The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (6 page)

HEATHROW WAS MUCH AS I REMEMBERED
it from the far-distant past, much as most airports have become. We had arrived in London two hours late—punctual, per Air India standard time—but the partner airline that took over from Heathrow was Air Canada, and so we departed on schedule at 3:15 p.m. The Potemkin screens of my mind got perilously shabby with the approach of the place where the bombed plane went down. Thankfully, cocktail hour coincided with it, right in the nick of Scotch o’clock.

When my colleagues at the Institute for Research on Developing Societies read my proposal to interview victim families in Canada, many were excited. They swallowed the 9/11 analogy, hook-line-sinker; they understood the question as I myself framed it.

Few of them knew of my own losses in the Air India disaster and I did not mention them in the proposal. One who did, Aziz Ahmed, currently the institute’s director, took me aside.

He asked to see the consent forms the subjects would sign, so that he could support my petition with the human subjects review boards. He also said, though I hadn’t asked, that he didn’t think the proposal needed to include my personal stake. I waited to see what else he would say, and he seemed to do the same for me, his fingers templed against his salt-and-pepper goatee, mine clutching the armrests.
A therapist walks into a bar
, I thought as I waited. Aziz said nothing further. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t either.

The proposal received harsher treatment from a small flotilla of my colleagues. One was a political scientist who had resented my assessment of his most famous study: “Small questions, medium data, big conclusions.” He said my method could not produce reliable results. Another, who called herself a Freudian economist and was working on some pea-brained notion that Bombay’s slums were not only
anus mundi
but needed to progress out of an anal retentive phase to, to … never mind. She accused me of—what? Parasitism? The two others who didn’t approve had been cold to me ever since I refused to attend their children’s weddings. I sent gifts, wished them well. Why hide that I thought the marital institution wrong-headed? (Apart from my instinctual repulsion at any display of communal emotion, modern marriage seems to me the supreme expression of conformity.)

This small band attacked my methods, flinging the erroneous criticisms that hard scientists have levelled at social scientists since the dawn of our profession, and that we now throw at ourselves: sampling errors, lack of a concise hypothesis. In other words, no serious objections. It made me realize I no longer had anyone who could advise me in my research. My late mentor and analyst in Canada, Marie Chambord, had vetted my prior manuscripts long-distance, but she could not do that
from the grave. I thought to ask Paromita, an eco-anthropologist and my erstwhile, occasional lover, but she had recently married. Anyway, we had not been close enough that I ever spoke to her about the bomb and my losses, those matters I most worried might blind me to some fault in my methods, and there no longer seemed to be an appropriate way to tell her. I had a psychiatrist friend, Sudhir, but we had such differing views on method that, though I respected him, I would dismiss his response. I had always trusted my father’s advice. But Appa, like Marie Chambord, was dead.

I was flying blind. Perhaps any flaws or lacks would reveal themselves in the course of the work itself. I hoped they would do so in time for me to correct them.

My brother-in-law Suresh met me at the gate in Montreal. He looked not much different from the last time I had seen him: a little greyer, but then, I wouldn’t say nineteen years had done me any favours. We greeted each other awkwardly. He took my outstretched hand, clapped my back with the other, a symbolic hug, half open for easy escape. (Was he still my brother-in-law, even though my sister was dead?)

I had written to him, and to twenty other victim families, explaining my project. A dozen families from Montreal to Vancouver volunteered to participate; Suresh would be my first interviewee. I have tried to avoid the word
subject
, with its strange connotations:
subject
to another’s caprices,
subjects
of some
ferenghi
monarch. In psychological research,
subject
seems oddly interchangeable with
object
—the thing observed, probed, dissected. Is this what I would be doing? Strictly speaking, perhaps, but strictness is not the same as accuracy.

Suresh had invited me to stay with him, and I accepted. Now, arriving at his home—a new address, not the one he had shared with my sister—I was surprised to be greeted also by his wife, Lisette. Platinum blond, mid-thirties, I guessed, though she already had a deeply lined face. She greeted me shyly in French-accented English.

Supper was quiet, but not awkwardly so. After, she went to watch TV in their bedroom and Suresh told me how they had met on the cancer ward of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, where he had begun volunteering a couple of years after losing his own children. Hospice: that was where the thin wire of grief led him.

Lisette’s son had died there, shortly after his fifth birthday. Suresh used to volunteer four nights a week and Saturdays; Friday night he went to the temple. Lisette invited him to the funeral. A single mother, a receptionist. They had married two years ago. He cut his volunteering down to Saturdays, came home for supper every night. She came to the temple with him on Fridays, and he took her to church and lunch on Sundays with her family in Trois-Rivières. Lying that night in their spare room, I wondered, would they fill it with another child?
They should
, I mused, surprising myself.

I thought back to his wedding with Kritika. He wasn’t shorter than she, though he appeared so. PhD, employed in pharmaceuticals research, settled in Canada. I had recently started medical school at McGill, and my parents gambled on the likelihood that I would remain, so why not settle her here, also? It narrowed the groom search: there were only five Telegu bachelors of our caste and creed in Canada in 1970, one of whom was me. Suresh was the only one who could get home and get married that summer.

Kritika was a prize: curly hair, snapping eyes, educated, unambitious. Suresh adored her. I think he also liked me more than my sister did, and more than I liked him—he had a more generous spirit than either of us. Unpretentious chap, for all his aspirations; a much more patient parent than she (though she was warmer to the kids than I would have expected, given how much she was like our mother, no model of affection); a reader of poetry—obvious, sappy stuff, Tagore, Wordsworth, but still; and uxorious, which I admired, even more because I thought Kritika undeserving. Am I unkind? She would have said the same of me, were the roles reversed. The difference is that I would agree. In bleak moments—and most moments when I think of myself are bleak—I believe my solitary state confirms this. I am
alone because I deserve to be. But then, wouldn’t the reverse logic also apply to her?

She had her good points. Not least of which were Asha and Anand.

Suresh had taken the next morning off to talk with me, and after Lisette left for work, we sat in their small front room. I had never been to this neighbourhood: urban but aspiring middle-class, street upon street of duplexes. Francophones have a higher tolerance for shared walls than anglos, though if they hear anything through the walls, they prefer it to be in French. We sat with our backs to the window. Children shouted their way to school behind us, before the street fell silent. In Suresh’s living room, a white sofa abutted blue recliners crowding houseplants from whose broad leaves dust motes floated into the morning sun. In lulls, we watched a patch of light creep along the back wall.

He told me of a tiff with Kritika on the way to the airport (she had forgotten to pack a small gift he had bought for his mother); the early-morning call from his sister in India, who somehow learned of the bomb before he did; his trip to India, afterwards, seeing my parents, seeing his own; his return home to his empty house, full of their things. He reminded me how I had come to Canada and helped him clean it out.

I listened and made notes on my steno pad; that afternoon, I transcribed into a composition notebook marked with his name; and, late that night, I wrote a few small stories about him. I didn’t know yet whether I would show them to him. It was mostly that I couldn’t help myself.

He started with the baby’s room. He hadn’t stopped calling her that until she was seven, and here it was, again. He stood in the doorway, his arms around an irregular stack of empty boxes. The room was crammed with doodads—a collection of miniature scented erasers; shiny purses hanging helter-skelter from a pink-painted rack; a makeup mirror, its pockets stuffed with Lip Smackers. Kritika would periodically go wild about the clutter, but continued buying the crap for Asha. How could he bear to clear it out? He had to. Much worse to pass by it each day.

Her clothes went into a garbage bag for donation, keeping aside only a silk maxi and bodice she had worn to her cousin’s wedding in India three years ago, and a pink velour tracksuit that made her look sporty, sharp, ready for anything. On the floor beneath the bed, two lost teddy bears and a dustball made mostly of her hair. In one pocket of her school bag, the mush of a decomposed apple core in a tissue. In the other, a creased handful of notes, slips torn from notebooks, cryptic messages pencilled on both sides:

All the girls’ handwriting looked alike. He tried to follow the strands of debate—was Asha mediating or instigating? Was she not paying attention in class? She got top marks in everything, both his children did.

None of it mattered.

Next, he dusted and vacuumed Anand’s eminently tidy room. When he lifted the reading chair cushion to clean under it, he found a
Sports Illustrated
swimwear issue and a bra page from a Sears catalogue. He sat in the chair and wept at history’s repetition, at the loss of so much of so little consequence. Under the mattress, though, were three ripped-from-a-magazine pages of women and men bound with black leather, hooded, orifices exposed. His mind briefly went blank, but then he thought,
curiosity
. Pictures, only.

In Suresh’s own room, his and Kritika’s, he expected to find a secret. He steeled himself for it: a diary full of complaints about him, or letters from an ex-lover, or expensive earrings she bought without telling him
and only wore when she was alone. Nothing necessarily bad, merely secret. He had never assumed he truly knew her. That was okay. It was part of the deal.