The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (9 page)

“
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 in 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.