The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (35 page)

Venkat’s street was drabber than most here and his house looked extremely shabby by comparison to his neighbours’ stalwart facades. A pocked lawn, flowerbeds littered with toppled, half-frozen weeds, cracked concrete steps. I rang the bell, heard it bong, waited.

I girded myself against the chill and rang again, opened the torn screen door and knocked. Lightning has to strike somewhere, I was thinking—a storm builds: friction, release. (My version of Seth’s physics mind.) Nothing personal. Right? Lockerbie. The Twin Towers. I needed to stop thinking of myself as some special victim—

My freshly impersonal thinking fled as the dead bolt shunted and a vast image troubled my sight: Venkat and me, matched at the threshold, then folding away from each other in a chain of men like us, paper men, arms outstretched across this too-wide country, ready for uncoming embraces.

Count on a therapist for a fancy prose style. Venkat opened the door, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He had eyes only for the bird perched on his cuff.

“Come, come in,” he said, pointing his chin toward me, no eye contact. My shoes might have made it into the frame of his peripheral vision. “This is Mandy.” He stroked the bird’s head and neck with a finger, and it gave a little shake and fluff. “Mandy,
namaste.”

“Namaste,”
said the bird.

Venkat threw me a look of pride.
“Howd’youdo
, Mandy,
Howd’youdo
?”

Mandy squawked.
“Howd’youdo!”

“Intelligent bird,” I grunted. This was, to judge by Venkat’s expression, what he wanted to hear. Was that why I said it? I followed him down a hallway, his smell, like gunpowder traces, in my nostrils.
Ah, the birds
, I thought, but that was wrong. I got close to the other two, as he took them out of their cages to change their newspaper. The smell came from him.

The birds had the run of the house. The flight of the house? They hopped along the backs of the chairs, a game. They appeared to live on the dining table, which was covered in a scratched plastic protector. There was a doily-ish thing under the plastic and a tablecloth beneath that, in a pink that matched the carpet.

I fed Mandy some pieces of apple.

“Tasty
, Mandy?” Venkat asked.

“Tasty!”
said Mandy.

“Mandy is a good boy?”

The parrot repeated that he was.

The cages were cleaner than the house, but the house was not as dirty as I expected. I watched one bird drop its business from a sideboard onto the pile carpet. Seth, I learned later, had arranged for a cleaner. I thought such a person would have to be paid well.

“Seth told me he likes to repeat “E equals mc squared,” I said, by way of bolstering our strange sense of rapport.

Mandy flapped to a trapeze in the doorway.
“E equals emcee squared!”
He somersaulted, once, twice.

Venkat glanced slyly at me.
“ ‘Bande Mataram’
?” he asked his bird.

“Bande-e-e Mataram!”
Mandy willingly sang, and nipped a pineapple chunk from Venkat’s fingers.

This, the chorus of a de facto Indian national anthem, raised my hackles—I hate anthems, all anthems. Drivel and dreck. When I hear schoolchildren sing it, I want to snatch them and run; when Lata Mangeshkar does it, she despoils the films of my youth. “Perfect,” I said, “coming from a parrot.” Venkat showed no reaction.

I was being drawn toward my reason for coming here. To Canada, and now, to Venkat’s house. It wasn’t to do what Seth had asked, though I hadn’t admitted that to him, and possibly not to myself, but I must have known I could not be this man’s therapist, help ease his pain, soothe his demons. He was too far gone. He didn’t want to be helped. And, most of all, I feared him too much. Not him, exactly. My similarity to him. I was here to get to know him, because only then would I be fully convinced that we were different. The superficialities of his barren life were so close to my own that they brought all my despair to the surface. But I would change my life.

So much for my reasons for coming—why was he acting so differently toward me? He wasn’t resisting me as before. He had opened the door.

“A noble bird,” he told me, “beloved of ancient Greek emperors, because they would cry, ‘Hail, Caesar!’ ”

“Hail, Caesar!”
agreed Mandy.

“The other ones don’t talk?” I asked. Venkat’s breath smelled dead, but in the way of many people’s breath, extruding as something grey, lumpy.

“They may still learn.” He helped one of the others down from the chandelier, from where it had shat onto the clean cage, and caressed its apple-green nape, eliciting chuckles and trills. “But Mandy is the
brightest.” He looked up toward his favourite again. “Mandy!
Bharat Mata ki Jai!
”

This second praise-phrase for Mother India pulled a shudder up through my body from soles to scalp. Mandy parroted it, as Venkat continued speaking.

“You never said, when you came to my office last summer, that you are here because those same bastards killed your family too. Once Seth told me, I wanted you to know: don’t think that, because I stayed in Canada, I have forgotten our motherland. I returned to Canada to better support our struggle.”

My mind ticked forward through the implications. I had heard that ashrams, in India and abroad, were a favoured fishing-ground for Hindu nationalists looking to snag homesick
desis
with cash jangling in their pants. “Which struggle?” I asked, even though I was suddenly, irrationally sure that I knew. “What kind of support?”

“My good man.” He gave me a complicit smile and rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. Venkat drew a full professor’s salary. The money didn’t go to the house, nor to the birds. A small portion alone would support his mother and sister. He had selected me of all people to tell: he was sending his money to—

“Mandy!” he said, still looking at me. “Khalistan or Kabristan?”

“Kabristan!”
Mandy gaily responded, swinging on the trapeze.

“I must go,” I said, and left him, letting myself out and tripping down his cracked steps to his yellow lawn, where I loved the bitter wind blowing away his thick smells.

I walked around the block, not ready to get back in my car. I pictured the scene: seventeen years ago, Venkat, fresh from his suicide attempt, is at Shivashakti’s ashram. Perhaps with his younger sister. He is ashamed. He is at loose ends. His mother is urging him to return to Canada and his job, but he is nervous. Perhaps sub-nervous. Numb.

His life back there is meaningless: Sita and Sundar were not merely his reasons for living. They were his reasons for earning. Now he has no one to feed and no one to come home to—no reasons to go home and no reasons ever to leave the house. He knows, in some inchoate way,
that if he returns to Canada, he will attempt suicide again. It’s the only logical response to the conditions of his life.

He might still be on antidepressants; he might be forgetting to take them. Either way, the only true emotion he feels is anger. If he is on the drugs, the anger is blunted, but still present, palpable.
Those bastards stole my life. They killed my family. They took meaning from me. They took belief
. Sometimes he hears it, like this, in words. More often, his mind is a smoky blank, the anger its glowing embers.

Into this picture walks a man. A couple of men? They are at a satsang, at the Shivashakti ashram. They somehow walk out with Venkat and his sister. They strike up a conversation.

Venkat and his sister give their address, as well as quite a bit of other information. The men promise to visit, and Venkat feels eagerness in anticipation of seeing them. It’s a relief to feel an emotion other than anger, though it is chiefly his anger that attracts them. When the men come, they talk in ways that make sense to him, about how the Jews have a homeland, the Muslims have a homeland, the Sikhs want a homeland. India—which they call Bharat—is the Hindus’ homeland, but we are made to bow to minority rule here! The Christians, the Sikhs, even the Muslims, who have their own goddamned country—they are allowed to make the laws! India is a democracy—the majority must rule!

Venkat subscribes. He pledges his salary to this worthy cause: purify Mother India. The men continue to visit. They talk strategy, philosophy, finance.

Seth, encountering Venkat at his mother’s home, notices his renewed energy and cheer, even meets his new friends, though he mistakes them for actual friends, mistakes their interest as benign. Seth doesn’t know. Venkat never tells him.

I had wormed my way into Venkat’s mind. I wouldn’t have thought I could. He reminded me—here is where you get the full depths of my own neurosis, but—he reminded me a little of my mother. His irrationality, the ridiculous leaps of logic. How can you put someone like that together on paper?

Fiction is the practice of “if this, then what?” For all my pages of notes on the strange things my mother said and did—from her physical roughness with us children, which she would deny; to her vanity about my father, which he might have seen as affection; to her insistence on the pogroms’ non-occurrence, which became a wedge between my parents until Appa made it clear she was never to mention the subject—I could never extrapolate, or penetrate. Any guess I made as to her motivations, any prediction as to her next action, struck me as wrong. I knew her well enough to know that. I never knew her any better.

It probably helped that I didn’t know Venkat very well. And however he talked, his actions, were not, I must admit, wholly illogical. What do normal people do in life? They love, they work. He gave his parakeets his love, and he gave his salary to—

I got in my car, started it, let it stall and turned the engine off again.

You must change your life
.

I am a man thrice-struck by lightning. The first strike, the pogroms, came close. The second, the bombing, struck home. Somehow I’d expected the third to come soon after and to kill me. Why think that way? It’s lightning—nothing personal, even if I seemed to attract it. I waited seventeen years. Finally, the third bolt had struck, but at a distance. It didn’t kill me, but it deadened me, for about fourteen months.

I WAS ON A FIVE-MONTH LEAVE
from the IRDS, as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Management, in Ahmedabad. I had never taught before. They had sought me out, to teach on Organizational Behaviour, a leap from the work I was best known for, but not, it turned out, a long one. My lectures focused on social responsibility, corporate culture, conformity and change. The course had led me to idle musing on a new writing project, unrelated to my therapeutic practice, about the new business scene, outsourcing, globalization.

As I crossed the campus that day, following my twice-weekly seminar, the shadows made me stop. Long shadows, late afternoon. The seminar was going marvellously. I had always thought my native impatience would scupper any attempt at teaching, but this was
the
Indian Institute of Management, and my students were no dimbulbs. True, many gained admission largely on their skills with test-taking and teacher-pleasing, and so were bewildered when obsequiousness and regurgitation got nothing out of me but thunder. Underneath their eager veneers, though, real thoughts often lurked, and as they relaxed with me, these kids began to reveal the fascinations of their minds. Their company was rejuvenating.

In a couple of hours, two of my favourite students were to arrive at my on-campus quarters to talk about a joint research project, from
which their theses would be drawn. Amita was brash and mouthy; she had worked two years in Bangalore, in the tech centre of an American bank, before entering grad studies with an eye toward microfinance. Jaggi, her batch-mate, was more reserved, an electrical engineer with more conventional career aspirations. I was guiding their research on a local Internet start-up, but our conversations often ballooned.

My thoughts were circling pleasantly as I crossed the campus, when the light—did I say shadows?—the majesty of the campus brought me to a halt. Particularly with the sun on the cusp of a rapid descent, the red brick arches framing views of red clay paths and green grass lawns and peacocks strutting across it all. When I started walking again, the direction of my thoughts had shifted: how little I knew of architectural magic. Were good minds attracted to beautiful places, or were the shapes of the buildings themselves conducive to deep thought? If it was the latter, what did it mean for the thinking of the poor that they so rarely lived and worked in places designed for aesthetic enrichment? What about the brains of the main run of the capitalist classes, to whom aesthetic value was typically sentimental or profitable, preferably both?

I had been given a large townhouse in professors’ row, rather good. I lived here ten days at a stretch, going back to Delhi four days each fortnight to maintain my therapeutic practice, though I had reduced my client load to accommodate the leave. It was this rhythm, in combination with the relatively light load at IIM, that had let me finish a book: case studies and reflections on narrative therapies with Indian army personnel and their families. I hadn’t heard back from my publisher yet, and as I turned on the TV news, was wondering whether to call him.

My students found me sitting in the dark. I had left the large sitting-room door open to the common lawns; otherwise, they said, they might have thought I was not home. They had seen the news, too, and thought to cancel our meeting, but had badly wanted to talk to me.

In Godhra, two hours west of us, a train load of Hindu pilgrims had had a rest stop, that morning, about 7:45. This much is agreed upon. They were returning from a mission that may have been devotional but was equally political: visiting the site of a proposed temple to baby
Rama at the place of his apocryphal birth. The site had been cleared ten years earlier by 150,000 “volunteers.” I prefer “fall-on-spears.” Many of them couldn’t agree even on who Lord Rama was, but reached a consensus long enough to tear down a mosque that had been on their chosen site since the time of Babur.