The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (38 page)

Think on what you know, Ashwin
, I heard now as I walked, his voice booming as though from behind the distant mountains, a voice Marlon Brando might have used to play a Bollywood don.
Not why it was you never married. You have plenty of theories on that. Not about that troll, Venkat
.

The breezes across Lohikarma’s slopes were bracing. My cheeks chapped in the dry winter air.

Think back, my son
. Appa’s voice gained strength and intimacy in my mind, sounding increasingly like Seth’s.
Not about yourself
.

Ah.

I began, tentatively:

The Air India bombing was not simply the result of some limited if collective murderous rage. That rage was fed by a larger sense of outrage, resulting from the under-noticed, under-reported Delhi pogroms.

The pogroms? The doing of overzealous party functionaries, using the Dragon Lady’s assassination as an excuse to wage an intimidation campaign against Sikhs.

The assassination? A reprisal for her having ordered the invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Keep going. Amritsar?

I had circled my neighbourhood to land at the Chinese restaurant downtown. Thirty tables at least, no more than six occupied at any given time. Red carpet, stained near the door. A tank of carp I stood and watched until a bobbing-frowning waiter reminded me that I should seat myself.

Sikhdom’s holiest shrine rises as a lily from a pool; the city is named for that water
—amrit
, the Sikhs’ holy nectar, drunk by the devoted when they are baptized. The generals had been told not to destroy the temple. “We entered with humility in our hearts and prayers on our lips,” said one, in the true spirit of Indian secularism, which means not that the state governs without God, but rather that every god governs at once.

The Dragon Lady upturned that bowl of amrit, drowned fleeing fighters and praying pilgrims, blew fiery breath ahead of the spreading nectar, drenched Sikhs around the world. They tasted ash in it; they tasted blood. They burned the Dragon Lady in effigy, and hung her, and stomped upon her. Prominent Sikhs in India returned their government awards, resigned their parliamentary seats, and so found themselves allied with a movement whose aims and leadership they had never admired.

The government’s response was to pull out the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act—T
ADA
! No need to steal your neighbour’s apples; if you wanted his tree, all you needed to do was accuse him of being a Khalistani sympathizer. “Suddenly there was no crime in Punjab,” said a former police officer, “only terror.” Thus began the long summer that led up to the Dragon’s slaying.

But again
, said my father, as I twirled a noodle that seemed to have no beginning and no end,
think. There comes a time to act, but …

Not for me?

Do not put words in my mouth. You eventually must act, but for now you must think
.

To act is to do violence.

Bullshit, my son
.

That was me putting words in his mouth—Appa never would have said that. The expression suited him, though, and it made me smile to hear him use it.

You fool yourself, that your life is something done to you, that you live but don’t act. You left Rosslyn
.

Did I tell him about her?

You are stringing that poor Vijaya along
.

I most definitely did not tell him about the widow.

You counsel people daily to change their lives
. He was thundering at me.
You will act!

I looked around the restaurant, a little unnerved, but the other patrons—two men, gazing shyly at each other as if on a second date; an Asian businessman steering noodles away from his lapels; a drab threesome of college girls—were in their own little worlds. I love that old saw:
their own little worlds
. The world in my head seemed neither small nor mine, but that was why I became a therapist.

My father was growing impatient.
Think! What came before?

The Emergency.

In 1975, a resolution was introduced by the government of Punjab—a state poor in cash but rich in resources—suggesting a devolution of power into the hands of the states. The young P.M., Indira Gandhi, did not take kindly to it. And she was having other problems: on trial for election hanky-panky. She took care of all of it by declaring a national State of Emergency.

I was in Canada, then. My father wrote me letters throughout, so that the Emergency happened, for me, in the measured, regretful voice of his reportage. At that time, he thought the prime minister did what had to be done, no more, no less.

I don’t think that anymore
, he interjected gruffly.

I always thought you were fooling yourself.

So you say
.

Mass demonstrations followed. The first? In Amritsar. Yes, the Sikhs of Punjab were the first to raise the cry, and after twenty-one months, as protests were squashed and silence spread, the Sikhs were the last men standing, even if behind bars: 33 percent of the Emergency’s nearly 150,000 detainees were said to have been Sikhs, who make up 2 percent of the Indian population.

Given this, how could some of them not start to imagine a Sikh nation?

They had taken on several strange bedfellows (are bedfellows always strange?): Hindu nationalists, who, since they oppose Congress, are natural allies for any other opposition. Thus they opposed the storming of the Golden Temple. Thus they in fact helped Sikhs during the post-assassination riots of 1984.

But they also, later, encouraged destruction of mosques and churches, professed expulsion or forced conversion. And, earlier, they encouraged the killing of that much more famous Gandhi—no dragon, no lady—in the service of this abhorrent idea: India for Hindus.

I left the restaurant pondering Venkat.
What’s with that strange light in his eyes?
I asked my father.
Or the patterns on his face, like time-lapse immigration maps
.

Hardly were those words out when Venkat himself faced me on the sidewalk. The temperature was dropping and his putty-like breath mingled visibly with mine in the brief space between us. He carried a large birdcage with a couple of blankets over it, and I glanced at the door he had emerged from: a vet’s office. This was one of Lohikarma’s shabbier streets, studded with dormant storefronts, their windows soaped over and signs inverted.