Читать книгу The Ever After of Ashwin Rao - Padma Viswanathan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеJUNE 19, 2004
Lohikarma, B.C. Fourth town, seventh family.
I arose with the dawn, my habit. Canada was terrible for me that way: despite many years here, I never managed to wake long before first light in winter, long after in summer. I cracked a window to fan out the fug of night gas and snore breath. That smell, akin to stale popcorn, can linger, even in a large room. A faint priapism deflated as my pyjama and kurta cooled in the morning air. Twelve degrees Celsius perhaps? Like October in Delhi. I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror, the double-bagged eyes, the beginnings of jowls to rival the cat’s. My cat. Had anyone—my widow, perhaps—taken over his feeding? I cranked the shower, pulled my kurta over my head, and was enveloped for a moment in the smell from my own pores, something dark and leafy, with the tang of iron. Cooked spinach? Lovely. I gagged a little, stepped into the coursing water, coated myself with strong soap, then antiperspirant, then aftershave. Sandalwood, bergamot, lime. By night the spinach would chew its way to the surface again, but then I would quell it with Scotch. The pleasures of a day fully lived.
I was accommodated in a self-contained suite at the top of a house. The owner rented it to holidayers, along with two suites on the ground floor; the middle was occupied by a dentist. At the back, where one entered my flat, off the fire escape, were two large windows. I took in the view before going out to find a newspaper: majestic mountains supporting an endless sky where the morning sun was carving mists away from the day’s clean promise, everything any visitor to Canada and particularly the beautiful province of British Columbia could want, but also (eyes dropping to take in a sweeping palette of industrial greys) back-alley-cum-parking-lot, chicken-wire fence, and dirt-dusted, supersized, aluminium Quonset. My guess: a curling rink. These ruddy northerners do love to sport on ice.
I eased the morning stiffness from my knees, descending the stairs of iron and air that climbed the back of the building. Walking around to the front and through the garden in the moist morning, toward the rising sun and the newspaper box across the street, I was entangled by a plague of green worms descending on sticky filaments. I should have backed off and found a way to bypass them, but instead I swore and flailed until all the strings were broken, the caterpillars all over me, then I swore some more and crushed and brushed them off.
Back in my room, I set the coffee to decoct, and opened the paper to search for a mention of the trial.
Last spring, the prosecution had opened dramatically, broad hints of intrigue and newly unearthed information setting the gathered families alight with speculation and hope. Then came weeks of hysterically banal minutiae: ticket purchase, baggage checking, details nearly universally known. Some heartbreaking, if irrelevant, moments, such as testimony from the stalwart Irish sailors who had fished bodies from their seas; as well as misleading ones, such as a suggestion that the Canadian spy agency had had a mole inside the terrorist cell until shortly before the bombing occurred, a mystery never solved. Then came a long summer break, occasioned by the prosecution’s attempts to shorten the process by presenting witness reports instead of witnesses. They could have pressed on. Instead, they pissed off.
The fall brought more testimony, more research, more witnesses, a growing weight of information. And so the trial sank down through the newspapers, off the front pages, out of the public eye. I could go days now and find not a mention in the press.
But look: this morning, Canada’s National Newspaper had published an article on the trial, a moment that might prove crucial—though who knew? A bookseller testified that he had given a book about the bombing to a star witness for the prosecution, bolstering accusations that the witness, “Ms. D,” had repeated what she had read, not what she had witnessed. As with all the trial news, I felt a detachment both familiar and disturbing.
Ms. D’s identity was masked by witness protection. She had been whisked away from her life years earlier. Death threats against those with inside information about the bombing were not uncommon. The publisher of a community newspaper, a man who had been part of the same Sikh-nationalist circles as the bombers but then began speaking out against them, had been killed.
In the courtroom, Ms. D’s identity was no secret. Plenty of those present knew her as the former employee of one of the accused. She said they were in love, although the affair had remained nobly platonic, with both of them married. When she testified, on October 31, 2003, she started with a description, under duress, of the hold he had on her. She loved him still, she said, though he had fully confessed to her his role in the bombing.
Her challengers, in cross-examination, said she was making this up. Wanting revenge for losing her job. How could she love someone as evil as he sounded? She stuck to her guns, but now, ten months later, the defence brought a witness who claimed Ms. D owned a book about the bomb plot, Soft Target, which contained all the details she was now regurgitating, including errors of a sort she couldn’t have made up on her own.
The sun was nearly above the horizon, and coffee was gargling up into the top of the mini-macchinetta I carried with me. I travel light, but this is one item I won’t be caught without, anywhere in the world. I had bought eggs and onions on arrival in Lohikarma the night before. Now I scrambled them, squeezed on hot sauce—I always toss a few packets in with my toiletries—and scooped them with improvised chapatis a.k.a. store-bought tortillas warmed in the pan.
Done with breakfast, I readied for the day’s interviews, taking out a fresh composition notebook and labelling it “Venkataraman,” the name of a man here whose wife and son had gone down on the plane. I would not be meeting him until Monday. Today, Saturday, I would meet individually with his closest friend, one Professor Sethuratnam, and Sethuratnam’s daughter, Brinda.
Dr. Sethuratnam seemed to be very involved in this Venkataraman’s affairs, and had told me that it was he who had first noticed my letter and encouraged his friend to open it. Whenever possible, I was interviewing not only direct family members but also other relatives and friends, if they volunteered. It would let me investigate a theory, that loss radiates, and also paint a fuller portrait of the survivors. Also, for Indians in Canada, family friends become the equivalent of family. I was never like this, needless to say, but most seek out those who share their language and their recipes, and raise their children in proximity the way we grow up with cousins back home.
I swirled my second and final shot of espresso into a pan of hot milk, and took it to drink in the window seat. The view: let us edit out the pavement, chicken wire, Quonset. See instead soft, low mountains surrounding Kootenay Lake, which stretched fingers into the landscape’s crevices and drew storms over the mountains as quickly as it drove them away. Three wispy clouds drifted against the black-green mountainside, as yet unlit by the rising sun. Two resolved into figures, so clearly that even I couldn’t miss them. I’m not like Asha, for whom one thing always became another, some crumpled paper a rabbit, her bitten sandwich a ship. The two cloud-figures danced, while the third galloped past beneath them. The uppermost rose, feet in the air, like Chagall’s wife in his paintings of the two of them, she upside-down, smiling, hands stretched toward him. Her limbs pulled apart and she vanished. The sun hit the top of the peak opposite and her partner, too, fled. The third figure ambled briskly forward, a buffalo from a cave-painting. Its hump grew as the sun crept down the mountain; it became a fish, a deer, five little v-sketched birds, then nothing. The sun shone as it had to.
I walked to the town centre, which lay between my apartment and the university. The Kootenay river valley descended to my right. To my left, High Street, where a stylish wine shoppe advertising B.C. vintages abutted a yoga studio with homemade beeswax candle displays that shared a wall with an upscale vintage furniture store. The air smelled as much of incense or baking as exhaust. Families of tourists occupied iron benches, unless they had been driven off by a homeless person parking a shopping cart in the curbside landscaping. There were a few of those, adding to the smells.
Brinda Sethuratnam had chosen a coffeehouse, Brewed Awakening, for our meeting. Tastefully restored art deco architecture; staff indistinguishable from patrons; lemon bars and Linzer squares baked in-house and cut to modestly sized portions suitable for modestly sized consumers—the type of place where Rosslyn and I used to pull apart the Saturday books section before tackling whatever work we had brought home for the weekend. An hour remained until my appointment. I did some reading. I prepared.
And then there she was: an attractive girl, thirty-five, I learned, though she looked ten years younger. Longish hair, clear complexion, fit and fashionable, though with a twitchiness that undermined her looks.
“I’m very pleased that I got to Lohikarma in time to meet you,” I told her as we sat. (I know how to make niceties, though I often don’t bother.) “You must be leaving day after tomorrow, is it?”
“Actually,” she said, “I’ve decided to stay on a few days longer.” She chewed her lip.
“Good, then. You told me where you live, in our correspondence. Saskatoon, is it?”
“Edmonton. I moved there for grad school, ten years ago.”
“Mm-hmm. In . . .?”
“Epidemiology?” She pulled the cuffs of her jersey down over her palms and gripped her mug. “I went to do a PhD, but it never really took. I’m restarting, this fall, not a PhD, an MA in science writing, at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. I’m still fascinated by epidemiology, but I want to write about it more than I want to do it. Part of the reason I’m home—apart from that I always come back in the summer for a week or two—is that I’m interviewing a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harbord as part of my thesis. The MA programme’s only a year long, so I thought it would be good to get started.” Her manner had shifted decisively, as though she’d crossed the beam of a film projector. Now she projected confidence. “I want to take a magazine-feature approach, four profiles of epidemiologists, two Canadian, two American. They tend to be attached to universities, right, which are increasingly corporate funded, but many of these scientists, including the one I’ll be talking to here, are effectively in the business of exposing corporate malpractice. Environmental cover-ups, for example. So I’m wanting to investigate some of those delicate balances in their work.”
“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 would come to like best 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. I followed 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?
“Hah, originally, yes. My father was from Nellore, and we spent holidays there, though I was raised first in Hyderabad and then New Delhi. I did graduate studies at McGill, though, and lived in Ottawa for some years.”
I imagine he might have liked to know my caste, to add that stamp to my resumé. But such questions are no longer the done thing among the educated classes.
“And you live in Delhi now?”
“That’s right,” I said. There was a slight brightness to his eyes that conveyed genuine, relatively untainted interest. He struck me as a man concerned with bonds of affection and community. He might like you; he might even, somehow, someday, help you.
“And you would like to hear about our involvement with Venkat?”
“If that is what you want to talk about. Also your own experience of the disaster.”
He sat with elbows on the armrests, hands in his lap. I waited for him to ask more about the focus of the study, as others of my interviewees had. Why are you doing this? Or, as Suresh had: Why dredge this up?
“And your experience?” he asked instead.
“I, mine?”
He cleared his throat. “Did you not lose loved ones in the disaster?”
To this point, none of my other subjects had asked me this, and I can tell you now that none but Seth ever did. They were caught up their own grief and their own stories; they must have figured they would have known my name if my wife or children had died.
Since this was not a therapeutic relationship, and since I had withheld that information for no reason I could name, it seemed wrong to deflect. “My sister and her children.”
I watched Seth’s face. Not much changed, except for a shift of those eyebrows. And yet I distinctly felt that my pain was filtering through him, and that he had no sense of how vulnerable this made him.
I elaborated, my mouth dry. “My brother-in-law, who still lives in Montreal, was my first interviewee. His wife, my sister, Kritika, and my nephew and niece were coming to India for their summer holidays.”
His eyes looked steadily into mine. “Your parents are still alive?”
“No, not anymore.”
He hadn’t moved, nor had I, and yet it was as though some column connecting our chests was collapsing, drawing us toward an unseen centre.
“And your own family, is anyone travelling with you?”
“I don’t have a family. I . . .” This, too, is always an awkward thing to say, particularly to men of my own age and station in life. “I chose to remain unmarried.” I broke his gaze. Too much. I was short of breath. Looking around the office, I saw a PhD from Indiana State University, framed on the wall, together with several teaching awards. Jumbled into the shelves, physics toys: a drinking bird, a Newton’s cradle, wooden blocks in a Roman arch.
Seth looked out his window. “The sun is out! Perhaps let’s go sit in the, what do you call it, gazebo sort of thing, in the garden. There are comfortable chairs that stay dry.”
“That rainstorm was quite something.” I don’t make small talk. It really was quite something.
He swept some untidy stacks of papers into a briefcase and closed his door behind us. “It’s the lake. Pulls the freak rainstorms in.”
“You are a professor of physics?” I asked as we descended.
“Everyone has to profess something. I profess physics and God.” Sly and harmless delight.
“Ah?” I said. The G-word raised my arm hairs a little.
“Associate Professor only,” he said.
He was approaching retirement, not as a full professor but one rank below. Some halt in his career? “What is your specialty?”
“I don’t specialize, as such. I like to think my specialty is making people love this subject.” He cleared his throat. “Let me put it to you this way. Every scientist sees the world through his discipline’s teachings. When people learn about physics, the world expands for them. The Big Bang, I like to call it: if a man continues to learn, his universe will be constantly expanding, isn’t it? So I teach Introductory Physics, Physics of Chemistry, Physics of Biology, Physics for Non-Majors. Courses that might typically rotate among faculty, but I like to teach them. I have never gone in much for research.”
“And yet . . . teaching here?” We found seats in the garden, very nice, an outdoor student lounge. “Harbord is a research institution, isn’t it?”
He cleared his throat again. “When I first came to Harbord, the physics department was not the best in the country. If it was, they wouldn’t have hired me! Maybe they didn’t know that, then. Not much resources. Very little equipment, not too many graduate students. My area of research was elementary particles. I worked on muons, for my dissertation. You know much about . . .?”
I’m sure I looked quite blank.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I got married in the summer between completing my PhD and coming to Lohikarma. After I arrived, and got settled, I started to see how competitive it could be to get research funding. Such a big part of your time, competing for grants and prizes and publications. Competing, competition . . . it’s not really my thing.”
Seth used his hands when he talked—we all do that, Indians—but in concert with his eyebrows, as though one pair were conducting the other.
“My wife, Lakshmi, arrived about six months later, in the middle of a Canadian winter, poor girl. I had to get her settled. I was the junior man on the totem pole that year, so I taught all the introductory classes. And I very much enjoyed it. Especially the classes for non-majors. I enjoy the feeling of bringing them into the field. Initially, students are fearful. They think they will be bored; they think they might feel unintelligent. But they come to love physics! It’s truly satisfying, truly so.
“So. There was no real opportunity for me to continue my research that first year, and without my dissertation director, I felt a bit lost. I had enjoyed my research, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking I was the most brilliant physicist that ever walked the earth. Have you read any Richard Feynman? Now there’s a brilliant fellow. A very dedicated teacher, also. He used to say that if we can’t explain it to an undergraduate, we don’t know enough about it. I try to keep up. I read the journals, try to incorporate the new research into my courses. Keeps it interesting. You know? So many people out there are driven to do research, to write. I ride on their backs!”
I smiled, still waiting for an answer to my question.
“But, back then, my old mentor was writing a book, using the research I had conducted under his supervision. I read the book as he was writing, offered some suggestions. He invited me back to Indiana one summer, to work with him. And when the book was published, he gave me co-author credit. This was some four years after I was hired here. I had published two other papers in the meantime, also co-authored with him. Anyway, it was unusual, for a young physicist to have co-authorship on a book. I had good teaching reports. My colleagues liked me. I got tenure.
“My children came along, and I kept on teaching—but research?” He shook his head. “Not for me. I never tried to advance beyond Associate level.”
I would learn, in time, what a popular teacher he was, both among undergraduates and with his students in an adult education course, which he taught almost entirely using examples in nature and real-world experiments, rather than in a lab. He was beloved as a teacher, even while remaining a figure of some ridicule among his more ambitious colleagues. I was struck, then and later, by Seth’s having shaped his seeming lack of ambition into a professional niche, justifying his tenure by being both popular and indispensable: teaching courses that higher-reaching professors might feel were beneath them while also providing them with a gratifying sense of superiority.
“I talked about it with Brinda, my eldest, when she was deciding whether to quit her PhD.” He leaned back in the lawn chair, put a hand in his blazer pocket as if to reach for cigarettes. I made a little note: smoker? Former, maybe. I would have smelled it. No one in Canada smokes anymore. “She did Biochem here, then took a break, a year or two off, then joined the epidemiology programme at the University of Alberta. An excellent programme, and I think she could have done very well, but the drive wasn’t there. She’s a brilliant girl. You are meeting her, this week?”
“I met her this morning,” I said.
He smiled as if to say, So then you know. “She seemed to think it wasn’t what she was meant to do. She stopped, took a job with the alumni magazine. Within a year, she was writing half of the articles. No training! Now she wants to take it further, so she is entering this master’s course, at Johns Hopkins: Science Writing.” He looked off at groups of students dotted in the half-sun. “She would have made an excellent prof.”
“She might yet become one,” I interjected. Was I reassuring or challenging him? “In writing or journalism or some such.”
“Yes, yes,” he agreed so fast it was as though he were contradicting me. “How many jobs of that sort are out there?”
I didn’t respond.
“Writing these articles about others . . . She has been married six, seven years, but still they don’t seem settled. No children. And now she’s off to Baltimore.” He brightened, falsely: the eyebrows stayed low. “Questions, questions!”
“What does her husband do?” I asked.
“Dev? He is a Chemistry PhD, but he works as a lab technician. I don’t know what happened. His father teaches at the University of Alberta.” Seth leaned back to pull a peony toward his nose, from a bush that spread behind him. He indicated the flower with his eyebrows. “Very nice.” He resettled in his chair, the hand back in his sport coat pocket, fingers working at something in there. “Dev is a bit of a funny guy. Doctorate. Employed at a university. But he puts down academia, acts as though it is beneath him somehow. It’s not for everyone, as I well know.” He seemed now to regret his candour. “But what does all this have to do with the bombing? What am I talking about?”
I offered a hook. “Brinda talked to me a little about Dr. Venkataraman’s family.”
“Yes.” He met my eyes, giving me, again, that strange feeling of collapsing toward him. “My wife and I, and Dr. Venkataraman and his wife, when we were all young, we used to get together every weekend. A small group of us, young academics, from all over India, but Venkat and Sita were the only Tamilians so we saw them even a bit more. He is my wife’s relation. You have seen him yet?”
The question was not merely casual, but I couldn’t say why. “We have an appointment, Monday morning.”
Seth nodded. He spoke slowly. “I have two girls, no complaints, but I was very attached to Sundar. Different, you know, a boy. Even before I had my daughters, I used to play with him. Venkat is not so much the type to give horsey rides, that kind of thing. I enjoyed that. When we went to their house, I would be on my hands and knees the whole time!
“The children grew up together. Once, Sita and Sundar joined us on our holiday, at a cabin, for a week or two. We had never done that before, and this place was a bit remote—Malcolm Island, off the west coast. Can’t remember how we chose it. Venkat didn’t want to come. Not his cup of tea. So Sita brought the boy. We had an excellent time. Board games, swimming. Absolutely relaxing. We still talk about it. A beer on the . . .”—he waved his hand horizontally—“the veranda, in the evening. Sita and Lakshmi used to get along very well also, a bit like sisters. Sita was a quiet type, but that week she talked and laughed. Venkat had, well, you’ll see—he used to have a bit of a temper. And Sita, just as we were attached to Sundar, she doted on our daughters.” His eyes went a bit glassy. He paused. Sniffed. Went on.
“One day, Sundar and I went fishing. I wanted to try it, but my daughters were still too small, and they were never the type to fish. We’re Tamil Brahmin, raised strictly vegetarian, but we started eating meat when we came to Canada. It was hard to be vegetarian here, back then, not like now. But both my daughters turned vegetarian again when they found out where meat came from! Soft-hearted girls.
“Sundar was very eager to go fishing. He must have been eight or nine. We got the poles and bait from a shop in town, and they told us a good spot to go to, a kind of fishing hole, a dock area, where you could sit. We had a bucket, in case we caught something. We had packed sandwiches, candy bars. We sat around with the other fishermen. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! But Sundar didn’t get bored, all day. And he caught one fish, a little thing.” He held up one hand, putting his other pointer finger to the wrist. “One of the fishermen told me I shouldn’t keep it, so I said to the guy I would throw it back, but I was afraid Sundar would be disappointed. We took it home, kept it alive in water in the bucket. But then I didn’t know what to do with it—kill it? Take out the bones? He had been talking all the way home about frying it or roasting it, but Lakshmi and Sita had made supper, and by the time we took baths and ate, he was tired, and forgot about it. After he went to bed, I checked on it, but it had died. I threw it out in the woods.”
Again he stopped, rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. A vein throbbed on his temple. He worked his mouth, swallowed, put his hand back in his pocket.
“A couple of years later, Sundar came to Disneyland with us. Once more, Venkat didn’t want to do it. He only ever shelled out for trips back home to see his mother. Sita had just begun a part-time job at the bank, so I think maybe she didn’t have holiday time yet. So we asked, could Sundar come with us? Venkat and Sita insisted on paying his portion. I think Sita must have put pressure on, and Venkat didn’t like to be seen as cheap. Sundar was very excited. Our daughters must have been, perhaps, six and eight? And he is about four years older than Brinda. We drove. It was a bit awkward. Motel rooms are made for four, but we would get him a cot, and he behaved perfectly, an angel, the whole trip. He was old enough to even help with the kids. One night after our daughters were in bed, Lakshmi and I went out, to the restaurant attached to the motel. We could see our room from our table, but still, we would not have done it without him there.
“But there was one thing that happened on that trip. Sundar was old enough for some ride, I don’t remember what it was, but our kids weren’t big enough. I can see now, one of us should have gone on it with him. I don’t know what we were thinking. Probably we were tired, and he said he could do it by himself. We agreed to wait for him, but the kids were restless, that must have been it, end of the day, so we told him we would get a snack and meet him, right at the exit to the ride. Well, we came back and he wasn’t there. We thought we were early, he hadn’t come out yet, but we waited, twenty minutes, half an hour, and then we started to panic. There wasn’t anywhere for the kids to sit, so they were whining. Lakshmi and I were sweating, let me tell you. So finally I left to find an information kiosk.
“They put out an all-points bulletin and finally, maybe an hour or two after that, some person in a Donald Duck costume brings him. Disneyland. It’s huge. Thousands of people. Sundar couldn’t tell us how we missed each other. But, really. What would be worse, losing your own kid or losing someone else’s? Oh God.”
He had noticed me watching his pocket, and now pulled his hand out a little to show me what occupied it in there. No ancient cigarette pack, but a japa mala, a rosary of rudraksha beads, each wrinkled, tobacco-coloured seed like a dwarfish pocket idol presenting in a queue for worship. “I am a devotee of Shivashakti. Heard of him?”
Said with a straight face: my introduction to Seth’s deadpan humour. No Indian could avoid Shivashakti, a “spiritual leader” of tremendous fame and, dare I say it, fortune. Shivashakti’s cult was massive and international, as with Rajneesh and his ilk, nearly on a par with Satya Sai Baba’s.
I do not like godmen, and reserve my greatest dislike for those with the wealth and adulation it seems to me should belong only to rock stars. My attitude, common enough among self-styled intellectuals, is to see religion as infantilism, unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own decisions. True, certain thinkers I admire intensely, including Erich Fromm, have thought differently, but I had never gotten far with these ideas myself, not least because meeting a devotee shuts me up tight, their fawning and mindlessness. I had vowed, as a therapist, to help people to think for themselves.
What to do? Religion has hobbled my countrymen. It has poisoned my country.
And yet. “I’ve heard of him,” I said to Seth. None of my usual bile, despite the japa mala snaking out of his pocket, despite the lack of a therapeutic frame—historically the only harness that can restrain me from telling someone what I think. I wasn’t thinking it. I wasn’t even feeling it! What strange spell had this man cast?
Many people who know me imagine I must be a cruel sort of therapist, an old-fashioned abusive Freudian, hastening transference by becoming the problem itself. Not at all. I’m not a misanthrope, even if I don’t like most people. I am indescribably touched by anyone who has been moved to dig in the embers of his life and find what glows there. I stoke, blow, add wood or dung chips as needed . . . the metaphor founders, but I think you understand. Seth provoked in me a glow: credulity. He had started to break my longstanding habit of skepticism. It felt good and strange. I wanted to see what he saw, or, no, not that. I wanted to be seen by him? It wasn’t only that. He had guessed, about me. He had seen.
“You must come home,” he said, still using that expression after how many years in Canada? I, too, live between my Englishes, and claim them all. “On the anniversary, we typically have an evening at our place, a remembrance, short prayer, a meal.”
I said I would see, yes, perhaps, my heart dropping a little. Such gatherings are not my thing.
“No need to confirm. Just come.” He wrote his address on a card. “Can I give you a ride back to your hotel, or . . . where are you staying?”
“No, no, it’s very close.” I gestured behind me, toward town. “I walked. Less than twenty minutes.”
“I live even closer, but walking? Bad enough to have to work!” The habitual deadpan. “I do a forced march along the lake each evening in summer.” Eyebrows up, tilted asymmetrically. “My wife.”
His wife. I was curious about her, about his home, his other daughter. Curious about the daughter I had already met. Also his friend, the excuse for our meeting: Venkat. Also to see Seth again.
I took a long-cut home and was on a bench by the lake, watching the geese, someone diving off the opposite bank, white legs disappearing into the green water, when I looked up to see thunderclouds running in again from the horizon, dangling sheets of rain that darkened the shining town against the sun, until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
I don’t like to get wet, and so did my best to defy my knees, going up, up, up the side of the town, so steep that sidewalks alone cannot cut it. Rather, the sidewalks have been cut into steps, several flights per block. (A “flight” of stairs—that’s a good one.) I only made it a third of the way before the rain hit. Torrential. Lashings. My notepads would be soaked. I was trying to cross a wide thoroughfare when I saw two punks huddled with their dog under a dry cleaner’s awning, who waved me in. They told me they were from Montreal, hitchhiking west, where berries, they said earnestly, were bursting to be picked. Their German shepherd wore the standard-issue homeless-dog bandana, a splash of purple amongst punk-black clothes and punk-white faces. We peered out into the rain, avoiding leaky spots and eye contact, at least on my part. I didn’t want more conversation. I wanted to think.
I hadn’t needed to explain to Seth that someone who had not lost immediate family in the crash could still be intimately affected by it. He, like his daughter Brinda, was self-effacing, but in a way that had nothing to do with self-hatred. I couldn’t name it, but it was powerfully attractive. Gracious forbearance. His admiration for his daughter. His bemusement at her life-course. I remembered a book by someone who taught in that science writing programme at Johns Hopkins. Perhaps she was still there. Ann Finkbeiner. After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss Through the Years. An unexpectedly good book, one of the few I had returned to out of the dozens on the subject that I had picked up and, mostly, dismissed.
For many years, researchers searched and researched for proof of “recovery” from bereavement, the very term suggesting that a person could return to fully robust being by accepting that “dead is dead” and letting go. Freud himself appeared to believe this, until he lost his own child. I remembered this: therapists I knew, in Canada, shepherding bereaved persons through identifiable stages toward recovery. Rosslyn argued this with me at some point, or, at least, that was what I thought she was arguing. She seemed sometimes to think I was misrepresenting her positions. No doubt she was sometimes right.
Finkbeiner says that researchers finally are starting to admit that we perhaps never recover. They still look at stages in grief. Not the old, hard-and-fast ones: Denial: Anger: Bargaining: Depression: Acceptance? Check. But changes of some sort—erosion, shape-shifting. Grief is as subject to the forces of time as every other real thing, from love to trees to stones. Finkbeiner matter-of-factly says that “. . . letting go of a child is impossible.” And yet, with time, the great sloth heart may move.
The storm began to thin and dissolve, and the Montrealers moved out toward the road. I gave them some money, enough for a couple of bowls of noodles at the Chinese restaurant, if they could get in the door smelling as they did. Before going home to make my notes, I bought a rainproof jacket at a second-hand store on High Street. Black, urban-looking, nothing I would wear back home, but it cost less than my recent investment in the Youth of Canada and rolled up neatly into a little packet that I swore never again to be caught without in this volatile little town.
I had it with me the next day, Sunday, when I went, as I have every Sunday of my adult life, to find a novel. I had spotted the bookstores downtown, and already decided where I would go, a cavernous store stacked with books organized according to mysterious rules, and attached to a vegetarian café.
Rosslyn and I had loved Sunday, loved our system, both profligate and restrained. You buy only one book, and sometimes not even that; sometimes the other already owns the book you most want to read, but if you want a book, you buy it. Only one. You spend the whole day reading it. It keeps you from worrying, the rest of the week, over whether you’ll ever get to read fiction again. It keeps you from being acquisitive. It is calm, measured, stately.
Although I always have several titles in mind, I also like to browse. Today: CanLit. Had to be. What a plethora of books I’d not heard of! Canadians do love their authors. This was coming, when I left, with the Mordecai Richler this and the Margaret Atwood that, but it hadn’t achieved anything like these proportions. I’d read the Globe and Mail Saturday books section yesterday, over (and under) my solitary meal, but it only brought home that I was Out of Touch.
This week’s winner: Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, nosing out Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I paid the chatty, bearded fellow at the cash and went through a set of aquamarine-painted doors to order a breakfast burrito at the café. The book’s cover bored me but I wouldn’t hold it against the novel. Our era in book design is dominated by photos-from-behind.
Earlier this year, back in Delhi, Vijaya, my upstairs neighbour, the widow, had begun inviting me to meals. Somehow she learned about my Sunday routine and somehow I invited her to join me. She was an MA in literature, after all, teaching at the college level. Perhaps she had seen me leaving one Sunday or another for Chandni Chowk, Oxford Books, Bahrisons? I sometimes thought she conspired casually to run into me in our stairwell—evidence not of my allure, but rather of her desperation.
So one morning we went to look at books together. I was sweating lightly and already regretting it. So self-conscious! We had no idea how to behave. There is no template, back home, for middle-aged dating. Others out and about were mostly younger, students, bachelor profs. Occasionally a middle-aged couple, but terrifyingly chic; women with short hair, men with long. It was Sunday: anyone who looked like us was at home, the men lounging on divans, the women cooking.
Vijaya chose a Jane Austen reissue, one of the few, she said, that she hadn’t read. I hate Austen. Artificial, sentimental claptrap. I chose Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. She peered politely at the blurbs.
Impossible to think of going to a coffeehouse, sitting among shouting, pretentious would-be poets. It would have compounded the awkwardness unbearably. As I hesitated, she invited me home for lunch. We entered her flat and followed the script: I lounged on the divan with Chatwin while she cooked. Her children telephoned: chatter-chatter-chatter. She switched on the television or radio, the blare of Bollywood. We ate and made small talk in Telegu. A hot midday meal induces a siesta, so I made my farewells. It was late afternoon by the time I woke. I never finished the book. I doubt she even opened hers. What piercing solitude. I recalled it now, here in the Big Bean Café. I was alone with my book and my meal, but it was that day with my widow that I felt in full my loneliness. How the other half lives, the variety, the social engagement: would this have been my life if I had succeeded in having a family? How would I have coped up with all that?
The breakfast burrito was passable, despite hard-core vegetarian ingredients requiring long mastication. The coffee was better than expected. And the book was excellent—Highly Recommended for All Collections. Indelible characters, and a view on a corner of Canadian history. I wondered if Seth or Brinda had read it. I was feeling very warm toward Canadians just now.
I remembered, randomly, as always, my parking-garage cat. Would Vijaya give it some yogourt rice to keep it going?
It probably had run away or been struck by a car.
At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, the longest day of the year (sun-up at 4:42! Rise aaand shine!), I was walking from one greystone building to the next in Harbord’s lush quad, looking for Sonnet Hall, where, funnily, the department of math and statistics did its thing. Professor Venkataraman’s office was on the second floor. He seemed to be on the same teaching schedule as his friend Seth, and had asked me to come immediately after his class.
His door remained closed to my knock, so I sat on one of several smallish wooden chairs in the hall. They were scattered, like hard, uncomfortable throw pillows, for use by anyone waiting for tardy profs. Several were decorated with angry words, deeply inscribed. I waited nearly an hour, but refrained from deepening any of the inscriptions. I called his office number and listened to it ring; I called his home number and left a message saying I would try again the next day at the same time, and could he please confirm?
He didn’t, but I returned the next day in any case and waited fifteen or twenty minutes before giving up once more. As I pushed the elevator button (going down stairs is often harder on knees than going up) a man of about my age emerged from the stairwell. He was unlocking his door as I caught him.
“Professor Venkataraman?” He looked at me blankly. “Ashwin Rao. I’m conducting the, er, doing the study. I sent a letter and we spoke by phone last week . . .” His face seemed to harden but he nodded.
I followed him into his office, breathing his trailing scent: dusty, ammoniac, faint but distinct, perhaps intensified by raised body temperature because he had walked up the stairs. I couldn’t identify it and wondered if it might be a drug I didn’t know. Anti-anxiety medications alter body chemistry in specific ways, common enough that I often can distinguish them. The skin of his face and hands was flaccid, as if from sudden weight loss.
He pulled a visitor’s chair out from his desk and gestured me into it, then sat on a sagging sofa, as though we were therapist and client. I reminded myself that this was something else.
“Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?”
There was an odd immobility to his face, not severe but noticeable. It wasn’t the slackness of stroke, but rather a rigidity that could almost have been conscious or, if not, then otherwise psychological in its origins. He also had a noticeable facial discolouration, not uncommon in Indians with a particular type of skin, which gave a bluish shading to his features. He was quite bald on top, the fringe behind his ears neatly combed. His pants and shirt were of the sort not to wrinkle, but he was not dressed with care.
I gave him the same answer I had given Seth. He asked where I was based, my academic history. I had the clear sensation that I was being ranked.
“So you are interested in what?” he said, at last. “How I have got on since the bombing, is it? The trial has stirred up all the old emotions. Now we are waiting, again, for it all to be over.”
I nodded and waited. One of the victims’ fathers had been quoted in the papers, on the trial, saying, “It is like somebody putting a needle in a wound that has formed a crust. It was probably bleeding on the inside, but you couldn’t see it. Now it is bleeding on the outside.” Freud felt this himself, when his own child died, “a deep, narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed.”
Venkat cocked his head coldly. “You want to ask some questions?”
I sniffed and swallowed, and rubbed my nose, which was itching. “We can start wherever you like. People often want to talk first about the early days, when you found out about the bomb. I would like to know that, as a sort of baseline. And more about your family.”
“Accha, is that so? And how will this help, who will this help? I didn’t want to do this, you understand.” He gestured in my direction, as if toward something unpleasant. “Sethu’s idea.” He sighed. “He and Lakshmi are good people. But how, what is the model for this research? Someone will publish this? You travel around and ask questions of anyone who will answer? Journalism, then? Maybe made for TV?”
Despair filled me, a chilly blue liquid, seeping in from the ground. My feet grew cold, my fingers numb.
Why are you dredging all this up?
“I hadn’t realized Dr. Sethuratnam had put you up to this. Please. You don’t have to.” But if he didn’t talk with me, I would have no reason to meet Seth again, and all the unfamiliar, perhaps groundless optimism of the last couple of days would be snatched away.
“No,” he barked. “That would not be right. Let us talk.”
I stayed more than two hours. Don’t think this means things got more pleasant. It was simply that once he started, he did not stop.
On my way back to my apartment, I bought two mickeys of Canadian whisky. For after I finished my notes. My steno pad, in my shirt pocket, thwapped my heart in time with my steps.
The composition notebook marked “Venkataraman” was on my dining-table-desk. I made a sandwich, then found the first blank page after my notes on Seth. I pulled a fresh pen from the package and my steno pad from my pocket, and began to write.
Dr. Venkataraman’s monologue (monolong?) had often seemed virtually incoherent, but I did my best to record it the way he had told it, to try to follow the lines of his thought. He began with the accused, those in the dock and the ones who seemed to have gotten away. He ranted about governmental incompetence. Air India had been threatened, don’t forget. Planes were going to be bombed, that’s what they said, payback for decades of atrocities. Air India let the Canadian Aviation Security folks know, but, as happens, the white people thought the brown people were merely asking for a handout. Extra security? Make ’em pay for it. Next! Same with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service—insecurity and stupidity service was more like it! And whatever information they could get, they refused to share with the RCMP, who were working blind, not that they would admit it! He told me in nauseating detail, much of it redundant to me—we had read the same sources—how the bomb was made, how it was planted, right under the noses of everyone whose job it was to prevent such things. The RCMP made him fill out forms, then lost them. The Canadians didn’t bother sending anyone to Ireland to help with logistics—that fell to an Indian diplomat and the Irish themselves. Over and through he cycled—details, details, details—hardly mentioning his wife or child or how he lived his wreck of a life. I was unable to interrupt, to guide him or ask questions.
Transcription took six hours. I permitted myself coffee at the three-hour mark, while my whisky stood like a Buckingham Palace guard beside the hot plate.
Ann Finkbeiner said that the parents she interviewed had found “subtle and often unconscious ways of preserving the bond” with their children. I had begun to see this in many of my interviewees’ stories. It sometimes took hours of talking for the subject to reveal the ways they had found, and I often didn’t recognize these until I transcribed the interview, even if it seemed obvious in retrospect. My brother-in-law, Suresh, had gravitated to hospice work, comforting other grieving parents and departing kids. Another man I talked to had given up his career as a research scientist to found a charity in India, its various branches named for his late wife and children, providing schooling and medical care for needy kids there. The dancer I had seen at the trial last year famously emerged from several years of debilitating grief to found what has become the premier academy of Indian classical dance in Canada. Eventually, she created and performed a choreography inspired by her horrendous losses.
I couldn’t tell, with Venkataraman, how, if at all, he had “changed his life to preserve the bond.” He was the only person I interviewed who hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Finkbeiner, like me, interviewed volunteers only. Perhaps people who found a way to “preserve the bond” were more willing to talk about the course of their lives following bereavement? Would Venkat be the exception that proved the rule, the one who had felt his family float away, leaving him grasping at ether?
Shortly after nine, I finished. Full stop. I creaked my back upright and tried to straighten my neck. I massaged my right hand with my left, then sat on it to undo the kinks. The goiter-like callus on my bird-finger’s first knuckle was throbbing. The sky was starting to pink.
It had been good to discharge him onto the page, but the feel of him lingered in me—his quaking inadequacy in the face of the disaster; his loneliness, for how could someone like him find anyone else to be with? I had let his emptiness pass through mine onto the page but still it blew about in me, its cold surfaces shifting and tumbling freely.
I should have boiled up some rice and dal and delivered myself early to bed with some poetry to read upon the pillow. I was carrying a leafing-apart copy of Robert Hass’s Praise, left by some tourist at a Delhi bookstall, just as I would leave it here for some other tourist, or maybe even the same one, on the same circuit as I, some invisible doppelgänger I was unwittingly trailing around the world, and who was trailing me . . .
Instead, I cracked open the whisky. An aluminium cap, perforations tearing as you twist, perhaps not as satisfying as magazine-subscription-card-tearing, or bubble-wrap-popping (this latter delight has come lately to India thanks to online booksellers), but quite good in its own special way, the brief cracking of something made to be torn.
It was 22nd June, the eve of the anniversary. All over Canada, we were in our rooms, alone or with others, readying ourselves for the onslaught of memory. I took up a small tumbler. I poured a shot. Shhh. Ahhh. T.
I would never have volunteered to be interviewed in such a study as mine. And now, I could not think of a way I had kept my bond with Asha. I never properly even had a bond with Anand. Let alone Kritika. Who were they? I would never know. No one would ever know. (Rosslyn. Thoughts of her lurked continuously since my return to her country.)
My glass was already empty. I poured a second shot. Remember the Mukherjee and Blaise book? I fetched my copy, wanting to hurt myself. Now let me tell you why it infuriated me. Not the polemics—those were merely inadequate. It was the way they talked about the dead.
They did interviews with the victim families. Suburban Indian parents, who tell their moving stories themselves, while the novelists describe them, and the scene around them, with only occasional lapses into the ridiculous: “The winding streets of middle-class Toronto suburbs, bearing names like ‘Brendangate,’ ‘Wildfern’ and ‘Morningstar,’ should never have known such tragedy.” What? Tragedy belongs to places with ugly names? “Schillong,” perhaps? “Ouagadougou?”
But here is the offensive part. Here is how they describe the children who died:
. . . truly bicultural children. They were bright synthesizers, not iconoclasts and rebels. Every day at school, where mainstream kids chatted around them about drugs and dates and at home where parents pressured them to study hard and not let go their Indianness, they negotiated the tricky spaces of acculturation. These were children with the drive and curiosity of pioneers, but they were also children who took family love, family support and family dependence for granted. They switched with ease from Calvin Klein and Jordache to saris or salwar-kameezes brought over by doting grandparents, aunts and uncles. They ate pizzas with friends in shopping malls, and curries with rice or unleavened breads at home. They were smart, ambitious children who won spelling bees in a language that their parents spoke with heavy accents; they were children who filled high school chess clubs and debate clubs, who aced math tests and science tests, who wrote poems and gave classical dance recitals while they waited to go into engineering, medical or law school; they were children who pleased their old-country parents by avoiding school proms and dances where kids misbehaved, and above all, they were newly affluent children with purpose and mission, who organized benefits for Ethiopia and Bhopal and projects closer to home.
These were our children, reduced to some majority opinion of what they should have been, perfect little conformists, the best of both worlds, untouched by darkness or dirt or curiosity. No iconoclasts. No rebels. No thinkers. No individuals. Stiff little brown Barbies and Kens.
Tch-tch, Canada, your loss, not India’s. Is that right? Get this: their chastity-obedience-intelligence had nothing to do with whether they deserved to be acknowledged as Canadians. Those children weren’t deserving of investigative attention because of their virtues. They deserved to live because they were alive. They were Canadian because they were born or raised here.
Besides, Mukherjee and Blaise are novelists. They should have known better.
I hate the sentimentalizing. I hate the saint-making. I hate that I hate. I threw the book down, poured another shot and raised it. A toast! Congrats, bombers! Conviction or no conviction, you did it.
On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—which man, which?—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took his revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.
Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.
Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.
So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had taken Kritika and me as children, I dreamed increasingly of my niece. The child of my life. I hadn’t seen them since I left Canada, nearly two years back, and she already looked different in the Christmas pictures my sister had sent, skinnier, the teeth that seem so large in late childhood shrinking within the proportions of an almost-adolescent smile; that smile still, always, the focal point of the family composition.
I tried to incorporate that new face—surely it would be different again by the time they arrived—into hazy daydreams of us playing Snakes and Ladders, or reading novels in cots set at right angles so we would lie with our feet making an arrowhead and chat over the tops of our books, she perhaps enjoying one of my childhood favourites, which still fed worms on a couple of shelves in the upper reaches of my parents’ home.
Sometimes I pictured all of us together, my sister, nephew, parents, but those thoughts were more obligatory, more effortful. Images of time to be spent with Asha, in contrast, were like the japa mala Seth carried in his pocket. A particularly obnoxious colleague, a boring meeting, even a less than fully sympathetic client, and suddenly I was off in the clouds, quite literally: thinking of the hill station, where, if one were an early riser, one would take coffee on the veranda amidst the low cloudsthat settled onto the hilltops each night. I imagined Asha, wandering out to find me, trailing a quilt. She would nestle against my shoulder, watching the mist snake through the bushes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of my coffee, or perhaps asking for a contraband sip, as the rest of the house slept on.
In steadier moments, I gave thought to Anand. He was fond of baseball, and I wanted to take him to a cricket game. He also loved books, though I had been stung by his rebuffing my suggestions, or, worse, his starting a book I had loved only to rubbish it with a few choice descriptors. Of course I had had some successes, and his expression, when something intrigued him, was particularly pleasing to me. I should have found his inability to fake interest disarming, but we were too much alike, particularly in this way. Even my sister could see it and said so. She said it was her karma: she had done so badly on her first attempt to live with me that she was being made to try it again. Except, as I would point out, I wasn’t dead yet. Kritika would roll her eyes and say, “One of God’s karmic accountants is scratching his head. Or rubbing his hands in glee.” She had her moments.
She would tell me that I should have given her children cousins to play with. I would counter that I should then have been deprived of her children’s company. “Selfish,” she said, “as always,” though I didn’t see it that way. Of course, had I had children of my own, I suppose my craving for hers would not have been so fierce.
The liquor was giving me courage. I would apply myself to the problem that had vexed me to nightmare for so long: discerning the moral source of the disaster.
I went inside the apartment to fetch my journal and my still-warm pen. I saw the notebook marked “Venkataraman,” and picked it up as well. And, why not, the second bottle.
A mechanic, Inderjit Singh Reyat, had been serving time in England for building the bomb that went off in Tokyo. The Brits agreed to send him back to Canada to face the music for building the other one. Once he arrived, though, he struck a bargain to testify in his old buddies’ trial instead of standing his own. His testimony could and should have been a bomb indeed, but at the trial he developed sudden-onset amnesia, an unfortunate disability that later resulted in (hooray!) a perjury conviction.
In the dock, then, two men.
1. Ajaib Singh Bagri, the Sidekick. Big family. Received welfare payments with one hand, paid for expensive cars with the other, openly preached violence against Indira Gandhi and India as a nation.
2. Ripudaman Singh Malik, the Millionaire. Charismatic as far as these types go. Rabble-roused in the temples, kept bad company, and ran the Khalsa School, Sikh education for the chosen ones. Ms. D’s love, the unconsummated affair. He had told her that the second bomb should have gone off at Heathrow, should have killed many more than 329.
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had made tapes of phone conversations, mostly coded, between the suspects prior to the bombing, but then erased them. The erasure was routine, procedure. Somehow, no one plucked these particular conversations from the conveyor belt. (“Ready to write the book?” “Ready to write the book.”)
Imagine the lad who did the erasing. I’m fairly sure it was that, and not recording over. He loads the massive disk of tape onto the axle, threads its end onto an empty, waiting spool. He adjusts the alignment and flips the lever for the sixth time that day, the forty-fourth time that month, the two hundred-and-nth time since he got his job. Then he sits, one lightly fuzzed cheek cupped in a rubber-gloved hand. The rubber glove seems redundant, since the only evidence he is handling is to be destroyed, but protocols and procedures must be observed. He lets his eyes blur as he watches the spools go round and round . . .
I threw down my pen. My brain was full of the details, but I couldn’t stick with them, the bombers, the investigators—banal, not evil. Where was the evil that wrecked my life? What happened, and how did it kill my child?
I will tell you now, dear reader, because I want to tell you everything: I heard voices. Yes, they roiled in on the whisky, the sunset, my unselfconscious grief, my uncontrollable self-pity, loud, undeniable and loud: a multitude of tiny, tinny voices in chorus. I picked up the pen again and turned the page and pinned them down into my journal, out of my head.
We were mere bits and bobs quivering undetectably on separate shelves in a store where motes danced on breath soured on deprivation and depredation, wafted promises that we would be united in good time—in bad time!—to fulfill our Daddies’ purposes. Other components dreamt of coming together as stereos . . . TVs . . . clock radios, for gods’ sake. Conduits to false hope. When we were chosen, we knew what for. We were going to give them what-for.
The gods create the parts, but components are not born until they are united in a function. The Daddies conceived us, conceived of us, birthed and rebirthed us out of hateful innocence.
There were Others, before us. We could feel them in their elemental state, their components sundered, atomized, quivering undetectably in the old, old woods of the island where the Daddies had gone to blow them up, our prototypes, progenitors, predecessors. They predeceased us so that we could decease others—cease them, that is.
Acronyms—FBI, CSIS, RCMP—would bumble after the Daddies at a distance, getting stopped at traffic lights, missing ferries, looking through binocular lenses, or bifocal glasses, or fickle eyeballs, that made the Daddies all look alike, those Sick Sikhs: turbans or no turbans, beards or no beards, but all with handsome brown faces—how do their gods make them so alike? Gotta be a conspiracy! Police Agents tripped through the woods, close enough to hear a big explosion, whereupon they thought . . . “Gun!”
Gun!
Even so, Officers in the one Agency didn’t tell Agents in the other Office. Sometimes they didn’t even tell their own. They might have thought a thought or two but didn’t think to mention what they were thinking, and then said later that they thought it better not to mention their thoughts when really they weren’t thinking much at all.
In hindsight, everyone had premonitions, if you believe the accounts. One man, a Sikh but no extremist, leaving on business, leaving his family behind, saw a man he knew to be an extremist at the airport. They exchanged pleasantries, after which the departing man went straightaway to a kiosk where he bought a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of life insurance before getting on board the jet.
Another man, after seeing his family off, noticed the British Airways line was full of observant Sikhs while the Air India line had almost none. “What’s going on?” he asked a friend. “Hadn’t you heard?” the friend replied. “Sikhs are warning each other: avoid Air India.” The man tried to go after his wife and kids, but was stopped.
Suresh fought with Kritika on the way to the airport. “Did I do that to make it easier to say goodbye?” he asked me. I didn’t answer, that people often pick fights with loved ones on the eve of a separation, because I didn’t know what he most wanted to believe.
Planes would fall from skies, some Agents heard our Daddies say.
Planes flying. Planes falling. What goes between?
Mechanic Daddy bought us on plastic. We: Sony. We: Sanyo. He: Reyat. He: IDIOT!
But even an idiot can assemble a bomb, blow it up in the woods, assemble another, blow it up, assemble us and . . .
We were in the bag!
Bag Daddy closed the zipper over Us. His hands were sweating. We were covered in clothes. Toothpaste. Deodorant. Aftershave—a joke? Well, this was one of those handsome Daddies without a beard. He was nervous, shaking and grinning. Scared! Of us!
Oh. The Twin. Our Double.
Grrr. We were jealous. Our Twin was on its way to Japan. We wanted Japan. Like Hiroshima-Bomb and Nagasaki-Bomb. They WERE The Bomb. The H-Bomb and the N-Bomb dancing A-rings and O-rings around the other bombs, Alpha and Omega. That was Us now.
Us going West. The Twin going East. Going, but not to arrive. To go.
Daaaaa BOOOOOOMMMMBBBB!
Bag Daddy stops at the airport, but his ticket doesn’t go past the next stop. He’s checking us, so we won’t be checked. He’s not checking himself—he’s letting the counter gal have it, and she’s got a line full of people all craning their necks to give her the stink-eye. What’s the holdup? He hasn’t got a gun!
She’s giving in, “Okay, okay,” agreeing to Check Us Through.
We are in like Flynn, checked in because she checked out, into the hold, interlined because Daddy was out of line in the line.
Who’s your Daddy? He’s gone. And the line is moving again.
I phoned as they were getting ready to go to the airport. Some small thing, an excuse. I had no premonition. I only wanted to hear their voices. My sister was stressed: in a hurry. My nephew was curt: monosyllabic. My brother-in-law was out getting gas. My niece—my niece was all ready, her knapsack packed. She told me which books she was bringing, what games, stuffed animal, candy.
On the conveyor belt, on our way, we hear, behind us, kerfuffling. The detection equipment has gone haywire, awry, kaput!
Security folks call for dogs, but all the dogs—yes, ALL THE DOGS—are at a training session. Every wet black nose off who-knows-where.
A wand! That’s what they come up with. Hocus-pocus! The trained wand-bearer demonstrates: Hold wand by handle. Wave wand over bags. Say a magic word under your breath, under the roses, nobody knowses, so they supposes, but they supposes erroneously.
What? They found something! Another bomb? Some other bags are being pulled aside. The wand quivered and beeped over them like a terrier, a Ouija board, a crystal on a string. Dowsed!
Kikikiki. Hahahaha.
They pulled the wrong bags.
They let the flight close. We roll away, quivering undetectably, as they search the magicked bags, the conjured problem that vanishes as they search, poking with left hand, tossing with right hand. What do they find? Clothes. Toothpaste. Aftershave. Curry powder—ah. That must have been what the wand sniffed. Spicy like dynamite. Asian hot.
Thank gods, think the pokers and tossers, we didn’t delay the flight for this.
For a long time after, I couldn’t remember any of it, though I remembered now that I pictured her, leaving the security cage, hoisting her small, stuffed tote onto her shoulder, pulling a ponytail from under the strap, her shoes slipping on the newly waxed floor, Sikh women cleaners looking past her impassively. Unless I’m making that up.
A buzz and a hum and a click-tick-click. We are aloft, alone, all on our own. Daddies left behind. Cut from our origins, we become one with the plane. Its components become us. Buzz, hum, and click-tick-click goes the timer, under people (subhuman). Our clock’s on, our coxswain, synchronizing the plane’s components, now marching with us in lockstep, marching in time to stop time. To disappear it. The horizon approaches, the vanishing point.
Ah! The Twin has gone and done it!
It was supposed to run in time with us but it ran out of time. Jumped the gun.
Hahahaha! We are delighted. No—we are lighted! We are THE BOMB.
For a long time, I thought that all I had heard, over the line, was pure sound: her voice. Her voice, the sound of which I will not try to describe, the sound of which had no precedent in history; the sound of which will never be heard again.
She was sweet beyond sweetness. She was not a saint. She was not a future unrecognized Canadian asset. She was beautiful and peculiar and still-unknown. She was just a child.
Oh, her voice! What sound fell into the sea? My child, oh, my child, oh, my lost, my smiling child.
