The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Padma Viswanathan
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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