The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (32 page)

He had been so proud and happy to have her with him. Walking out of the dorm, yesterday morning, down the ashram’s shady lanes, he had imagined the four of them coming someday. And beyond—retirement, maybe here; grandchildren, maybe here.

And then, this morning, the excitement of seeing his God. Shivashakti had entered the arena at a point unseen, but Seth could tell, everyone could, it was as though a current had run through them. He himself felt faint, until God entered his view.

Shivashakti seemed to him less distinct, more mutable, than in pictures he had seen, as though his outlines were drawn in shifting light. The sunlight in the outer court seemed to blend into his features, as though He were continuous with it, instead of reflecting it as did every mortal creature on God’s earth.

But others, he came to realize, saw something—someone—different.

One devotee later made reference to the benevolence of his aspect. “What do I see when I look at him? I see goodness. He shines it. Out of his eyes.”

Another seemed to find him simultaneously unreachable and omnipresent: “He is, for me, like the sun, moon and planets. He governs my life’s motion, the rhythm of my days. So when I meet him, it is like he is always with me, anyway.”

After seeing him, that first time, Seth rubbed his eyes the rest of the day. They felt warm and tired. He didn’t want to sleep, though; he wanted to meditate, to contemplate that which is without form.

Every August, before beginning teaching, he reread Richard Feynman’s
Lectures on Physics
. For him, Feynman was the greatest, his model, the scientist and theorist Seth would never be, but a teacher in Seth’s own mold. He thought now of Feynman’s lecture on Brownian motion, and his citation from biology, since, for Feynman, all sciences were connected, and the connections were love and physics:
Everything that animals do, atoms do
.

Seth knew this to be true, but had not
felt
, before, his own atoms animalized. Here he felt not simply at peace, but somehow beyond the knowledge that he was a mortal composed of immortal particles, which, after him, would recombine in infinite ways determined by the universe and the laws that he had been made to preach.
Felt
there was no separation between being and truth.

Even the fight with Brinda left only a mild residue of discomfort, easily washed away in a satsang he attended that afternoon, while Brinda explored the ashram grounds and read. He took comfort in her seeming strength and confidence—surely these would serve her? He did feel detached from conflict, he thought. Such a disagreement,
before
, would have shattered him. That night, he lay spinning in his cot, skewered on an axis that also pierced the earth’s centre and the ever-living heart of the cosmos.

The train for Bangalore left in the morning at ten, but Seth wasn’t able to catch another back the same day and by the time he arrived back in Shivashaktipurum, he had missed two
darshans
. He wasn’t happy about that, but was coming to recognize that his dream of worshipping in happy communion with his family was unrealistic, and, in light of that, felt a dawning relief on arriving back in Shivashaktipurum alone.

That afternoon, as he sat reading in the shade of a margosa, he was approached by a severe-looking young woman in a dark red cotton sari, the uniform worn by acolytes living at the ashram.

“
Jai Shivashakti
,” she saluted him. “You are Sri Sethuratnam?”

Seth had grown irresistibly drowsy, bent over his book in the still and fragrant shade, and had been wondering if he could succumb right there on the grass or haul himself back to his cot. As he rose to face the woman, he wondered if she had, in fact, awakened him. He brushed at his face:
neem
pollen or the cotton wool of sleep?

“Sri Swamiji wishes to speak to you. You will come, today at six o’clock p.m.,” she said, in the dice-tumbler accent of south Indians to whom English doesn’t come easy. “You know where it is?”

He tilted his head in the affirmative. “I know, yes.”

He had asked for a tour, the first day, and had seen the bungalow that had recently replaced the thatched-roof huts of the original ashram. The house was set in a garden, the garden within a grove, so that the impression one had, viewing it from a distance of fifty metres, was that it must be a very inviting place, if one were so lucky as to be invited.

No one knew the process by which visitors to the ashram were asked to come to the bungalow for a personal audience with their guru, but everyone heard about these encounters, and everyone hoped. Last year, Venkat had been granted a semi-private audience, together with another family who had lost relatives in the Air India bombing. Shivashakti had materialized
vibhuti
, holy ash, from the heads of the children there, and given it to them all to take home.

There were other stories, from other visits, other devotees. Venkat had told him that his first time there, he had been waiting to see Shivashakti when a man emerged, weeping, from the inner sanctum. He was from Finland or Sweden, Venkat hadn’t been sure, and grew up speaking a language now known by fewer than a hundred people. Shivashakti had spoken to him
in his mother tongue
.

Why was Seth being called? Perhaps he already knew. When he needed a guru, Shivashakti had come to him. Now he needed to meet Shivashakti in person, although he hadn’t recognized it until now—there
it was, a gnawing hunger. And he had been called to satisfy this, as well.

Any remaining mental mistiness had been burned off by the invitation, which seemed to issue directly from the sun.
Tat savitur varenyam
. He walked out of the shade into its warmth and paced the grounds, a walking meditation that took him, three times, past the evening’s destination, before he returned to his dorm to bathe and dress.

By five thirty, he was walking toward the western end of the compound, and the house of his Lord. He realized he was thinking of the bungalow and garden as though they were a temple complex and wondered whether Shivashakti’s acolytes performed for him similar rituals to those done for deities in the usual temples, where the gods were represented in wood or bronze instead of taking the form of living beings.

Seth had loved, as a little boy, to visit the Krishna temple when the priests were getting the deity ready for bed. He and his mother would watch them give the idol his dinner of yogourt, milk, ghee, all those rich foods beloved of the child-God and of all children, then bathe the small figure and dress him in silk garments before parading him around the temple and singing him to sleep. Seth’s mother donated such a garment once a year.

Seth once told his mother that he wanted to come and look after baby Krishna when he grew up and his mother had shushed him—“Become a priest with your marks?”—as though the priests were grown men playing with dolls, rather than men invested with the holy offices of worship.

The density of margosas increased around the path, absorbing the heat of the day and releasing a slight, oily pungency into their shade. Sound, dust, the enmity of the common world, all seemed held at bay as Seth climbed the steps. A veranda, terra-cotta roof tiles, rooms and people, as with a temple or a home. One or two muttered
“Jai Shivashakti”
toward him, and understanding both Seth’s purpose and his uncertainty, pointed him ever farther into the interior of the house. He saw a bench,
finally, outside a closed door, where a middle-aged white couple sat.

“Jai Shivashakti,”
he greeted them. “You are waiting to see Swamiji?”

“Jai Shivashakti,”
they answered.

He sat and waited.

Shortly before six, the door opened and a family exited, a frolicky little girl, a sombre adolescent boy, and a man and woman—Indian but prosperous and progressive, to all appearances: she with bobbed hair, he a gold watch—who leaned into each other. He wiped tears from his eyes and cheeks as her manicured fingernails dug into his starched shirt sleeve.

From behind them, an acolyte beckoned the white couple. The Indian family shifted to let them pass. When the white couple exited some twenty minutes later, looking brave and buoyed, Seth thought of
The Wizard of Oz
, which Ranjani loved and had made him watch every time it came on TV. The Wizard, we were to believe, possessed no special powers other than making people (or lions, or scarecrows) see what strengths were already within them.

“
Jai Shivashakti
,” the usher said now to Seth.
We’re off to see the Wizard!
Seth’s mind sang—not what he wanted to be thinking.

“Jai Shivashakti
,” he said, feeling one part of his mind quiver in readiness, a blossom in the wind, while another part raced, a greyhound of analysis:
The Wizard lets us see what is already in us, but, as with Krishna to Arjuna, his powers also reveal his divinity to us …
The two parts joined in silence as he entered the chamber and his God came forward to greet him. Seth bowed, palms together.

“If you are God, so I am God,” Shivashakti said to him, and Seth repeated it back to his god.

“Your daughter has gone,” his guru said. “But you remain.”

Seth flailed briefly in panic and incipient grief. His daughter had died? Which one? Was this an instruction? Then he grasped, easy as snatching a firefly out of dark air, the obvious meaning. “Yes, yes,” he said.

“You feel somehow alone.”

How did he know? Seth could not recall later whether they spoke in Tamil or English, or in words at all.

Remember that I am always with you and within you. Think on my name, you will feel my presence
.

Close up, Shivashakti radiated a hypnotic stillness. He had wide black eyebrows above a strong nose and below the silvering bangs of his still-thick pageboy. He was a small man with large features, something like a big-boned bird, feathers fluffed into a saffron robe. His keen eyes, too, had something of a bird’s intense attention.

In his presence, Seth was, almost against his will, more aware of his God’s humanity than his divinity. His divinity inheres in his humanity, he reasoned afterward, savouring the experience. At close range, then, you must feel less God-warmth, and more person-warmth. Else, how could you approach him? At such close quarters, you would be burned.

Seth felt himself surrender, felt love surround him, absorb him, perfect him.

“I am here, Swamiji,” he said, and fell at the feet of his lord.

During his weeks at the ashram, Seth called his brother’s place in Bangalore every few days to speak to Brinda. Or rather, he would go to the Shivashaktipurum Post Office and place a call to his brother’s neighbour, hang up, wait ten minutes, then call again to find Brinda there or to be told a time to call back. His brother had applied twenty years ago for a phone line, but claimed he hadn’t gotten it yet because he refused to pay bribes.

These things—India!—increasingly drove Seth nuts: corruption, congestion, poverty, dust. To his daughters, he defended the conservatism, the rituals, the sex-segregation, but inarticulately, and with decreasing conviction. It had long been a reflex for him, in his adopted country, to imagine that there was another place where he felt at home as he never had in the Great White North. Returning to India, though, he learned, over and over again, that the country of his birth was no longer his to claim. He was suspended, as if in mid-bound, between two shifting-drifting continents whose appearance, texture, even location, changed even as he watched
them from his great-seeming distance. That was the other problem: he couldn’t fully know either country because both were transforming, not even glacially. India was visibly more urban and modern than when he first left; Canada, too, was more cosmopolitan and open than when he first arrived. So maybe that problem would turn out to be the solution.