The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (39 page)

“Ah,” Venkat said. Would he ask me why I had bolted from his house a few hours earlier? But he didn’t seem to have found it strange. “You must join us,” he said, summoning an odd heartiness that queered my stomach. He leaned to envelop me in a thin, warm miasma of damp down-fill and vet’s office. “A group of young persons, white Canadians, have asked me to lead them in learning about Vedic practices. You would have much to say. Come, this afternoon, two p.m., at the Lutheran church, not six blocks from here.”

Say yes, say no, but walk away, my son! Walk away!

“What?” I asked.

Venkat’s fleshy lips seemed isolated in his otherworldly face. “Sacrifice. Soma. A revival of our original order …”

I backed away from him, feeling a strange grin on my face. I waved effeminately and scurried off, slipping and sliding over icy patches in my inappropriate shoes until finally I scrambled up my fire escape, exhilarated, chuckling aloud.

I put the kettle on for tea, looking guiltily at my bottle of whisky, as we do in the presence of our parents.

Ah, what the hell
, he said,
I’ll join you
.

I smiled and poured two shots. We toasted. I drank.

So, carry on
.

The Mahatma’s assassination. I was eight. The man who had killed him thought that Gandhiji and Nehru were Muslim-lovers, that this (and not the longstanding British policy of divide and rule …) had led to the
creation of Pakistan, a Muslim state lopped off India’s northwest and northeast corners, like ears on that sacred cow’s face. West Pakistan was cut from the Sikhs’ holy land, Punjab, with a double-edged sword. The Sikhs were balanced on the blade. Forced, they jumped toward India, a self-proclaimed secular democracy, where their rights would exist on paper, at least.

Sikhs had served in the British army through multiple generations, multiple wars, but this had become tougher as they came to realize that was all the white man wanted them for. Second-generation Sikh Canadians, receiving Second World War conscription notices from Ottawa, asked why they got soldiers’ uniforms but not the vote. First-class fighters; second-class citizens. Sure, we’ll battle the Krauts and Japs; let’s see you open the doors to your white-collar world.

In 1919, they had endured another Amritsar massacre, when General Dyer’s troops opened fire on peaceable, picnicking Punjabis, part and parcel of the period’s paranoia. After the First World War, Canada, Australia and New Zealand gained greater sovereignty, the Empire’s thanks for so many donated lives. India? Not. There, His Majesty’s forces had been put to much trouble, quelling a nascent independence movement. They were wiping their brows, just having publicly executed nearly a hundred such violent dreamers, supporters of the Ghadars—a party started by North American Sikhs for a United States of India, a free, secular, democratic nation for all Indians. Plainly, this was a ridiculous notion, of which the inferior races needed to be disabused.

We, Indians, have never given them sufficient credit for that
.

As one Canadian parliamentarian put it, with quaintly rough-hewn grammar: “The Hindoos never did one solitary thing for humanity in the past two thousand years and will probably not in the next two thousand.”

Canada had always courted European immigrants while barring the Brown Peril, exercising Canada’s right to Keep Canada White. In 1914, under newly written (and, because of successful legal challenges, repeatedly rewritten) immigration laws, Canada famously turned a shipload of Indians back at Vancouver harbour. “Hindoo Invasion Repelled!” the
headlines hollered, floating on strains of “White Canada Forever!” an anthem sung by mobs ten thousand strong.

When the emigrés returned to India, they were fired on by the Brits, who feared that this rejection—demonstrating that all British subjects were hardly equal within and throughout the Empire—might have converted some of them to the Ghadars’ cause.

Which it did
.

Each humiliation grew the Sikhs’ pride. Each galvanized a small subset into quests for purity and self-rule. Each formed a rough link on history’s rattling chains.

Once upon a time—

No, be specific
.

Punjab, the Land of Five Rivers, at the dawn of the sixteenth century.

Better
.

There was a Hindu who was bothered by empty ritual and hierarchy. His name was Nanak. He founded a cult devoted to humility, service, and meditation on the word of God. Its adherents were called Sikhs, which means, I think, only “disciple.” His fame spread; his following grew.

On his deathbed, Guru Nanak appointed a successor from among his disciples, who begat another guru in the same manner, until this lineage culminated in the
Guru Granth
: a book composed of centuries of wisdom from the Sikh gurus and from others: devotees, mystics and saints professing Hinduism, Islam, and shades of belief in between. The final guru: a perfect admixture, a true immortal, a book.

Was there persecution, over these years? There was. Martyrs were made. Sikhs believe in valour. But I recall a young Sikh telling me the story of the ninth guru, who was killed while defending Hindus. “Sikhs are in the world not for Sikhs alone, but for anybody who needs a Sikh,” he said, eyes shining.

And yet.

By the time I came back to India, Sikhs were no longer seen as defenders of any interests but their own. “It used to be that if we were riding on a train and saw a Sikh in our carriage, we would feel safer,” my
mother told me, in the midst of the riots. “Nowadays if we see one, we feel scared.”

When I repeated to a Sikh colleague what my mother had said, he grew heartsick. “They are tarring us all with the same brush,” he said. “Khalistan, land of the pure!” Disgusted, he had become tempted to shave his beard and yank off his turban. Others had been convinced, by repeated acts of oppression and discrimination in India, England, Canada, the USA, that self-determination was the only way, but most of them still would not follow the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy, so the purists were attacking them. The terrorist’s dilemma: acting on behalf of constituencies who cannot be convinced except by their own deaths. Purity: the old lie.

When I think on the Air India disaster, I hear the chain of history rattle. Its links are loops. Loops have holes. Was the bombing a Canadian or an Indian tragedy? Why pose this false division? Canada was colonized when India was, and their fates were ever linked. There is no expiation. The declaration of any single truth is itself an act of violence.

Once upon a time—here, I cannot be specific—Hinduism arose, perhaps on the soil south of the Indus; perhaps brought by Northern invaders. Without Hinduism, there would not have been Sikhism. Without India, could there be Empire? Without Empire, could there be radicalizing? Without Canada, could there have been a bomb?

Once upon a time: poetry, syncretism, mysticism, death.

Once upon a time: evolution, matter, being.

Once upon a time: time.

Night had fallen early beyond my Canadian windows. I had a message on my phone from Seth. Would I tell him what Venkat had told me?

Don’t you think it’s important that Seth be made aware?

I’m not sure.

Maybe you are not sure you are the one to do it
.

I doubt my telling him will do anything but anger me.

So why lay these links out, in order, as you have?

You tell me.

I can. Firstly, for you, my son, thinking is action
.

(No reply. I was thinking.)

At least insofar as you write down your thoughts
.

This causal chain must frame my book?

It must
.

New links on the chain are still being forged.

Yes, that is why
.

And what else?

Think
.

I had what I needed and now I wanted to leave Lohikarma: I wasn’t ready to see Seth and it would be too hard to avoid him if I stayed. I would perhaps call him from Winnipeg to say I could do nothing for Venkat, promise to return in winter. Would Brinda come home for a winter break?
Pang!
Excellent word: from the beginning of pain to the beginning of anger, the sound replicates the feeling, of being snapped in the heart. Would I ever see her again? How was she? I thought of her not only because I regularly thought of her, but because I felt now a little of what she might have felt on leaving me: a tenuous, suspicious sense of peace.

That’s it—that’s the other thing, my son
.

You felt that a little, after my mother died.

Come now! I always felt it
.

Seth was so like my father
—gracious forbearance
—how had I not seen it before?

On my visits with Appa, toward the end of his life, I would go into his room to say good night, and sit beside his bed until he slept, practising for his death, worried he would die awake and alone. He did, anyway.

And yet. Here I am, old boy, like it or not
.

I crossed to the dining table, opened my computer, and wrote an e-mail to Vijaya, a response to a dull, polite note of inquiry she had written to me months earlier. I was cordial and distant and, without saying so, made it clear that there was nothing to be hoped for between us.
I was vague on when I would return to India. I said I hoped she and her children were well, but asked nothing about any of them. I did ask about the cat.

Did I let myself think about whether I would contact Rosslyn when I got to Ottawa? Likely I did. Think about it, that is.

I drank a final drink. I slept alone, as always. The next morning, I drove east.

BRINDA DROVE WEST
. No one knew she had gone. No one thought to expect her. She drove over frozen Canadian roads, hairpinning up and up then down, up and up then down, through blinding Kootenay snow. She had not expected to drive her car this winter, and her snow tires languished in the storage room of an Edmonton apartment building. She wasn’t seeing the edge of the road so much as intuiting it. If she saw anything, it was the home and future she was abandoning, floating in her mind’s eye. She drove slowly, aware in some dim and peevish way of her vulnerability. Her face was stony; it was wet with tears. She was alone with the sound of her breathing. It was hard to get the radio here, inside the mountains’ cradles.

A bounding shape coalesced out of the snow, curled horns and shaggy bearing. Brinda heard a whistle, as if from a flute, and swerved. A mountain goat, it must have been, grinning and unaware, caught by the headlights but not in them. If she had swung the lights back, it would have been gone, the teasing snow drawing aside to reveal nothing but darkness and more darkness behind. But she was sliding, now turning the wheel the opposite way, feeling the crunch that was the edge of the road, the rear of the car dipping toward the precipice.

She put the car in neutral, remembering vaguely some prescription of that sort, though whether it applied in this situation, she didn’t know.
She tapped the brake pedal, then pushed hard. Nothing happened. That was a first. The car was spinning, very slowly, turning her away from where the view would have been. She knew there were mountains hovering out there in the darkness, and in daylight she would have trusted they touched the earth, but she couldn’t see the mountains nor where they touched, and so, for her, all that was behind her was snow falling through space and time without end. She slid toward endless falling, some version of herself endlessly falling.

Then the back wheels of the car slipped off the road and the nose tipped up: space and time were infinite, but not for her, not tonight. She forehanded the gearshift into drive, depressed the accelerator and rose up out of death’s jaw, braking as soon as the car was horizontal. It didn’t stop her from hitting the cliff walling the other side of the road, but stopped her from hitting it too hard. She reversed very slowly back into her own lane and started, again, to drive.