speculates on entomology, etymologies, and other subjects he had no real means to penetrate. While sojourning among Finnish utopians on an island off North America’s northwest coast, Harbord had chosen a name for the place he sensed he would shortly discover: Lohikarma, his pronunciation of the Finnish word for “dragon.” He cites the word as final proof of his theory of the Finnish language’s Sanskritic origins. Many cultures compose their dragons from the parts of other animals, reincarnating them: the dragon’s karma is to inherit their qualities. Harbord’s mission was to found a New World university on the traditions of “the many cultures the tides of history had washed up on these verdant shores.” The town was named for the dragon. The university was named for him.
In the hundred years since, Lohikarma had grown, mostly in the usual ways. Gold had brought the first white men here, but lead, silver and zinc attracted further waves of entrepreneurs. Mines, mills and money fertilized an ecosystem of hotels, transport, provisioners and traders. But the town also attracted three other populations in greater concentrations than any other place I’d been. One was renegade or persecuted religious and ethnic groups, fleeing czars, dukes, generals. But while conservative and conformist Hutterites and Mennonites can be found in various places, the anarchist Doukhobors—a.k.a. Sons of Freedom, a.k.a. Spirit Wrestlers, setting fires to protest personal property and shedding their clothes to protest war—are found only here. A second was the followers of various spiritual leaders who had chosen this area for their ashrams, attracted by energy centres or some such, in the rocks and earth. Funny how such vibrations are rarely discovered in the wastelands of northern Saskatchewan, say, but rather only in the prettiest areas of the continent. The Kootenays ranked—rolling hills and rocky outcrops, flowering meadows and sparkling lakes. And that was likely what attracted the third group of note, much smaller, but one that had influenced the landscape and culture of the town as much as any other: wealthy eccentrics who chose Lohikarma as the place where they would build their follies and live their visible or invisible lives. I would come to like best the French-Spanish fop who built here a miniature replica of his family’s castle and the lesbian heiress who serially seduced rich and famous daughters from Victoria to Regina, assisted by her boat-driver, a Marseillaise dwarf.
A barista pled in undertones with the Tweezer, who stood, declaring, in a flat Canadian accent, “Bug off. I’m not your stepping-stone!” As she made her way regally out into a hard rain, I imagined how her wool coat must have smelled, the rain releasing odours of a domestic menagerie: guinea pigs and rabbits, urine and wood shavings, and the oddly fresh scent of fur itself.
I finished my notes, and ate a ciabatta sandwich as the rain eased. I walked on damp but warming sidewalks toward the university to meet Brinda’s father, Professor S. P. “Seth” Sethuratnam. I followed High Street from its lowest point, in the centre of town, straight up toward the university, which is on a rise of its own. The sidewalks dried as I dampened. Pale clouds lifted and dissolved off the tops of the purple mountains. If ever you visit Lohikarma, huff and puff up to one of the many high points to take in the vista of the lake accompanied by the sound of your own laboured breath. I should not assume you and I are alike in this, dear reader: I am a grizzled old fart and perhaps you could run circles around me. Still, allow me to press my point: while Lohikarma gives a marvellous view of the mountains from almost anywhere, for no work at all, only when you climb do you get the full effect. Trismegistus, I came to call it: lake, mountains, and long, low sky.
I was grateful to stop a hundred metres or so from High Street’s summit. I could see it ahead: the quad, with its eight or ten neo-classical, Canadian-Edwardian facades, always featured on the covers of Harbord U.’s brochures, as if to demonstrate that the colonies’ inferiority complex was far from resolved. Physics was in a newer science facility closer to downtown, a modernist structure typical of the early seventies building boom in Canada, unfortunate materials but lots of light.
In the atrium, I detected an organic chemistry lab by its unnatural, tart-and-sweet smell, chemical (I suppose it goes without saying) and burnt, but not in the comforting way of woodsmoke. It was a smell I had not encountered since leaving medical school, but the olfactory cortex is well-protected from the ravages of time, unlike, for example, the knees: my own, already complaining about the climb, confronted a wide brick staircase with anticipatory discomfort before I spied the elevator behind it.
I found Dr. Sethuratnam’s name on his third-floor office door and knocked.
I liked him from the very first. He was a small man, though not so much so by the standards of his origins. I, too, am South Indian, though of taller stock. In a gathering of our fellows, I, not he, would have stood out. And I am only five-foot-ten.
I held out my hand. “Ashwin Rao.”
He shook it and gestured me in, lifting some papers off a chair that faced his overflowing desk. “No student came to office hours today. My desk starts to colonize my chairs if they’re unoccupied.”
“The impulse of empire,” I said, as he tried to find somewhere for the papers, ultimately stowing them on top of some others on a low shelf.
He laughed. “I know it! At home, my wife confines my mess.” He found his way back into his desk chair. The spot on the green plush where his head rested was shiny and worn. As it was a Saturday, I had been surprised that he was teaching, but he explained that summer school ran six days a week.
He wore a new-looking suit, conservative but not unfashionable. Chartreuse silk tie dotted with tiny purple fish. A hint of cologne and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. He was clean-shaven, with hair thinning on top to expand a forehead dominated by a pair of remarkable eyebrows. If they were still, they might not have been so notable. But they were never still. His voice was pleasant, his face well-shaped, but his eyebrows were his defining feature. (These were also Brinda’s eyebrows, though she used them so differently that further comparisons were useless.) Seth’s brows spoke as he spoke; gestured when he did. They made me think that this man could never lie: his eyebrows, shooting like arrows from his third eye, would shout the truth even if he fought to suppress it.
“Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?” It was the usual first question, sprung from that human desire to identify one another by clan. What is your place, your people?
“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?”
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