The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (29 page)

Unlikely as it seemed, he wondered now if Venkat might understand. Venkat so often came across as insensitive, mostly because he was preoccupied with his own moral agendas. But he had also, occasionally, surprised Seth with an insight, proving not so absent as Seth’s women tended to think. And Venkat had travelled to Shivashaktipurum, many times, had sprinkled Sundar’s ashes there and prayed and meditated at the lotus feet of his Lord. What did he find there? What did he feel? Seth asked him one night on their way home, trying not to sound too eager, nor merely curious.

“Did you have an audience with Him?”

“I did,” Venkat said, glancing at him, then back out the window at the purpling dusk, perhaps smelling the approach of autumn. His face in the half-light seemed illuminated in pixels, shifting dots that emphasized, if anything, the rigidity of his features.

Seth waited. It seemed rude to ask what Shivashakti had said, though he wished Venkat would volunteer it.
What was it like to meet your God in person?

“You should go, Seth,” Venkat said. Insight or prescription? It didn’t make a difference. It was what Seth wanted to hear.

“I will,” Seth said, leaning over the steering wheel to release a sudden stiffness in his back. He had to go. There was no other way. He was expecting from his fellow devotees what could only be found in himself and in his God. He would go. The only question was when.

It was nearly dark outside, that’s how long I stayed: much longer than I had intended. Such a strange bubblement of feelings, to be with them—I was stung by the fullness and inviolability of their love, but wasn’t it exactly that which made them so satisfying to be with?

Still, I could stand it no longer, and they had work in the morning.

Seth wanted to drive me home—he seemed to spend half of his time ferrying people about town or trying to—but I refused in favour of a starlit stroll. I stumbled only twice, unable to look away from the inner dome of heaven.

I HAD ALREADY STAYED
in Lohikarma several days longer than planned and would leave the following afternoon for Vancouver, with less than twenty-four hours until my first appointment there. But what could I do? Brinda needed to see me once more before she left.

“You said goodbye to Adrian last night?” I asked her gently.

She thumbed a tear from the corner of her eye and twitched unhappily. “Guess what else? My younger sister, Ranjani, called yesterday afternoon, to tell us she’s pregnant.” Her voice tore a little on the word. “We had no idea she wanted babies. She never gave in to a big wedding, the way I did. She does what she wants—she
knows
what she wants—and it turns out fine!” Urgency entered her face. “Tell me what’s wrong with me.”

I felt a tremor of caution. “There’s nothing wrong with you!” I had no real way of knowing this, but I was now her friend, or hoped I was. This is the sort of thing friends say, isn’t it?

“I’ve been with Dev for ten years. Why did I put up with it? Did I want it this way?”

“You and I have known each other such a short time …” I was hedging, as surely she could tell.

“Give me something.”

When the child asks, it is hard not to give, even against one’s better instincts. I had so little practice resisting.

“Okay,” I said. “I have known you only a week. You understand?” She nodded. “You must take whatever I say with great skepticism. This is going to sound simplistic.”

She tried to appear circumspect, though her eagerness was clear.

“Dev, as you already know, may be in many ways the more vexing and intriguing case.” Now she looked hurt. “Not a more interesting person! You seem to be the better thinker, more gracious, more complex.”

“You only have my side.”

“Indeed. His problem sounds more complicated and more difficult to unravel.”

“One of the reasons I thought to talk to you is that you’re Indian. Although Dev grew up here. Do you think that being Indian has anything to do with it?”

“I can hardly begin to guess. I have never encountered another case like this. Homosexuals married to women, yes—but you’re quite sure that’s not his problem?”

She scratched her head. “I caught him.” She looked away. “Masturbating. Once. With a lingerie catalogue that had randomly come in the mail.”

This seemed convincing. Unless he had been trying to convince himself. “How did you react?”

“He was embarrassed, but I was relieved. Evidence of interest in sex! I tried to talk to him, but it never really went anywhere.”

“You mentioned some immaturity, in other areas?” She affirmed this, but I raised my hands—I could say little more about Dev. “I would have been curious to talk to him.”

“What about couples therapy?” she asked.

“Have you tried this?”

“I could never get him to go.”

“It could be good.”

“I’ll try again when I get home. But you were going to tell me why you think I stuck with him.”

I was. “With a grain of salt, yes? Your first and most significant erotic attachment—after the parents, of course, but we’re not speaking in those terms—was to Sundar. His death, at the moment when you were
coming into a sense of yourself as a maturing sexual being, at sixteen, a rich age, in more ways than I need to enumerate—his death made you terrified of forming a similar sexual attachment to anyone else. You idealized Sundar. How could you possibly find a replacement? You can’t, and perhaps you weren’t sure you wanted to. You stumbled into this relationship that was structured, by Dev’s inadequacy, to hold you back from the deepest levels of attachment and intimacy. But now time itself has worked on you, through your frustration, through these years of giving love. Now you want, you are ready for, a full sexual relationship, for babies, with all the emotional risk that entails, terrifying as it may be.” I wasn’t positive of that last. I wasn’t positive of any of it. I just wanted to give her what she wanted. I changed tack. “So much in our lives is governed by strange forms of luck—how on earth did you happen to find this puzzling man, Dev, among so many others who surely would have been happy to find themselves in his place? Adrian, to name one?”

“Adrian was doing his own thing, then.”

“He was. Again, luck, destiny—we cannot make choices until life presents them to us. And this level of pathology, yours, what I have described, this is not at all unusual. It doesn’t need to hold you back. Whatever the sources—here, we depart from orthodoxies—they needn’t govern your behaviour from here forward. And perhaps I’m entirely wrong in my hasty, forced“—I raised my eyebrows at her and she smiled—”‘diagnosis’ of your problems. Perhaps there are myriad, small, forgotten factors in your history, too many and too minute to be retained, much less recounted, and these are what made you vulnerable to such a marriage. I don’t know you well enough to know.

“The reasons you stayed were also good ones. Loyalty. Hope. Dev’s own virtues, the way you enjoyed one another’s company, the way he made you feel comfortable until you were—as I think you are now—able to feel comfortable without him.” I winced. I had gone too far.

She jumped at the opening. “You think I should leave him?”

I looked at her reproachfully, and she apologized.

“My parents will be heartbroken,” Brinda said. “They thought this marriage was perfect for me. What if he can still change?”

“That would be wonderful,” I said. I reached to take her extended hands—a gesture foreign to me, nearly artificial—yet I did it.

“It’s been so useful talking to you,” she said, and I was deeply discomfited, then, by a sexual buzz. Something like transference, but disturbing and hateful in a way it never was in therapy, where it was natural, expected, contained.

I took a little breath, acknowledging now the degree of denial I had invoked to get me through these intense days. A blooming rose such as Brinda, baring herself—figuratively—and I, racked with deprivation and longing—could I admit it now? Desire was felt. Nothing to fret over.

I shook it off. Withdrew my hands.

“I admire your loyalty,” I told her. Her eyes were burning and impenetrable. Was she angry? At me? “The love you have given him sounds like the sort you might give a child, the indulgence, the patience. You are very strong.”

“Maybe someday I’ll have a child to love like that.”

There was something fierce in her. I longed to know the particular brightness of her future, to be in it. As an uncle, only that.

“Will you keep in touch with me?” I asked her.

We stood and embraced, but it was not so fraught, so ambiguous, now. The moment had cooled and this was a simpler affection, easier on an old man’s nerves.

FROM LOHIKARMA, I CONTINUED
on to the west coast, did my interviews there, and made another attempt to drop in on the trial. It had vanished entirely from the “Glib and Stale,” as Brinda called the
Globe and Mail
. “Canada’s National Newspaper,” the masthead declared, but everyone knew it would be better called “Toronto’s National Newspaper.” The
Globe
’s coverage of the trial confirmed—and cultivated—a national indifference to the events transpiring in the Vancouver courtroom.

I admit that I had been craving information. But after only a day back in that courtroom, I started to fear both saturation and addiction. A team of defence lawyers was working to seed doubts about whether the accused could have been in Vancouver at the time the plot was being hatched. The witnesses—drug dealers, thugs, informants, FBI agents, illicit lovers—were both banal and fascinating to me. But did I need to know what was happening in the courtroom? I went back the next day, feeding my rage and helplessness, and also my desire to hear more, more, more. This time, when I left, I resolved not to return.

The bombers’ code phrase for the plot still echoed in my head, as it had for years now. “Ready to write the book?”

“Ready to write the book.”

I stayed in Vancouver and started drafting
The Art of Losing: Narratives of the Air India Disaster
. I also wrote up Brinda’s story, fretting over it much
more than I would have if she were a client I would see again and work with. But perhaps I thought I might draw her back to me, that way. The glow I had felt in her presence, the warmth of her parents, the spell of Lohikarma, it was starting to fade. Work was going well, but as the weeks passed I felt increasingly unmoored. Grey. Static. A drift back to the way I had felt in the year before I began this project.

Brinda’s thanks, when I finally sent her the document, were brief and uninformative. Had she moved on? Was she in the throes of a decision? I didn’t want to ask, not by e-mail. I wished her well, and again encouraged her to call on me if ever there was anything I could do.

I wanted to go back to Lohikarma. Why? I had done interviews in eight cities, all rich and emotional, but only in Lohikarma did I feel that other spark.
You must change your life
. People went west to change their lives.
Go west, old man!
I was even farther west now, but in Vancouver—a big city, where I was anonymous, alone, and life was little different from my life back in India. I wanted to change my life. I could do that only near Seth. There—I wrote that down.

Nonsense
, I thought, reading it in my journal immediately after writing it. What did Seth have that could make me feel that way?
Gracious forbearance
. It didn’t matter what. It would give me courage.

I would go back. He and I would meet, regularly. Coffee, lunch. We would become friends—real friends. Over time, his daughters would be like nieces to me.

And Lohikarma made sense—it was a place many people went to change their lives. It was a good place to do that.

I arrived back in October. I called Seth and we met, putatively in order for me to ask questions that had arisen in transcription, clarify a few points. He asked how long I would be staying this time. I said I wasn’t sure, perhaps a month. A week later, he invited me to have a coffee. He invited me.