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.
“But there was one thing that happened on that trip. Sundar was old enough for some ride, I don’t remember what it was, but our kids weren’t big enough. I can see now, one of us should have gone on it with him. I don’t know what we were thinking. Probably we were tired, and he said he could do it by himself. We agreed to wait for him, but the kids were restless, that must have been it, end of the day, so we told him we would get a snack and meet him, right at the exit to the ride. Well, we came back and he wasn’t there. We thought we were early, he hadn’t come out yet, but we waited, twenty minutes, half an hour, and then we started to panic. There wasn’t anywhere for the kids to sit, so they were whining. Lakshmi and I were sweating, let me tell you. So finally I left to find an information kiosk.
“They put out an all-points bulletin and finally, maybe an hour or two after that, some person in a Donald Duck costume brings him. Disneyland. It’s huge. Thousands of people. Sundar couldn’t tell us how we missed each other. But, really. What would be worse, losing your own kid or losing someone else’s? Oh God.”
He had noticed me watching his pocket, and now pulled his hand out a little to show me what occupied it in there. No ancient cigarette pack, but a japa mala, a rosary of rudraksha beads, each wrinkled, tobacco-coloured seed like a dwarfish pocket idol presenting in a queue for worship. “I am a devotee of Shivashakti. Heard of him?”
Said with a straight face: my introduction to Seth’s deadpan humour. No Indian could avoid Shivashakti, a “spiritual leader” of tremendous fame and, dare I say it, fortune. Shivashakti’s cult was massive and international, as with Rajneesh and his ilk, nearly on a par with Satya Sai Baba’s.
I do not like godmen, and reserve my greatest dislike for those with the wealth and adulation it seems to me should belong only to rock stars. My attitude, common enough among self-styled intellectuals, is to see religion as infantilism, unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own decisions. True, certain thinkers I admire intensely, including Erich Fromm, have thought differently, but I had never gotten