The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (37 page)

Mostly, in those days, I was musing on how limited the catalogue is of horrors people have perpetrated on one another through history.
Unless they were Nazis. They, it has to be admitted, took the possibilities of ethnic warfare to a new level—managing nearly to eliminate the role of emotion from their methods. Most organizers of similar projects have not had the Nazis’ resources and imagination. Fear and greed flow close to the surface and are easily tapped, but an oily slick of ignorance has greased the machines from Turkey to Nazi Germany to Bosnia to Rwanda to here.

The BJP: the Hindu nationalists’ political party. The VHP: their cultural wing. The RSS: their paramilitary volunteers. Whoever you consider to be behind the Godhra attacks, whoever Venkat was supporting, did not have the Nazis’ ingenuity, and they had the task of convincing an astonishingly diverse people of their essential homogeneity. But they did take the Nazis’ lessons to heart. Sparky youth camps full of chanting and games; a plan of national assimilation and standards by which to judge it. They controlled education, so that school history books told a story of a past India remarkably similar to the India they wanted to create: valorous, prosperous, unitary, Hindu.

This was their plan: a consummately modern ideal of a nation-state unified by an apocryphal identity resurrected for people who didn’t know the difference. A key tenet: elimination of the Muslims. The Hindu nationalists were more generous in this than others have been. The Muslims didn’t have to be killed. They could convert. They could leave. But those willing to do neither had to be exterminated, which task now devolved to the mob.
Pakistan or Kabristan!

The boys and I left around midnight on the sixth day, by which time news reports suggested that the violence was no longer constant, even in the epicentres—but why would we trust the news? I was nervous for the boys. The dew-like sweat on their high, clear brows; the dilation of their eyes—they had lost everything but their lives, and gave off an eager, reckless air.

We had to drive for twelve hours through the desert, but the hardest
part of our flight to Delhi would be the first twenty minutes. The boys insisted I drive them back through their old neighbourhood. True, this was the quickest way out of town. It was also the quickest way to get us killed, which may have been a motive. Both boys were alternately inscrutable and contradictory, so I didn’t ask their reasons. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

They held hands in the back of the car. The campus itself was serene and impassive as always, its architectural unity tightly walled. I drove out the gates and toward the boys’ neighbourhood, as directed. The normal nocturnal rarity of human forms thickened into crowds until finally the car was surrounded by chanting Hindu hooligans.

I am stopped by a pounding on the hood and windshield of my car. I roll down my window. I argue. I show my ID. How can I be convincing when I don’t care if I live or not? But I do it, for the sake of the boys. The car is rocking a little and at first I think it’s the crowd, but the crowd is drifting away. It is Munir and Sohail, struggling in the back seat. Sohail has got his window down and shouts, “It’s me! Your
miyabhai!
Come! I’m here for killing!”

The man talking to me looks interested. I tell him, “We don’t like what you’re doing. My sons are calling themselves Muslim in protest.”

“Go,” he tells me, as Munir wrestles Sohail back inside the car and we do as we are told.

“Jai Shree Ram!”
we hear someone shout as we drive off.

When we got to Delhi, I asked them,
Where will you go?

Pakistan
, they said, and left me. Terrorists in the making. Suicide bombers, ready-to-use.

This was six months after 9/11. Their career options couldn’t have been better advertised. I have looked for their faces ever since in newspapers, in pictures of the wanted and the dead.

How many well-intentioned colleagues urged me, back at the IRDS,
You must write about this. You were a witness
.

I wasn’t
, I told them.
I didn’t see anything
. Though they didn’t believe me, they ultimately accepted this, all except one woman, the sort of lefty who acted as though communism was her wounded lover. “Oh, you probably voted BJP,” she hissed at me in the canteen, crowning days of direct and indirect harassment.

“Unlike you, I would not pretend to understand mass murder because I passed it in a moving car,” I told her. She was a pathologically thin woman with thick eyeliner and rouge. I took a repulsive satisfaction in seeing her cower as I rose. “Unlike you, I don’t believe I always have something of value to say.”

As good as it felt, my outburst did nothing to relieve my puzzlement and shame over my inaction. I started to pull away from my work, which was all I had. No close friends, no family. No work. No love. Limbo. Drift. And then I got word of the trial, and bought a ticket to Canada. You know the rest, dear reader. Deadened and then galvanized. This was the work of the third strike.

Why had Venkat not told Seth about his support for the Hindu nationalists? Because Seth would have been appalled? Hardly: I know these Tamil Brahmins—those back home are insular and defensive; those abroad, clouded by nostalgia and misinformation. Seth would have seen the violence against Muslims in Gujarat as the work of isolated extremists, nut-jobs, much the way 99.9 percent of Sikhs see the Air India bombers. Except that the Sikhs, in this regard, are right. Seth would probably not approve of Venkat sending money to the nationalists, but he would understand the impulse. His community believes itself to be under attack for its historical privilege; he would appreciate the Hindu desire to protect Bharat Mata. Up to a point.

He would have thought Venkat was being imprudent, though, that he should save his money, give it to his nephews and nieces. Better yet, give it to Shivashakti.

Or perhaps Venkat kept it secret in unseen rebellion against the
way Seth infantilized him, a private proof that his decisions were still his own.

All of the above? It didn’t matter. I didn’t think about it even as long as it took for you to read about me thinking about it.

Why did Venkat choose me to tell? He saw in me his reflection. They wrecked his life; they wrecked mine. This is what he was doing about it. What was I doing?

I needed badly to get back to my apartment. I turned the key, again, started the car, drove.

I had laid in whisky the night before, knowing I was going to Venkat’s house today. I congratulated myself on my foresight, but now hesitated at the bottom of the fire escape, knowing the fire water waited above. It was barely noon, and I thought at first that was why I stopped, feeling the gods of decorum tugging at my sleeve.

No, it wasn’t that. I stopped because I didn’t want to deaden my self-analysis, the way I had for nearly twenty years.

Why dredge all this up?

Because I needed to understand it. Understand what?

This: what happened to me?

This: could it have been stopped?

I didn’t mount my iron stairs. I turned away, up my alley, and began to walk.

Alone. Always alone. I needed a guide, a hand-holder, a Krishna to my Arjuna. Who?

Seth would have been happy to listen as I talked this through, but I wasn’t yet close enough to him to ask. My old adviser, Marie Chambord? Perhaps, had she not died. But she wouldn’t have been the right person for this either.

I wanted my Appa.

A teddy bear man with a porcupine son. My prickliness, as I grew, was a disappointment to him. But whose doing was that? By the time my father came to realize what my mother’s bitterness had wrought, he couldn’t have done much to correct it. Or maybe the way I am is simply innate.

After the disaster, my mother’s health worsened. Cancer came. Appa cared for her, fed her, his gestures almost paternal. Indian women transfer their dependence from parents to their husbands; it is encouraged. My mother had entered marriage at sixteen, much younger than my father. Lakshmi once said Seth had been like a mother to her, in their early years in Canada, when she was so young and feeling abandoned by her family. I might have characterized my father’s care for my mother as maternal, except my experience of maternal care didn’t include such tenderness.

I didn’t look after my mother when she was dying. I looked after my father as he looked after her. I fixed his meals, went to the pharmacy, sat with him as he sat with her. I had never made her happy; Kritika was the child she would have wanted at her bedside.

When my mother died, in 1993, I asked Appa whether he wanted to move in with me, but he said he didn’t want to be trapped in an apartment complex, meeting other old people who lived in their grown children’s extra rooms. If I had had a wife and children, we would have made more of an effort. As it was, neither of us wanted him too close to my arid life.

He stayed in our old neighbourhood, with his old friends, and some young ones: two of the neighbours had small children he enjoyed; he even babysat, from time to time.

I visited him, once or twice a week. We would eat ice cream, take walks, drop in on his chums. He never spoke of Kritika and the children except to recall their brilliance. Once, he talked of my mother. He had first seen her bitterness when we children were young. She would criticize the flat, which was small and not nice, criticizing my father, by extension, for not yet being able to afford more, though he was still young. She went frequently to her mother’s. We got our first house when I was six, and moved into the second and final one when Kritika and I were in our teens. It was large and airy. We had always had an ayah and a maid, and now there was a cook, and eventually a driver. Still, my mother only grew more bossy, and no less resentful.

“I often wished she were happier,” Appa said. His voice was hoarse,
in age, something obstructing its passage from the cavity of his chest. “But I could accept, at least, that her unhappiness was not my fault. It was something she couldn’t identify.” He had never told me this before. Would it have helped if he had? He surprised me, then. “I always thought you saw this. She was the enigma that drove you to study the human mind.”

His housecleaner found him one morning, fully stiffened in a living room chair, a fatal stroke, or so the doctors told me.