The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (8 page)

“I can tell you’ll do well,” I said.

She looked both pleased and offended—about right. I hate it when people say that sort of thing to me. Presumptuous, as though to flatter, or worse, condescend. Was I trying to sabotage myself?

“We should talk about your project,” she said. “My dad showed me your letter.”

“I had the impression that you were as close as family to Dr. Venkataraman and his late wife and son.”

“It’s true. Well, we are distantly related—Venkat Uncle is my mother’s third cousin, or second cousin once removed. I never had a brother,” she said, and cleared her throat. She wore a
mangal sutra
—a wedding chain—with a smaller than usual pendant that she would lift onto her chin when she was listening or thinking. “So Sundar was like that to us. We spent a lot of time at their house. When we were little, his mom would even invite me and my sister for sleepovers. I remember her brushing and braiding my hair in the morning. I think she enjoyed having girls around once in a while. And Sundar came on vacations with us a couple of times.”

I was taking notes, and encouraged her to continue.

“We saw less of him once he got to high school. He wouldn’t always come when his parents came over for dinner and what-not. I would see him around sometimes, though, and there was still something kind of special. Like, I remember once a picnic for the whole Indian community, at this lake. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and he brought his lunch over to where I was sitting and talked with me the whole time,
about novels and music. I had just started junior high, and my friends weren’t huge readers. I remember making some funny or sarcastic comment, making him laugh. I felt so proud, or included. Worthy. But maybe there was no one better than me to sit with!”

She laughed, then looked around the café self-consciously. “I had friends who were boys, but never a proper boyfriend, until I met the guy I married. I wasn’t allowed to date when I was in high school, and by the time I got to university, it almost felt like I’d never learn how. Indian parents seem to think that’s how it will work, that you’ll meet someone when it’s time to get married, and
boom
. My parents disapprove of dating different people. But where are you supposed to get the life experience to make a good choice?”

“Did you think Sundar might have advised you on this, or been a model in some way?”

“Hard to imagine, but he’s frozen in time, right?” She had a distinctive way of working her brow. Her expression often seemed at odds with what she would say. “Our relationship never evolved. I always felt I had a lot in common with him, and looked up to him. After he left to go to UBC, we only saw him a few times. Like my sister, I think he really wanted to get out of here.”

“You didn’t feel that way?”

She shook her head. “Sundar … I like to think he wanted to be … not famous, he wasn’t crass, but something huge. Real but huge. I think he could have done it.” She had become hunched, her torso concave. “It seems like an important drive, to want to leave. I don’t have it. Do you think it could be because of the crash?”

That seemed pat, and unexpected. I thought to flip the question back: How had the crash affected her? How might it have been different for her sister? But before I could, her eye was caught.

I looked where she was looking: at a young man of about her age, black hair flopping into his eyes. I looked back at her. Her face was suffused, some soft burst of oxygen radiating from her. He came over to say hello. They chitchatted, gym or shopping or coffee-to-go, and she introduced us: Adrian, an old school chum, now in medical school in
Toronto but home for a month or so to help his parents on the farm while his father underwent cancer treatment.

“A good friend?” I asked after he left.

“An old friend.” The tremulousness returned and she began steering our meeting toward the exit. “So you’re meeting my dad and Venkat Uncle today?”

“Your father this afternoon, and Dr. Venkataraman day after tomorrow, Monday morning. They both asked me to come to their offices.”

“What about my mom and my sister?”

“Ranjani, your sister, she’s in Vancouver, yes? I haven’t had a confirmation from her. Your mother hasn’t responded yet either.” I waited a moment and then said, hesitantly, “I would like to talk further, if you have time in your remaining days here.” She had withdrawn so dramatically that I felt aggressive. “Perhaps if you don’t know your schedule yet, you could call me? I am quite open.”

She agreed, but I watched her with a kind of fear as she left. Not that I wouldn’t see her again—if I wanted another interview, I would get it. She hadn’t the strength to decide against me. No—I was fearful for her. Was she ill? The therapy room is better for detecting nuances in tone of voice, or scent. Fever, for instance, hits me in the back of my sinuses, fur-like, medicinal in its own distorted way. Emotional states alter body chemistry, and so alter a person’s smell. Although I’m most acute with people I already know, there are patterns, and I have been doing this a long time.

I stayed and transcribed as I always did, immediately and exhaustively, expanding on my scribbled notes while her words, inflections and pauses were still fresh in my mind, and then began to annotate: her clothing, her posture, my speculations on her state of mind. She was charming to talk to, but an image came to mind: a piece of paper that could eternally be folded, to become a SWAN! fold-fold-fold; BOAT! fold-fold-fold; ORCHID! while only ever showing its outside. I could see the hands doing the folding, but not the person they belonged to.

Looking up in the midst of this, I noticed a woman of indeterminate age in a purple wool coat lumber in to take a stool at the counter. She
lifted the veil of her hat to order an apple juice, and opened her beaded clutch. Gazing with childlike pleasure at her image in a small mirror, she retraced and reinforced her already racoonish kohl with a stubby eye pencil. Thirsty work. She ordered another juice, rummaged again in the purse and took out a pair of tweezers.

It was both performance and not. She would look around from time to time, as though pleased to be seen. But where did she imagine herself to be, as she began plucking her chin and upper lip, wiping the tweezers on her napkin, leaving little orange stripes of makeup?

Lohikarma, I would learn, held a special attraction for eccentrics. Its founder, John Harbord, was a remittance man and visionary who arrived in the Kootenay mountains in 1895 after seven years of travel from west to east to west again. His diaries zigzag the landscapes! ceremonies! hallucinogens! of the Urals! Orissa! Ürümqi! as he speculates on entomology, etymologies, and other subjects he had no real means to penetrate. While sojourning among Finnish utopians on an island off North America’s northwest coast, Harbord had chosen a name for the place he sensed he would shortly discover:
Lohikarma
, his pronunciation of the Finnish word for “dragon.” He cites the word as final proof of his theory of the Finnish language’s Sanskritic origins. Many cultures compose their dragons from the parts of other animals, reincarnating them: the dragon’s karma is to inherit their qualities. Harbord’s mission was to found a New World university on the traditions of “the many cultures the tides of history had washed up on these verdant shores.” The town was named for the dragon. The university was named for him.

In the hundred years since, Lohikarma had grown, mostly in the usual ways. Gold had brought the first white men here, but lead, silver and zinc attracted further waves of entrepreneurs. Mines, mills and money fertilized an ecosystem of hotels, transport, provisioners and traders. But the town also attracted three other populations in greater concentrations than any other place I’d been. One was renegade or persecuted religious and ethnic groups, fleeing czars, dukes, generals. But while conservative and conformist Hutterites and Mennonites can be found in various places, the anarchist Doukhobors—a.k.a. Sons of
Freedom, a.k.a. Spirit Wrestlers, setting fires to protest personal property and shedding their clothes to protest war—are found only here. A second was the followers of various spiritual leaders who had chosen this area for their ashrams, attracted by energy centres or some such, in the rocks and earth. Funny how such vibrations are rarely discovered in the wastelands of northern Saskatchewan, say, but rather only in the prettiest areas of the continent. The Kootenays ranked—rolling hills and rocky outcrops, flowering meadows and sparkling lakes. And that was likely what attracted the third group of note, much smaller, but one that had influenced the landscape and culture of the town as much as any other: wealthy eccentrics who chose Lohikarma as the place where they would build their follies and live their visible or invisible lives. I was most taken by stories of the French-Spanish fop who built here a miniature replica of his family’s castle and the lesbian heiress who serially seduced rich and famous daughters from Victoria to Regina, assisted by her boat-driver, a Marseillaise dwarf.

A barista pled in undertones with the Tweezer, who stood, declaring, in a flat Canadian accent, “Bug off. I’m not your stepping-stone!” As she made her way regally out into a hard rain, I imagined how her wool coat must have smelled, the rain releasing odours of a domestic menagerie: guinea pigs and rabbits, urine and wood shavings, and the oddly fresh scent of fur itself.

I finished my notes, and ate a ciabatta sandwich as the rain eased. I walked on damp but warming sidewalks toward the university to meet Brinda’s father, Professor S. P. “Seth” Sethuratnam, following High Street from its lowest point, in the centre of town, straight up toward the university, which is on a rise of its own. The sidewalks dried as I dampened. Pale clouds lifted and dissolved off the tops of the purple mountains. If ever you visit Lohikarma, huff and puff up to one of the many high points to take in the vista of the lake accompanied by the sound of your own laboured breath. I should not assume you and I are alike in this, dear reader: I am a grizzled old fart and perhaps you could run circles around me. Still, allow me to press my point: while Lohikarma gives a marvellous view of the mountains from almost anywhere, for no work at all,
only when you climb do you get the full effect. Trismegistus, I came to call it: lake, mountains, and long, low sky.

I was grateful to stop a hundred metres or so from High Street’s summit. I could see it ahead: the quad, with its eight or ten neo-classical, Canadian-Edwardian facades, always featured on the covers of Harbord U’s brochures, as if to demonstrate that the colonies’ inferiority complex was far from resolved. Physics was in a newer science facility closer to downtown, a modernist structure typical of the early seventies building boom in Canada, unfortunate materials but lots of light.

In the atrium, I detected an organic chemistry lab by its unnatural, tart-and-sweet smell, chemical (I suppose it goes without saying) and burnt, but not in the comforting way of woodsmoke. It was a smell I had not encountered since leaving medical school, but the olfactory cortex is well-protected from the ravages of time, unlike, for example, the knees: my own, already complaining about the climb, confronted a wide brick staircase with anticipatory discomfort before I spied the elevator behind it.

I found Dr. Sethuratnam’s name on his third-floor office door and knocked.

I liked him from the very first. He was a small man, though not so much so by the standards of his origins. I, too, am South Indian, though of taller stock. In a gathering of our fellows, I, not he, would have stood out. And I am only five-foot-ten.

I held out my hand. “Ashwin Rao.”

He shook it and gestured me in, lifting some papers off a chair that faced his overflowing desk. “No student came to office hours today. My desk starts to colonize my chairs if they’re unoccupied.”

“The impulse of empire,” I said, as he tried to find somewhere for the papers, ultimately stowing them on top of some others on a low shelf.

He laughed. “I know it! At home, my wife confines my mess.” He found his way back into his desk chair. The spot on the green plush where his head rested was shiny and worn. As it was a Saturday, I had
been surprised that he was teaching, but he explained that summer school ran six days a week.

He wore a new-looking suit, conservative but not unfashionable. Chartreuse silk tie dotted with tiny purple fish. A hint of cologne and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. He was clean-shaven, with hair thinning on top to expand a forehead dominated by a pair of remarkable eyebrows. If they were still, they might not have been so notable. But they were never still. His voice was pleasant, his face well-shaped, but his eyebrows were his defining feature. (These were also Brinda’s eyebrows, though she used them so differently that further comparisons were useless.) Seth’s brows spoke as he spoke; gestured when he did. They made me think that this man could never lie: his eyebrows, shooting like arrows from his third eye, would shout the truth even if he fought to suppress it.

“Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?” It was the usual first question, sprung from that human desire to identify one another by clan.
What is your place, your people?