The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (30 page)

We met at the mall, where we were surrounded by Halloween paraphernalia. I mentioned that, although I love to see the children dressed up, my apartment in Lohikarma had no front entrance, so that I could not distribute candy. I further broadly hinted—okay, I said bluntly—that October 31 had unpleasant associations for me.

He asked if I wouldn’t rather spend the evening with him and Lakshmi. So it was that at 5:30 p.m., October 31, 2004—the twentieth anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination—I was traversing Lohikarma’s scenic avenues in a multicoloured afro and a red rubber nose, carrying a bag of lollipops, thinking,
Indira G.: R.I.P.
, with uncharacteristic lightness.

Lakshmi was holding the screen door open when I arrived.

“Two-by-twos,” I said to her, indicating the crowd pushing past me down her walk.

She looked at me quizzically.

“Two years old by two feet tall,” I explained. It was not quite dark, still the hour of Baby’s First Halloween, children
knee-high-to-a-grasshopper
, as Rosslyn’s mother used to say, bumble bees and Ninja turtles.

Lakshmi looked as though she still didn’t understand, but it wasn’t that; she didn’t recognize me. I pulled my nose out by its elastic band; it made a wet, sucking noise as its interior humidity released.

“Ashwin?” I said over it. I proffered the sucker sack, wishing I had that hand to pull off the wig. Lakshmi was not in costume. “Seth invited me to …”

She gave a quick sigh, and blinked her eyes wide open as though to keep from rolling them. I looked past her, trying not to seem rude: Where was Seth?

She had a chair set up in their foyer and brought another from the dining room for me. She had left her paperback open and face down on her chair seat: Rohinton Mistry. The cover: a photo of a man facing away. See? I gave my own quick sigh.

“Seth is staying with Venkat tonight,” she told me as she went to give more candy to children too young to eat it.

“Don’t choke on that!” I told one, and popped my nose at him.

I wiggled my wig by working my eyebrows, and glanced sideways at Lakshmi. Disapproval or amusement? Her face was not nearly so expressive as Seth’s.

“What happened to Venkat?” I didn’t really want to know.

“He had an outburst of some sort.” There was a lull in the trick-or-treaters and she sat with a sharp outtake of breath.

“Bad?”

“He’s been put on leave. Perhaps permanently.”

Another crowd, old enough to know what they were doing, shouted, “Halloween apples!” from outside. I waved at her to stay in her chair while I did candy duty. “You didn’t know I was coming?”

“Seth didn’t come home from the office today. We talked, but it must have slipped his mind.” She was rubbing her forehead. “It’s fine. Stay.”

I kept her company for an hour or two. She told me what little she knew, or perhaps less, about the incident in the classroom, and then, as the Hallow-baloo decreased, I excused myself.

The next day, at a downtown diner, Seth filled me in. “I suppose it was only a matter of time, with the trial, the trial, the trial. It’s been going on so long, it’s become a trial for everyone.”

“What happened?”

“He was teaching a class. The economics professor who teaches in the same room, next period, was waiting outside but it was getting late, the door wasn’t opening, and then she realized she was hearing something that didn’t sound quite right. Finally, she peeked in. Venkat was shouting at the top of his lungs, all kinds of nonsense. The kids were too scared to move. Then he starts insulting this professor. There might be a lawsuit.” He rubbed his neck, looking tired.

As Venkat had ranted on about betrayal and misplaced faith, his colleague waved his students out and went to find help. By the time she returned, he had gone.

What was the trigger? It was not clear. His students were interviewed by the university’s counsellors, but most gave the impression that they had, for all practical purposes, been drowsing in their chairs. They woke to find him in full flight.

The colleague, who talked to everyone about it, thought Venkat was a step away from bringing a gun into the hallowed halls of academe. While I saw Venkat as too harmless a fellow for that, it did not escape me that this incident came one year to the day from Ms. D’s testimony, and twenty years after Indira Gandhi’s death. I never would have put much stock in this sort of thing—surely the date could not consciously be meaningful to Venkat; he wasn’t even in India at the time of the assassination—if I hadn’t seen the workings of such seemingly distant associations in the lives of my clients.

“It would be such a favour to us if you would talk to him, Ashwin,” Seth said.

I had seen this coming, and dreaded it. “Yes,” I said. “I will. But I have questions. Last time I was in Lohikarma, I asked you if you had any legal status in his medical care. You never answered. Is there anything I should know?”

Seth hesitated.

“If he were referred by his employer, his doctor, I would receive a file,” I insisted. “I don’t like to feel I am going in blind.”

He took a breath and let it out heavily. “Okay. After Venkat got home from his time in India,” he began, “all seemed to be going fine, as far as I could tell.”

“You had set him up, his routines, his teaching.”

“Exactly.” Seth had a mannerism sometimes, small, jerking motions of his neck, as though the weight of his jacket on his shoulders was too much. “Venkat was distant, but otherwise normal. Uh, except …” He digressed. “Except sometimes, when we were on campus, or once when I took him shopping, he would think he saw one of them.”

“One of them?”

“Sita or Sundar. He would become lively. All of a sudden. A startling kind of change. He would stop and stare, at the campus, or the mall,
looking very happy.” Seth showed me, half standing, agape. “And then,
phoosh
, he would deflate again, his cheeks sinking, his shoulders going down. Once he explained it to me, so then I understood the other times. He was thinking he saw one of them.”

“Not uncommon.”

“Oh?” The eyebrows went up. “You have heard this from other family members, research subjects?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “And also clients, in my therapeutic practice. Although they know, intellectually, that their loved one is dead, they will go on for years thinking they spot them, here and there.”

“But he, he got Sundar’s body. With Sita, I could have understood more. No closure, and all.”

“I’ve seen it in cases where the death was unambiguous, not even sudden.” Seth seemed to accept this. “But he appeared to be adjusting?”

“I suppose. I was worried. Every once in awhile, I would wake up in the night and be so worried, and I would go and see him.”

“Worried? Had he said something to worry you?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so. One thing he said, but I don’t really remember if this was before or after …”

“Before or after …?”

“I’m getting to it. He told me he could still remember the sound of Sundar’s voice, but he couldn’t think of what Sundar would have said.” Seth looked at me, questioning, I think, whether I understood. “I knew exactly what he meant. It was because he lost Sita too. When our daughters were small, I would come home from work and my wife would tell me the things they said. I would make her repeat them; I could never remember exactly how they went. Even when I was there, with the children, she would repeat to me what they had just said. You’re not trained to notice those things, as a man, or to remember them. So I knew what Venkat meant.”

“And so you would go to see him, in the night?”

“The door was never locked. He was always awake, often sitting on the family room sofa. Most often, we would pray. And then I would make him go to bed, and I would sleep on his sofa, go home in the
morning.” Seth swallowed. “On this night—I guess it was late October? There was a bit of snow already. I woke up, like I said. Cold chills. I had been feeling fine, but now, it was like a fever. A fever of dread. I rushed into his house but he wasn’t on the sofa, not in the bedroom, bathrooms. I ran through the house, calling his name, but I didn’t hear anything. I thought,
He went somewhere? In the middle of the night? He didn’t come home from the office?
I had this fear. I knew I had to keep looking. I opened the front door, but there were no footprints in the snow. Suddenly, it hit me. I rushed to the garage. He was sitting in the car.”

He put his hand in his jacket pocket, as he always did at his narrative’s worst moments. “Thank God I thought to press the button, open the garage door, before I went to get him out. I don’t know how I thought to do that. I could have died too, passed out. I was holding my scarf over my mouth but the carbon monoxide made me sleepy even when I was turning the car off. I ran and took a breath of fresh air, or I think I did, then I dragged him out of the garage, around the front, so the carbon monoxide wouldn’t get in the house, and pulled him up the stairs. Concrete stairs, and it was snowing, wet snow. I was worried I’d slip, kill both of us.” His tension made him laugh at his inadvertent joke. He rubbed his eyes, then continued. “I think I laid him on the rug in the hall with the door still open. He had begun to regain consciousness by the time the ambulance arrived. He must have started his car just about the time I started my car, at home.”

“Do you think Venkat wanted to be rescued?”

Seth looked appalled, as though this had never occurred to him. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Was he angry with you?”

“How could he be angry at me? I saved his life! I saved his life.” His tone was insistent. “He told me, much later, when he was in the hospital, that he had wanted to hurt himself but didn’t have the courage. He was afraid to use a razor, so he did this instead. ‘Totally Canadian, eh?’ he said. ‘No garages back home so we have to use more primitive methods!’ I’ll never forget it. The guy has never made a joke in his life, and when he finally jokes, it’s about this! I was so relieved when he went
into the hospital, and then, after that, to India for a few months. We were scared when he came back to Canada again, the next year. Geez.”

“Truly, you felt him to be your responsibility.”

“Who else does he have? Someone has to look after him. Poor guy. We felt terrible: we should have insisted he would stay with us. We should have insisted.” He ran his hand from pate to nape and made the shrug, his tic, twice.

“If I can ask, did his suicide attempt affect your feeling that Shivashakti had saved his life, after the crash? Didn’t you believe, to that point, that his faith in Shivashakti was giving him something to live for?”

“Well, I should have said Shivashakti saved his life by getting me up in the night and making me go over there.”

I didn’t ask if Shivashakti got him up every time or only the one time it mattered. “Let me just—you said, if I’m not mistaken, about your own devotion to Shivashakti, which started that summer, you said you came to God because God is eternal, and would survive anything and so help you survive anything. Clearly, Venkat’s faith was not enough to sustain him through the loss of his family.”

“He was in shock,” said Seth.

He wanted me to drop it, but I waited. And in time, perhaps because he was not accustomed to shutting people off, he resumed.

“In fact,” he said, “I asked him about that, when he was in the hospital.”