would periodically go wild about the clutter, but continued buying the crap for Asha. How could he bear to clear it out? He had to. Much worse to pass by it each day.
Her clothes went into a garbage bag for donation, keeping aside only a silk maxi and bodice she had worn to her cousin’s wedding in India three years ago, and a pink velour tracksuit that made her look sporty, sharp, ready for anything. On the floor beneath the bed, two lost teddy bears and a dustball made mostly of her hair. In one pocket of her school bag, the mush of a decomposed apple core in a tissue. In the other, a creased handful of notes, slips torn from notebooks, cryptic messages pencilled on both sides:
Mrs. G has abnormally long arms. Pass it on.
Kathy said she’ll be your friend again if you’ll take back what you said about her self-portrait.
Dana said she only said what she said because you said she said Valerie has hairy toes and she never.
I got my period!!!!!!
All the girls’ handwriting looked alike. He tried to follow the strands of debate—was Asha mediating or instigating? Was she not paying attention in class? She got top marks in everything, both his children did.
None of it mattered.
Next, he dusted and vacuumed Anand’s eminently tidy room. When he lifted the reading chair cushion to clean under it, he found a Sports Illustrated swimwear issue and a bra page from a Sears catalogue. He sat in the chair and wept at history’s repetition, at the loss of so much of so little consequence. Under the mattress, though, were three ripped-from-a-magazine pages of women and men bound with black leather, hooded, orifices exposed. His mind briefly went blank, but then he thought, curiosity. Pictures, only.
In Suresh’s own room, his and Kritika’s, he expected to find a secret. He steeled himself for it: a diary full of complaints about him, or letters from an ex-lover, or expensive earrings she bought without telling him and only wore when she was alone. Nothing necessarily bad, merely secret. He had never assumed he truly knew her. That was okay. It was part of the deal.
But either she didn’t have secrets, or he never found them.
He had kept nothing from her.
Before I left the following day, we talked a bit further, about his work at the hospice, his meeting and marrying Lisette. I asked if they thought about having more children. He smiled and looked away—finally, I had asked a question he would not answer.
Changing tack, I asked whether he had attended any of the trial.
“I had no interest,” he told me.
“None?”
“Not enough to buy a plane ticket, take time off work, leave Lisette.”
“Why not?”
“Did you go?”
“Yes, for a day or two.”
“Wasn’t it a bit like entertainment, like those town square executions?”
“Not for those who lost their families.”
“It won’t bring them back,” he said. I felt the droop of his face in my own, felt how grief compressed his lungs, made of his body a trap. “And why are you doing this, this study?” he asked, reversing the line of scrutiny. “This is what you do?”
I hesitated. “It’s a bit of a departure. I assume you haven’t read any of my books?” He hadn’t. They were not widely distributed, and I didn’t think him the type to Google a guy, though I have been surprised by others. I cleared my throat. “I’m doing the study because . . . for one thing, this tragedy was not owned”—I cringed at this word, but when speaking to people you must make yourself understood on their terms—“by Canadians at large. Emotionally, they did not feel themselves to be assaulted.”
“It wasn’t owned by the government either,” said Suresh.
“No. That’s one question, the isolation of the victim’s families, though I don’t know yet if it’s the central one. The term I used in my letter, I hope you don’t find it insulting, was a ‘study of comparative grief.’ I want to know: how have the families coped up? How have their lives progressed?”
“Surely that information must be out there, no? All the newspaper articles, pieces on TV?”
He had an intentness I didn’t remember. He truly wanted to understand.
“There’s media coverage, true, but no scholarship that I could find. Has anyone else talked to you?”
His expression suggested no one would want to. “I keep a low profile.”
“So you see.” I tried to sound convincing, but the more I talked, the less assured I felt.
“I don’t see, Ashwin.” He put his hand on my knee. “I’m happy to talk to you, if it’s important, but why dredge this up? Let it lie.”
It was only now that I realized: not only had I said nothing to my colleagues about my bereavement, I had said nothing about it in my letters to the victim families.
Okay, I thought, that was wrong. But I did nothing to correct it.
It wasn’t only the need for scholarship that was motivating me. It wasn’t only the desire to give the victims a voice. (As one grieving man had said to Mukherjee and Blaise, “‘We are so wanting to talk! That wanting to talk is in all of us . . . we who have lost our entire families. We have nothing left except talk.’” That was eighteen years ago, but so many were still wanting to talk.)
It was, as much as anything, my desire to understand what had happened to me. I had not recovered. Did anyone, from so severe a blow? Perhaps not, but I had, in some way, stopped my life. This, I suspected, might be less true for the others. It didn’t seem to be true of Suresh, or he didn’t feel it to be. How or why did some absorb loss into life’s flood-plains, while others erected a dam?
JUNE 19, 2004
Lohikarma, B.C. Fourth town, seventh family.
I arose with the dawn, my habit. Canada was terrible for me that way: despite many years here, I never managed to wake long before first light in winter, long after in summer. I cracked a window to fan out the fug of night gas and snore breath. That smell, akin to stale popcorn, can linger, even in a large room. A faint priapism deflated as my pyjama and kurta cooled in the morning air. Twelve degrees Celsius perhaps? Like October in Delhi. I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror, the double-bagged eyes, the beginnings of jowls to rival the cat’s. My cat. Had anyone—my widow, perhaps—taken over his feeding? I cranked the shower, pulled my kurta over my head, and was enveloped for a moment in the smell from my own pores, something dark and leafy, with the tang of iron. Cooked spinach? Lovely. I gagged a little, stepped into the coursing water, coated myself with strong soap, then antiperspirant, then aftershave. Sandalwood, bergamot, lime. By night the spinach would chew its way to the surface again, but then I would quell it with Scotch. The
