begun volunteering a couple of years after losing his own children. Hospice: that was where the thin wire of grief led him.
Lisette’s son had died there, shortly after his fifth birthday. Suresh used to volunteer four nights a week and Saturdays; Friday night he went to the temple. Lisette invited him to the funeral. A single mother, a receptionist. They had married two years ago. He cut his volunteering down to Saturdays, came home for supper every night. She came to the temple with him on Fridays, and he took her to church and lunch on Sundays with her family in Trois-Rivières. Lying that night in their spare room, I wondered, would they fill it with another child? They should, I mused, surprising myself.
I thought back to his wedding with Kritika. He wasn’t shorter than she, though he appeared so. PhD, employed in pharmaceuticals research, settled in Canada. I had recently started medical school at McGill, and my parents gambled on the likelihood that I would remain, so why not settle her here, also? It narrowed the groom search: there were only five Telegu bachelors of our caste and creed in Canada in 1970, one of whom was me. Suresh was the only one who could get home and get married that summer.
Kritika was a prize: curly hair, snapping eyes, educated, unambitious. Suresh adored her. I think he also liked me more than my sister did, and more than I liked him—he had a more generous spirit than either of us. Unpretentious chap, for all his aspirations; a much more patient parent than she (though she was warmer to the kids than I would have expected, given how much she was like our mother, no model of affection); a reader of poetry—obvious, sappy stuff, Tagore, Wordsworth, but still; and uxorious, which I admired, even more because I thought Kritika undeserving. Am I unkind? She would have said the same of me, were the roles reversed. The difference is that I would agree. In bleak moments—and most moments when I think of myself are bleak—I believe my solitary state confirms this. I am alone because I deserve to be. But then, wouldn’t the reverse logic also apply to her?
She had her good points. Not least of which were Asha and Anand.
Suresh had taken the next morning off to talk with me, and after Lisette left for work, we sat in their small front room. I had never been to this neighbourhood: urban but aspiring middle-class, street upon street of duplexes. Francophones have a higher tolerance for shared walls than anglos, though if they hear anything through the walls, they prefer it to be in French. We sat with our backs to the window. Children shouted their way to school behind us, before the street fell silent. In Suresh’s living room, a white sofa abutted blue recliners crowding houseplants from whose broad leaves dust motes floated into the morning sun. In lulls, we watched a patch of light creep along the back wall.
He told me of a tiff with Kritika on the way to the airport (she had forgotten to pack a small gift he had bought for his mother); the early-morning call from his sister in India, who somehow learned of the bomb before he did; his trip to India, afterwards, seeing my parents, seeing his own; his return home to his empty house, full of their things. He reminded me how I had come to Canada and helped him clean it out.
I listened and made notes on my steno pad; that afternoon, I transcribed into a composition notebook marked with his name; and, late that night, I wrote a few small stories about him. I didn’t know yet whether I would show them to him. It was mostly that I couldn’t help myself.
He started with the baby’s room. He hadn’t stopped calling her that until she was seven, and here it was, again. He stood in the doorway, his arms around an irregular stack of empty boxes. The room was crammed with doodads—a collection of miniature scented erasers; shiny purses hanging helter-skelter from a pink-painted rack; a makeup mirror, its pockets stuffed with Lip Smackers. Kritika 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