The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (56 page)

She gardened some flowers now, but mostly vegetables. Brinda asked about her one-time dream, to create a Linnean clock out of flowers that would open in sequence to show the hours. Seth had pressed her, back in the day, to propose it to the City of Lohikarma, do it in Harbord Park.

Sita twisted her lips to one side. “Vanity,” she said.

Brinda remembered that the Air India Memorial in Bantry Bay was a sundial, but didn’t ask if Sita knew about it.

The cabin, it turned out, was made of driftwood. “Logging, you know. Incredible what washes up. No need to cut any more down.” Sinclair had just left, she said, to teach a yoga class in town. That might have been his truck they passed. He would be back in a couple of hours. She had had a feeling they would come today. She had scraped out the fire pit at the edge of the beach and built within it a teepee-frame of sticks filled with brush. A blackened kettle sat on the ground, ringed by chipped enamelled-tin cups.

They peeked inside the house, whose door opened to the woods: a bunk and a bench, the width of each implying that Sinclair must be nearly as skinny as Sita, trestle table, chair for a guest, potbellied stove. Pot-hooks screwed into the walls, a two-foot shelf of dishes and books, another of dry goods. A window to the sea and an oil lamp.

“You cook here?” Lakshmi asked, trying to see the contents of the Mason jars on the dry goods shelf.

“We mostly eat raw food. One of us might make a dal from time to time. We have a root cellar for, for
thayir
.”

It was the first Tamil word they had heard from her, the woman who had been made to speak only English to her husband, only Tamil to her son.
Thayir
: the homemade yogourt they all had craved in their early years far from home. Some made poor attempts with commercial brands, but it wasn’t worth it; they lacked the taste, the spirit of home. Finally, in the seventies, someone brought—smuggled?—some culture over and it grew and spread from home to home across Canada in preciously Tupperwared tablespoons, to every Tamil Brahmin in the land. Sita had been cut off from all that.

The sauna was a more sophisticated building, with a tiny adorable antechamber and connected hot-room. “Sinclair knew better what he was doing by this point. He built the house first,” Sita said, seeming not to see anything but them, but wanting them to see it all.

She does have a life
, Brinda thought, watching her.
And it gives her, if not joy, then pride; if not pride, then satisfaction
.

Sinclair’s latest project was a yoga studio, usable already if not complete, with a sea-view picture window to match the sauna’s. They irrigated the garden from a bore well.

“So simple,” said Lakshmi, her highest compliment.

Seth remembered then that his wife said once, in response to a question from the kids:
What would you be or do if you didn’t have a family?
“A monastic,” she had replied. No hesitation. She sounded almost surprised that they didn’t already know. It fit perfectly. What else, with her silent meditation and retreats? The nunnery: what she would have done in Venkat’s place. No paralytic fear for her—she had a backup plan, an imagined life in parallel.

“So you garden through the summer?” she asked Sita. “And in the winter?”

Sita wanted to please, but didn’t seem to get the question. Ah, how does she occupy her time, in the winter.

“Time,” she said, as though it were a puzzle.

It was, the family agreed later. They didn’t think enough about how to solve the question of time. They thought, as did most people, about how best to spend it.

“Time passes. I walk the shore. Winter days are short.” A strange smile shape-shifted Sita’s hollows. “I remember Sundar. I remember all he said, his feel and weight and scent”—the brown-cereal aroma of his little-boy time, the must of adolescence, the sulphury power of growing manhood—“what he liked, what he didn’t like, what hurt his feelings, all he knew, what he hid from me. I think of him, when I wake in the night, when I sit at the shore. Time passes.” She took a deep breath, salt air. “Let me get the fire started. Tea. I’ve heated the sauna, already. You must try it.”

Seth still had some hard questions to ask. “And, your boyfriend, you told him about us?”

“Yes, I told him about you.” She had a smudge of charcoal on her nose. The fire kindled.

“Does he know of your life before?”

“I told him I lost my husband and son in the disaster.”

The truth, in other words
, thought Seth. Sita shrugged brightly at him as though he had spoken it aloud. “You said, about Venkat,
He loved us but he never knew us
. It made me wonder if my wife and daughters should leave me: I freely admit that
I
don’t understand them.”

She gave him a very small smile, no reassurance, no condemnation. “It’s time for a sauna. You should go first.”

He resisted. “No, ladies first.” Lakshmi was also a little reticent, so it was decided that the two of them would go for a stroll while Sita and Brinda went first.

“We will yell when we come out,” said Sita, “so that you can cover your eyes if you don’t want to see us naked when we run out for our ocean dip.”

This was distasteful to him. Their hostess: if she hadn’t known so many details of their past, their shared lives, he never would have believed her to be the same Sita, that demure paragon, excellent cook, shapely, soft, unassuming. She really had died.

And yet …

“Ocean dip?” Brinda asked Sita as he and Lakshmi walked away.

And yet: there was something familiar in his feelings for her, perhaps because of how she had changed. She had been so opaque before, treated him as a respected older relative, kept herself masked. And in any case, the wife of a relative—what did Seth need to know? But now she seemed as though, for all she had been hiding for twenty years, she had nothing to hide. She perhaps feared nothing. She positively invited the direct question! What was familiar? She reminded him more of his daughters now, and his way of relating, even perhaps his actual feelings, had obediently merged with her shift, into an affectionate sense of familial discord.

It was very strange for Brinda to undress with Sita. Women of her mother’s time and place were exceedingly if inconsistently shy about nudity.
She remembered her Toronto aunt telling her once that she couldn’t stand the gym locker room because it embarrassed her to see other women naked. Yet every Indian river had women standing in its flow, their thin, wet saris hiding practically nothing.

Sita pulled off her T-shirt, dropped her jeans, picked up a towel without hiding herself in it. “Ready?” she asked. In the hot-room, Sita spread her towel untidily on a bench, scooped water onto the stones, her movements completely unselfconscious.
This is not a body to me anymore
, she had told Brinda’s dad.
No shock, no shame
. As though she were crone or child, or, as she put it, ghost.

“So different, eh?” Lakshmi said, picking up a piece of driftwood as they neared the water.

“Huh? Oh, yes.”

“Really makes me question how we live, our values.”

No surprise for Seth there. “For her, her life seems not to have any value.”

“I’m not sure of that.”

“She said it, didn’t she?” He picked up a rock and threw it into the water. “She has nothing to live for, now that Sundar is gone.”

“I guess that’s what I’m asking: why do we have to live
for
something?” Now she sounded defensive, irritable. “Why can’t we simply live?”

Before, he had lived for his family. He thought Shivashakti had saved him from that. He was learning.

“Okay. You win,” he said. “But I didn’t come to Canada and live here forty years to give up flush toilets.”

She snorted and slapped his arm. They walked on.

Sita was emaciated, but still, when she sat, there were those few inches of below-the-navel shirring, the body’s graffiti:
Baby Wuz Here
. Ex-skinny
Ranjani had it now, a muffin-top above the chic jeans. But she would get back to exercising. And then she would have it all, wouldn’t she? Envy can become a way of life. It’s why Brinda had to try to avoid her sister until she had a life of her own.

“You are not married, no babies,” Sita said.

Brinda couldn’t decide whether the steam intensified the burn in her nostrils or mitigated it, just as she had never been sure that she liked saunas. She looked down at her own smooth belly, up and out to the ocean. “Divorced.”

“Oh-oh-oh.” Sita shook her head. “I could feel it.”

“I wish I were like you,” Brinda cried then with the force of a realization. “I
want
so much. You’re so self-contained. If I didn’t want, I could have stayed with Dev. Or I could be happy divorced. Or if not happy, then … then whatever you are.”

“What I am: this is natural?”

“How do you mean?”

“Sinclair is happy. Whatever he has renounced”—she made scales with her hands—“he has gained just as much. He has his projects. His days are structured by small goals.”

“But not yours.”

“I didn’t renounce desire, or ambition.” Sita shuddered, quick, like a cat. “I lost them. I have broken with nature. I live outside of its circle. I am a stranger to all. But what happened, child? Why could you not stay with your husband, and, now, what?”

Brinda took a breath and told Sita what had happened with Dev. The truth, quickly, in summary. It had gotten easier to tell, and she found better ways to thread it, with each repetition.
No shock, no shame
.

“Dev was furious at me for ending the marriage. ‘Ten years!’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’ The most painful thing I’ve ever been through. Since, that is, since Sundar’s death. It changed our lives. Changed our dad.”

Sita was very still. “Venkat liked sex with me when I was sleeping. Sleeping! Even when Sundar was small and waking me twice every night, this man liked it best when I was asleep. How did he manage to
catch me asleep, even? Then I would wake up, while he was, you know, but I would pretend, because I knew he wanted that and because that way I wouldn’t have to look at him. After, he would go back to sleep and I would lie awake.” She stacked tight fists on her knees. “I would be so angry! I thought I would go nuts. I did, a little bit,” she said, sounding almost clinical. “I’ve had enough sauna. You?”

“Definitely.” Brinda had been wondering whether to tell her parents the truth about her marriage. Now she knew she wouldn’t.

“Okay, I’ll shout so your father isn’t embarrassed! Run!”