follow along. And the snacks and coffee were tasty, especially following the rigours of spiritual exercise.

Afterwards, he felt calm and uplifted. How had he never seen how this would suit him? He supposed he had never attended a normal satsang, only the special occasions, and he recalled having been a little turned off by the fervency.

But now that the blood-dimmed tide was loosed, and the ceremony of innocence drowned, Shivashakti’s method was a rope to take hold of and follow, hand over hand, toward introspection and faith—it was just the thing. He found a schedule and other information on a table by a bulletin board. Satsangs were Monday and Thursday nights at six thirty. There were quarterly sign-up sheets for various duties and details. There was a phone tree for such matters as the volunteer and charitable activities that Shivashakti prescribed for his followers.

As Seth and Lakshmi ate pastries, some of the others introduced themselves. The young man who read the lecture was called Carsten. He asked what had brought Seth to the centre, the question proving mainly to be an opening for Carsten’s own story: he was a ski instructor, who first came with a friend. He was saving for a one-way ticket to India, which seemed synonymous for him with “Shivashaktipurum.”

Daisy, who had let them in, was in her fifties. She wore a crystal over her unfashionable salwar kameez, and her speech was larded with the language of healing and non-denominational spirituality that marked the town’s New Age Tribes. She introduced a friend, Irene, younger, in her thirties, perhaps. Seth noticed Lakshmi had disappeared from his side. Irene was small and bubbly—they were talking about a visiting lecturer and volunteer opportunities, unfunny topics, but she laughed after each thing she said. Her cheeks looked painfully red and flaky. She kept pushing thick bangs ever-so-slightly out of her eyes; they would immediately fall back in.

“I remember now,” said Daisy. One woman was at each of Seth’s elbows, while Lakshmi, across the room, was talking to an Indian couple. “You were at Venkat’s house, when we came there, on the grief vigil. How is he?”

They listened with interest to how Venkat had taken Sundar’s ashes
back to India, and would stay some weeks in Shivashaktipurum. Other devotees gathered in. Nick was one, a man of about Seth’s age who ran a copy shop and stationery business, not talkative, but with a warm and ready smile. And Kaj Halonen, the principal of a junior high school, big, balding, a bit hearty in conversation, so you weren’t sure how closely he was listening when you talked. But Seth had looked at the other devotees while they were praying, and thought he had glimpsed on Kaj’s face a true loss of self in the divine, depths of peace beneath the bluster, exactly what he himself desired.

He surged home, enclouded, almost inappropriately buoyant. Success! He had found his guru—so quickly! Who knew it could happen like this? Never mind that Seth had known about him for years. It was a common story, and an old one, that God could only be seen when the mind of the devotee was ready and open.

As they were getting into bed, Lakshmi asked him, with careful neutrality, “You liked the satsang? You thought it was good?”

He hadn’t given a thought to what his wife had felt since the first word of the lecture.
Confession
. He almost drifted back, but, instead, forced himself toward her. “It was just what I needed.”

She nodded and they said nothing more, spooning into sleep.

He resumed summer teaching the following Monday, and went to the satsang that night. Lakshmi went with him, but then declined to come on Thursday, and the week after, and the week after that.

Seth was enveloped by a quality of ecstatic awareness, a sense of pure feeling—what feeling? Feeling itself. How long had it been since he had really
felt
in this way? A long time.

Was it like this when he and Lakshmi were first married? He’d been consumed by her presence, their communion, all that was so surprising
and delightful. It was spurred by erotic discovery but reached quick tendrils into every part of his being.

His children, also, provoked surges of emotion. His family’s beauty still made him heady at times. But ecstasy? No. Not after years of chores, bills, backtalk. His love had deepened—it underlay all he did—but he was not, usually, aware of it.

So, now: not only had he found his guru, he’d become infatuated.

He felt more energetic, and more attentive to the small charms of life than he had in years, yet when he cut himself on the screen door, he didn’t notice until Ranjani pointed out that he was bleeding. The colours of sky, sunset, trees and stones were intensified, but also appeared distant, as though seen through a veil: devotion. He lost weight—food held no interest for him—and had difficulty focusing on teaching and remembering such mundane matters as groceries. Yet he had the sense of being hyper-alert, flooded with lost memories and exhilarated by insights.

One evening, as he was singing with the other devotees, some with finger cymbals, others, like Seth, clapping hands, he had the feeling that he was walking back from the market with his mother, stopping by a roadside shrine, where one would clap hands to call out the god.
An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress
 … He was back in the classroom with dear Father O’Sullivan, his bulby red nose, his joy at his students’ voices. So many dead.

Seth wrote poems, something he had not done since writing one for Lakshmi in the first weeks of their marriage. It seemed there was no other action adequate to all he needed to express, as he immersed himself in Shivashakti’s writings, and stories by fellow devotees. He learned that Shivashakti sometimes appeared as a woman, sometimes as a snake, embodying both the male and female energies, which is why he had the names both of Shiva and of Shakti, the god’s wife. He was a man first, and claimed that the male power was superior. (Seth was aware this would rankle Lakshmi deeply if she learned of it, but she was not asking too many questions and he found it easy not to talk to her about all he
was learning.) Yet he encouraged his followers to call him MataPita—mother and father.

Shivashakti was born Shanmugham, a Kannada Brahmin boy of some intelligence and secular promise. When he was in his early twenties, just finished engineering college, he went on a trip with friends to the western ghats. They had taken their morning bath in a waterfall and had plans to go to a cave temple in the afternoon. Shanmugham was a small distance away from his friends, drying off, when he saw, on the path, a cobra. Its head was raised, its hood open, but for some reason, he was compelled to go toward it. The cobra slithered through the woods and he followed, until suddenly he saw, on a rock, an old woman. The cobra was on her lap, her hand raised and slightly cupped, much like the snake’s hood, as though they both were blessing him. The snake spoke: “There is no more man or woman. Shiva and Shakti are one.” The snake slithered up through folds of the woman’s sari and around her neck to enter her chest through the dip of her clavicle. The old woman opened her mouth to speak. A snake’s tongue darted forth. “There is no more man or snake,” she hissed. “I am the cobra.” She bent into a circle and he saw she had no feet, but rather a snake’s tail. She began to swallow herself.