The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (53 page)

“That may be true.”

“I didn’t think
you
fully understood it either, though.”

I concurred.

“So—
write it
.” You actually said it, just as I had imagined you saying it. “Your story. And then let me read it. Maybe I’ll be slightly more convinced that the same thing won’t happen again.”

“I am!” I shouted. “I have been writing it, for weeks already.” I had thought I was writing it for myself, but I am not my ideal reader. You are, Rosslyn. You are. “I will give it to you,” I said. “It cannot be finished, until the verdict. There is so much, not just the story of back then, but of this year—so much you need to know.”

“I do.”

You weren’t done. Much as my father had told me to include the complex of prior causes in
The Art of Losing
, you further advised me to frame it with my own loss, to preface it by saying that while it is an analytic study of how twelve families came through the disaster, I didn’t come to it strictly as a psychologist. You also told me to make an accounting of my omission to the families, in the course of my final interviews.

You were right. I did.

And so—forward. Into the final chapters, in which Seth does, as I foretold, forgive me, though it does not happen in the way I expected. He and his family held and healed my heart and so, unknowingly, bore it back to you, dear reader. Dearest Rosslyn.

Ready to write the book? Just about.

MY BRAIN SKITTERED ALL THAT MORNING
, causing me to make coffee I forgot to drink, shave the same patch three times, until blood-drops bloomed like a field of poppies. I was filled with sick anxiety simply in anticipation of the verdict, but also, Seth had called me that morning, the first time he had initiated contact since our falling-out.

“Ashwin,” he said, “we’ll see you at the courthouse today?”

My heart hummed. Spring: the frost had melted! I could hear it in his voice. I was welcome in his life again.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Look for us?”

Sometimes relief and the state one wants relief from feel approximately the same. Which is how I expected the verdict to go as well.

There is a courtyard that, appropriately, runs alongside the courthouse. I arrived nearly an hour before the verdict, sat on the stone benches, watched the plants suffocating in the urban air, unable, at first, to go in. Should I have let you come, Rosslyn? But my pitch of anxiety—particularly since it was, to my way of thinking, so unjustifiable—made me testy. I would have been resistant to touch,
unwilling to talk. We might have fought. That would have been agonizing. I wanted you there, but it was better that I had resisted.

I felt your presence, though. Was that wrong—preferring the luminous clarity of a general idea to your flesh-and-blood challenges? No: we would meet, in real life, in a few days. So I let myself invoke you: the joking voice, a gesture I loved, a concentration of something fresh, almost unbearably alive, warm and cool and citron-scented, there among the hard stones and blurring trees. You see? Even though I could not let you come, you helped, as you knew you would.

Inside, I pushed through a crowd to find Seth, with Lakshmi at his side. He reached to shake my hand; I steadied both of mine by clasping his.

Lakshmi gave me her usual brief acknowledgement, then shushed Seth, who had grasped my elbow and pulled me close in the bustle. “There is someone else you must speak to,” he began, with an urgent air, but Lakshmi tugged his sport coat sleeve decisively and frowned.

“Later.”

He made a questioning gesture at her with a hand—
what?
—as we heard a shout. Some man, pushing through the crowd, was yelling. “Go back home to the Dark Age! We don’t want your problems in Canada.” Venkat and Bala found us just then, but we were too humiliated for eye contact. The crowd moved, and we were swept inside.

It is hard to remember the only thing worth remembering: the difference, if any, between before and after the verdict. Not guilty. Unlike most others, I was not devastated. I was hardly even disappointed. Who Are the Guilty? Only they and their Maker know.

The bombers were not forced to admit personal responsibility. Okay. They could never, to my way of thinking, be so guilty as an elected government perpetrating violence and death on its own people. Whatever
terrorists claim, they never represent the will of a majority. Popular governments, by contrast, are supposed to. Those five or ten Khalistani fools who engineered the bomb plot: they killed some hundreds of people, and I’m willing to wager no more than that many people cheered their actions. Perhaps the same is true in the cases of the Vancouver anti-Asian demonstrations, the Brits’ anti-Independence brutality, the Delhi pogroms, the Godhra massacre. But that’s not how it looks. All those originated in the centres of power, not the margins, which is why I was moved to anatomize them, while those turbaned sadsacks on the dock in Vancouver moved me little, if at all.

Others felt differently. Many were crushed. Not least by reading this as the all-too-predictable result of a majoritarian government’s longstanding failure to countenance a visible minority’s concerns.

We milled in the glass-vaulted atrium of the courthouse. All around us, people stood in stunned silence and yet the noise of chatter rose and rose. Where was it coming from?

“Not guilty,” Venkat said, his face eerie and motionless, as usual, his eyes dull, red and hurt. “I’m going back home.”

“Yes, of course,” said Bala, beside him.

“You want us to take you, right now?” Seth asked. He and Lakshmi were on their way back from a vacation. They had gone with their daughters and new grandson to Malcolm Island, that same place off the west coast where they had holidayed with Sita and Sundar thirty years earlier. Venkat had flown in to Vancouver yesterday, and they had planned to drive him back to Lohikarma after a day or two.

“No,” Venkat said.

I stared, thinking I saw the stormy blue-black pixels of his complexion receding or merging. His face seemed to have no shape of its own.

“I am going
home
. Canada is dead to me.”

This was the last time I saw him.

As the others worked themselves into a flutter trying to figure out what he wanted and how either to give it to him or to dissuade him, I took my leave. Seth said he would call me.

We met the next afternoon. Venkat had made Bala drive him to the airport, where he boarded the next plane for India. “Must have cost a fortune. But what else has he got to spend his money on?”

Did Seth want to know? I was no longer afraid his reaction would change my feelings for him, even though our recent estrangement was still fresh, making me fear a confrontation.

“We’re going to have to do something with the birds,” Seth went on, “but his leaving spared Lakshmi and me a lot of agony, let me tell you.”

To hell with it
, I thought,
I’ll tell you
. The Canadian government was rejecting calls for an inquiry into the mishandling of the Air India disaster, rejecting any imputation that race had been a factor.
Fertilizing home-grown terrorists
.

But as I opened my mouth, Seth held up a hand.

“Let me tell you,” he repeated, and I shut up and listened.

MARCH
5,
ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE VERDICT
, Seth picked Brinda up from the airport in Vancouver about noon and they drove to Malcolm Island. Lakshmi and Ranjani awaited them in a cabin there: they had accompanied Greg on a shoot in the area, since Ranjani hadn’t wanted him to be away from the baby for too long, and Lakshmi had gone along to help her daughter. But Greg was going to be bushwhacking for the week following and Ranjani had proposed that her father and sister come. Brinda was on spring break from Johns Hopkins and hadn’t met the baby yet. And they had wanted to return to Malcolm Island ever since that long-ago holiday—Ranjani because she had been too young to remember it, and the others because they remembered it fondly—but they had never gotten close.

It was remote: a tiny island several hundred kilometres up the coast, colonized by utopian Finns a hundred years earlier. The dream hadn’t lasted but the settlers had stayed, integrating into local industries, eking out a subsistence living. Kaj Halonen, of Finnish origin himself, passed on to Seth a tidbit: it was on Malcolm Island that John Harbord had come up with Lohikarma’s name.

Brinda and Seth pulled in a little after eight that night. The cabin was on a quiet beach road. As they unfolded themselves, a briny chill sluiced the stale car air from their clothes and nostrils. Holiday melancholy
seized them, Seth gently—
it’s cold!
—and Brinda violently—
have I packed enough books?
—in anticipation of aimless strolling and curio-’n’-fudge shops and eventual boredom. When they opened the cabin door, though, all those feelings fled. A faint milkiness to the atmosphere, small flannel blankets dropped on the sofa, a bramble of rattles above a black-and-white play mat. “Where’s the baby?” The first words out of both of their mouths.