The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (41 page)

And Lakshmi, increasingly serious about a certain godless, soundless, structureless and yet (to Seth’s way of thinking) horribly demanding school of meditation, had chosen to practise it in Ranjani’s former bedroom, saying the relative isolation and lack of decor helped her focus. Seeing her there now, he chose not to disturb her, but hearing him, she rose and followed him, past Brinda’s closed door, each of their hearts crumpling like a damp tissue in the palm.

In their bedroom, she told him, “I was angry, that you went first to pray to Shivashakti instead of coming to talk to me.” Was it in the nature of a confession? She held her head and neck stiffly. “And then I thought I should calm down and realized you were probably trying to find a way to calm down also, and that you would come to me when you were ready.”

He nodded. Let her think that he was trying to calm down. She would not believe the truth, that it was Shivashakti who bade him be reasonable and return to her.

“We have to be calm. No one has died, after all,” she said, and he saw in her liquid eyes all his own terror and disbelief.

He moved to take her into his arms, be taken into hers. “What does it mean?” he asked into her hair.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” She held his arm around her neck as she would a buoy. “These things happen, these days. Not in our family, okay. Not among our friends … But even back home, young people are choosing not to marry.”

“She did marry, unlike Ranjani.”

“Ranjani may as well be married.”

“Fine.” He could admit now that he wasn’t worried about Ranjani. If she was happy, he was happy. And she
was
happy, while Brinda—oh, his poor little girl. “Divorce?” (He pronounced it “die—.” Distasteful foreign word, yet another his daughters had tried to teach him to pronounce correctly: “ ‘Div,’ Dad. As in
div-ide
.”) “Perhaps I’ll talk to Ashwin Rao about it,” he said. “He is unmarried. And he has seen how things have changed, in India, in the last twenty years.”

“Brinda is not living in India, Seth.” She backed out of his arms, got her nightclothes from the back of the bathroom door and began changing. “And I don’t know that I’m interested in telling that Ashwin Rao much about our family life.”

“He’s very highly thought of in his field,” Seth said, but under the exasperation at her quick judgements, his pleasure tinkled minutely. She liked him best. Even if Ashwin was like her—iconoclastic, reclusive, skeptical—Lakshmi liked Seth best. She was Seth’s other half.

Ashwin didn’t have one.

And now, neither did Brinda.

In bed, at last.

Nearly asleep, then
gasp, thump
, and the image came back—naked, clifftop, night, falling into the void—once a year the nightmare returned with an eerie familiarity. Oh, how his heart thumped, still.

He remembered: this is what drove him into the arms of his Lord. The bhajan songs:
An aged man is but a paltry thing / Unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress
 … The sound, filling the void: nothing that would stop you from falling, but maybe stop you from being so afraid.

IT WASN
’
T ENTIRELY TRUE
that no one knew Brinda was coming.

When I left Lohikarma in November, I had continued east across the country. I had thought to stay and work in Montreal, except that Suresh and Lisette were insisting on putting me up, for months, if needed. They had the room and were away all day, they said, but I wasn’t positive of my capacity to live with others for that long a stretch.

All right. It wasn’t only that.

On my way to Montreal, I had stopped in Ottawa. After my single interview, I drove again to Rosslyn’s neighbourhood. A sunny Wednesday, four o’clock, early for a commuter to be home, unless she worked in schools.

She was in her front yard. I drove past, no more than five metres away, but she didn’t see me; she had eyes only for the chainsaw she held with both hands, her lips clamped as she severed a massive tree branch. She looked just the same—at that distance, from a moving car, through the veil of my shock—just the same. Papery skin; mild freckles; determined eyes. Scrunching her face as she used to do twenty years ago, when she manoeuvred an eighty-pound manure sack on a wheelbarrow through the community garden, or showed her nephew how to do chin-ups. She wore unflattering jeans and a sweatshirt, but she was still lithe as she strained with and against the chainsaw.

I drove around the block, assuming I would pull up short to park and watch her some more, but instead I veered off, out of her neighborhood, and kept going, and kept going, until I surprised Suresh by showing up at his house that same night.

Where was her husband?
Suresh asked me, when I told him.
Surely she wouldn’t be doing that if she were married
.

Maybe her husband hadn’t returned home yet? I couldn’t remember what line of work he was in. Her husband. It could have been me. She hadn’t wanted to live together before getting married, her reasons more romantic than moral. Why rush the courtship? She wanted marriage eventually, but said cohabitation was nearly as tough to revoke, and equally mundane.

I felt the same about the marital institution as I do now. She should have agreed to move in with me. Perhaps then I might have given in and married—she was right that it would hardly have been different. Certainly, I thought, I would not have left. Even as I thought it, I felt how partial was that sentiment: I could no longer feel whatever drove my decisions of twenty years ago. The past has as few certainties as the present. Who knew?

Where was her husband?

Suresh encouraged me to return to Ottawa. I did, and spent a month working there, dining at our old haunts, driving down her street every few days, and did not see her again. I had begun playing with the notion of staying on, through the holiday season, at least. There was nowhere I had to be. No one expecting me, though I had seen a couple of old friends and colleagues in Ottawa, and might be asked to join them. Suresh did not insist I return to Montreal: Christmas is not our thing—in India, it tends to be strictly for Christians, and a bit dour—and I think he didn’t want to be reminded of how we used to celebrate with Asha and Anand. He and Lisette surely had plans, maybe with her family, maybe not. Lisette had her own memories to avoid.

But then Brinda lit my cell phone.

“I’m in Calgary,” she told me. I hadn’t heard from her since our parting last June. Her voice sounded as though she were shivering.
“I decided I’m not staying in Edmonton. I’m going home for the holidays. Where are you now?”

“I’m in … it doesn’t matter. Do you want me to meet you in Lohikarma?”

“Not if … Can you?”

“Yes, yes. I was planning to be there soon, anyway.” I had not planned on travelling west again for another six weeks, had planned on doing another set of interviews as I drove west and arriving in Vancouver for the verdict. Oh well. “I will see you in three or four days.”

It’s what I would have done for Asha
.

I reassembled toiletries, bundled laundry, coiled computer cords. Packing took me less than twelve minutes.
What I would have done
: even in my mind, this sounded forced. I would have done this for Asha, yes, but I wasn’t doing it for her. I would do it for Brinda too, apparently.

This was, what, early afternoon? First stop, Sudbury, a seven-hour scramble at ninety-five clicks per, up the Canadian Shield: hard over the country’s snowy breast, under which beat its riddled heart,
en garde
for thee! The sunset? I glanced and it was gone. Six further hours to go in darkness. I turned on the radio: all snow, but for two country-and-western stations, and one smug CBC voice, whose plummy tones were soon blizzarded into obscurity. Sudbury, I recalled vaguely, was the kind of place Brinda would want to epidemiologize: nickel mining, acid rain. Astronauts came here for basic training, a moonscape-on-earth.

My own pathetic fallacy might have seemed funny, as the desolation went on and on and on, had my pride not been both slightly inflated by my mission and also damped by my cowardice. I was skimming Canada’s vast armoured plates toward Brinda, but, despite my vow to act, I had failed to see Rosslyn, failed to stop, failed to knock, failed to stay, failed.

I recalled my one glimpse of my one true love, as I had so many times that month that the image had become cartoonish in my mind’s eye: a gallant maiden defeating an evil tree with her chainsaw. I checked into the Moonlight Inn by moonlight; installed myself at the Tim
Hortons with a bowl of chili; I found Rosslyn McAllister in my phone and pressed.

She picked up before I heard a ring, saying, “Hi, honey. Sorry about that. Where were we?”

Honestly. Twenty years: a wrinkle in the fabric of time, neatly mended shut. Where were we, indeed? You were pregnant by someone else and I was half a world away, that’s where we were. I’m sorry, too.

Except she couldn’t be talking to me. “Hello?” she repeated. Just before I pressed “end,” I heard “Alistair?”

Alistair: her husband? But why would he be calling her, this time of night, for a long conversation? I flushed: a lover. Wait: the birth announcement. The baby got his father’s surname, while his given name evoked his mother’s. He would be nineteen now, away at university, in all likelihood.

I dialled her again. She didn’t pick up. I had spooked her. It went to voice-mail. No leaving a message.

Spooked her. Hardly. She was on the phone with Alistair. Girlfriend problems. Trying to choose classes. Their conversation must have lasted as long as my dinner. I was about to go to my room when my phone rang.

*Rosslyn McAllister*

I had to pick up. Letting it go to my voice-mail would be worse than my leaving a message for her. “Hello, Rosslyn?”

“Oh. Hi? Who is this?”

It would be cheesy (is that the word? It has the right sound, but I have fooled myself before) to give every detail here, which, anyway, I would have to invent: I was at such a pitch of anxiety that I have no memory of the conversation until it was nearly done. When had I ever been so anxious? Not at first sex: by the time I realized the opportunity was upon me, so was the girl. Not at my dissertation defence: cocky to a fault, that way. Not on first meeting Rosslyn: I noticed her, when she sat beside me
at a conference keynote. Citrusy-smelling, sea-green dress, aloof. Audrey Hepburn-ish, with russety hair. The speaker was a blowhard, an idiot. Within minutes, I was in fear my head would explode. I was holding it together, elbows to knees, fingertips to temples, when I looked sideways and saw Rosslyn in the same posture. Same fear? Or mocking yours truly?

She, from beneath the columns of her hands, caught my eye. Who started laughing first? We were both helpless, within minutes, and beat an exit through the sparse crowd; rude, yes, but it would have been ruder to stay.

The highlights of our phone conversation:

She was no longer married. She and her husband had separated, some three years before (his instigation, a potential affair that fizzled, she said, her tone unclear), but then, a year later, he was killed by a car as he cycled to work.

Two boys, Alistair and Griffin, the elder now at McGill (“Your alma mater,” she remembered), the younger struggling a little with some subjects. (“Amazing with math, physics and industrial arts,” she said. “Reading, not so much.”) I remembered then that she had sent me a holiday card with a family picture, once, when the boys were young, and she said, “Yes, you never acknowledged it.” I apologized. No need to mention that I had put it straight in the rubbish.

How long did we talk? It might have been an hour. Or longer. Not without awkward pauses, but also evident interest, on both sides. And, yes, I told her I would be coming to Ottawa (I mentioned that I had been through town already, though I omitted some stalker-ish details) and that I would call again to let her know when. It wasn’t only that I wanted another excuse to call; I needed to recalculate my research plan now that I was sacrificing a set of interviews to drive straight across the country.