The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (33 page)

These were his thoughts as he rode the train out of Shivashaktipurum, on his way to his sister’s place in Chennai. His brother would bring Brinda from Bangalore to meet him there. Before they arrived, Seth planned to pop in on Venkat.

The agrarian landscape of his boyhood scrolled past. The exposed dirt, in mounds beside rice paddies, in furrows beneath bullock hooves, was a different shade of red or brown every half hour. The air, too, would smell different for brief periods, though this was not all natural: sometimes he would smell manure, or dampness, the smells of childhood rambles; sometimes a putrid, nose-burning smell of chemical exhaust, some factory, plastics or fertilizer, employing an entire village and likely giving everyone cancer and holes in the heart. It happened in Canada—Lohikarma, the environmentalists liked to remind them, was downstream from the pulp mill, and who knew what they were getting in their water? But Seth was sure more precautions were being taken there than here. Canadians would insist.

He was in a third-class compartment, which he had always enjoyed, even in his youth, when his school performance and the Brahmin ethos (
Brahmins are under siege
, he heard his uncles saying,
our advantages are disadvantages
) meant he was far snobbier than he was now. A third-class carriage was a place between places, and within an hour, he had gotten to know his neighbours: the cringing Tata Company peon with his wife and three crusty kids; the Marwari trader, with waxed moustache points that stuck out past his earrings, who was no doubt toting gold or diamonds; the retired Tamil Brahmin couple who, on learning they shared Seth’s sub-caste, talked doggedly through their entire family tree until they figured out how they were related to him—by marriage, at a distance of more than six degrees.

They all then drowsed in the rocking carriage, as Seth’s thoughts drifted sleepily back to Canada. A few weeks before he left, he had run into Kaj Halonen, with his family, at the mall food court. As Kaj chatted, his wife left them without smile or excuse. Their children were waiting: a sullen-looking dark-haired boy, and a blond girl with long, misshapen limbs, flailing in some kind of kitted-out wheelchair. Kaj had never made reference to his kids before and didn’t now. Seth was left thinking about children—or adults—who never fully grow up.

Sundar would always be twenty-one to them, floating, in his own way, in some Neverland. If and when Venkat returned to Canada, he and Lakshmi might forever be responsible for him. Was that what terror did—give us unwanted family, weird and delicate alliances; did it drive us into the arms of people who were then forced to embrace us? Did Venkat see it that way? He had turned to Seth and Lakshmi, but then Seth had turned to God.

Venkat’s house, in a Chennai suburb, had been built by his late brother, whose widow and children still lived on the second floor, in a roomy three-bedroom flat identical to the one on the ground floor where Venkat’s mother and sister had long been installed. Venkat met him at the door with a handshake and some back-patting and his sister Parvati appeared immediately behind him with a stainless steel tumbler of lime-water balanced, reflected, on a stainless steel plate. They gestured him to a sofa.

Parvati had been widowed at nineteen, weeks after her marriage, and her in-laws hadn’t tried to keep her with them. She wore a silk nine-yard sari and a fleet look of cunning desperation that Seth recognized from others who had lived their whole lives with overbearing parents.

Venkat’s mother, lurking noisily in the kitchen, called out,
“Enna
, Sethu?
Sowkyumaa
?” She, too, wore the traditional nine-yard, which accented her broad middle, and she had her daughter’s thick hair, parted and combed severely over a wide head. Their silhouettes were almost identical, the mother’s only a bit wider and taller.
Self-similarity
, Seth thought,
fractals, infinite regress
.

Venkat was dressed neatly, in a white dhoti and pressed mauve kurta. He didn’t appear to have gained weight, but didn’t look any thinner either. There was an alteration, though—what? Seth sensed, not calm (that would be asking too much), but less bewilderment in Venkat than he had become used to.

“You’re looking well,” Seth told him. He would have said this either way, but how nice that it was true.

“I’ve heard back from Jerry Czaplinski,” Venkat said. The statistics department head.

“Ah?” Venkat had told Seth he was thinking of returning to work in the fall. The university would be virtually obliged to comply if he did.

They both reached out to receive saucers of fresh-hot onion
bajjis
from Parvati.

“So you are coming back?” Seth wanted to know.

“Very much coming back, Sethu. Very much coming back.”

“We think it’s a bad idea,” Parvati said from the kitchen entrance at the other end of the living room, not precisely observing the customary rules against women mingling with outside males, but, by staying in the doorway, not exactly violating them either.

Seth remembered Lakshmi telling him once that Sita complained a little about Parvati, who had worshipped Venkat and his wife and the now-deceased elder brother who used to live on the top floor. Parvati would stifle them with attentions, insist on carrying Sundar everywhere, even when he was so old as to feel uncomfortable with it. She wanted to comb Sita’s hair, make Venkat’s coffee; she became a Shivashakti devotee when they did and came with them whenever they went to Shivashaktipurum. Sita pitied her and tried to be kind, unlike the other sister-in-law, who lived upstairs and spoke sharply to Parvati. Venkat, too, indulged her: the youngest, their father’s pet, a widow. Now Parvati had fixed all the largesse of her immature affection on Venkat.

Seth looked at her with polite bemusement. Could Parvati sway him?

Their mother passed another plate of
bajjis
through the kitchen doorway to her daughter. “
Chi!
He’s a man. He needs to work. Is he going to sit around the house with you, reading
Stardust
magazine?”

Seth sneaked a look at Venkat, whose face was a mask of bizarre, unreadable neutrality. Was it his mother who convinced him to return? But that wouldn’t quite account for the sense of energy behind his declaration, a rumbling of determination greater than any he had felt from Venkat since before the disaster.

When Seth called Lakshmi later that day, he tried to give an account of Venkat’s mood. “I suspect that being home with his mother and sister has reminded him of his obligations. Who else can support the family now, with his brother gone? I don’t think his mother would put up with him quitting his job and moping around the house.” There was something else Seth was grasping for, something he himself had been cheated of. “I think it’s been healthy for him to be back where he truly feels at home. He even seems to have made some new friends.”

“Then why is he coming back?” Brinda asked later. “Isn’t he going to get sad and lonely, and, you know”—she didn’t say “suicidal” but the word puppeted, herky-jerky, between them—“all over again?”

Lakshmi had asked the same thing. Seth said, “He didn’t tell me why, exactly. He probably needs to feel more productive and important than he can here. And he will earn enough to support his mother and sister and come back every summer if he wants.”

In August 1986, Venkat came back to Canada. He flew in to Vancouver, as before, but this time Seth drove out to pick him up.

Venkat was thinner, which almost never happens on a trip home. He sat with his shoulder bag clutched in his lap, the same one he had in Ireland, filled, back then, with the photo albums and his family’s clothes. Seth wondered what it had in it now.

They were on their way to stay with Bala. Seth had been to the house two or three times, but the suburb was dramatically altered every time.
New residential roads, first with nothing at all around them, then with new cul-de-sacs tacked at intervals by spindly trees; new mini-malls, their exterior decor meant to evoke Switzerland or California; new houses of worship: a Pentecostal church; and, now, a Chinese temple in red and gold, rising up from the wayside earth.

Bala’s wife, Vasu, answered the door with a smile, then stood aside for them to enter as Bala came to greet them. His starched short-sleeved button-down looked like a packing box, thought Seth. If he lay on his back, his torso would be perfectly flat. What was that book Brinda had liked so much? About the boy squashed flat one day who mailed himself to a friend for vacation.
Flat Stanley
, that was it. Flat Bala.

He smelled sandalwood incense, coconut rice. The Balakrishnans’ daughter was reading on the sofa. She would start Grade 12 in a few weeks, a girl in her parents’ mould: A for academics, A for athletics, All About Achievement. Their son, Sudhir, not at home, a different story, as they say. Pudgy, shortish, darkish, sweet. Daddy’s pet. They kept Sara Lee brownies in the freezer for him, even while Bala—who strode laps around his little street each morning before staging a grand finale on his lawn, bopping bony knees to palms, jumping his jacks, pushing his ups—made subtle cracks whenever anyone hoisted a samosa at a party.

Bala offered Seth a Johnnie Walker, a gesture that Seth, as the only drinker in the room, felt was laden with moral condescension. He accepted. It was good, that caramel burn, after the long drive. He looked forward to an oversoft bed. He wondered if he and Venkat would be sharing a room, as they had in Cork.

“Our Mahalakshmi temple?” Bala was responding to a question Venkat had asked. “Coming along, coming along. We think we’ll have the groundbreaking within the year. All of us out here are exceptionally committed.” Bala handed plates to the men and began murmuring insistently that they should help themselves to the buffet Vasu had laid out.

“Is that so? Excellent,” Seth said, making reciprocal gestures that Venkat or Vasu should really go first. Venkat, with an absent air, began, and Seth followed.

Bala took a linked set of measuring cups from a drawer to serve
himself, three-quarters of a cup of vegetable
kootu
atop a half-cup of rice. “Even some of our white Canadian friends from the Shivashakti Centre, they have made contributions to the temple fund. They think it can only be good.”

They moved to sit at the table.

“This is good,” said Venkat. “From the British and the Portuguese converting the Hindu man to Christianity now they want to know the greatness of our ancient scriptures. The Muslims are not so open. And the …” Venkat’s voice shook a little. “Not the Sikhs.”

“We don’t see them at the temple, no.” Bala spoke with uncharacteristic caution; no idiot he. “But they come to Shivasakti satsang. Even now. Some have specially made a point of coming. Some Sikhs.”

“Gandhiji said it: ‘There is in Hinduism room enough for Jesus, as there is for Mohammed, Zoroaster and Moses,’ ” said Venkat. “Most of the Indian Muslims converted from Hinduism. Right? Yes? The father of our nation, he said, ‘in a free, prosperous, progressive India, they would find it the most natural thing in the world to revert to their ancient faith and ways of life.’ India is a Hindu nation and these others, these others, these—we must make the circumstances for them to revert.” He finished his minuscule portions. “India could be a superpower now, but for this
vazha-vazha, kozha-kozha
”—his gestures illustrated: namby-pamby, wishy-washy—“multi-religious nonsense. You see what comes of that!”

The Balakrishnans had stiffened and Seth was looking at his plate.

“Everybody wants his own country,” Venkat went on. “We too need to keep up our homeland. India—what does this name mean except ‘country of Hindus’? These others, the defectors, they want to fight. Okay, I say, let us fight!”

Seth had heard such things from him before, but, of course, that was before.

There was a deadness to Venkat’s face as he spoke. His lips barely moved; his voice was a monotone. It had begun the week after the bomb, but back then it seemed no more than appropriate, the numbing effect of horror. Had it continued through last fall? Or had it returned or worsened? Perhaps a very minor stroke? There was also some discolouration,
on the skin of his face. Looking at it distracted Seth from what Venkat was saying. It happened to Indians, unlucky ones: light-skinned ones got dark pouches under their eyes; dark-skinned ones a spooky frame edging the hairline. Venkat’s was something else, a visage-haunting.