The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (10 page)

“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.