The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan

Author:Padma Viswanathan [Viswanathan, Padma]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-36692-4
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The only subject of disagreement (on this, they could agree) had been his house. Seth tried to suggest that Venkat come to stay at their house while he and Lakshmi packed away Sundar and Sita’s things and shifted the rooms around a little. But Venkat was categorical. The house stayed as it was.

Venkat’s courses that fall were ones he had taught before, Statistical Methods, an intro course that rotated among faculty members, and Theory of Experiment Design. Neither was particularly challenging.

Lakshmi and Seth asked him to come every Friday night to dinner. He complied, though Seth usually had to remind him, either catching him at the office before he left or, on a couple of occasions, phoning him when, after waiting some time, they realized he had forgotten.

Also, at least one night a week, Seth would take Venkat to a Shivashakti satsang. It was odd to feel that he was guiding Venkat back into his own fold. Seth was also uncomfortably aware of having ranked the rest of his fellow devotees according to his own arbitrary standards of temperament and authenticity.

Daisy and Irene were in the middle somewhere. “Where’s your pretty wife?” one or the other would often ask. Maybe if he told Lakshmi they made him uncomfortable, she would come with him more often. Carsten, the leonine young man who read the lecture the first time Seth came, was on the lower end. Seth sensed his ambition and didn’t much like the way Carsten talked down to him. Very near the bottom was the Reverend Jonathan Dunn, a Unitarian pastor whom Seth found suspicious for no good reason. One night, he had persuaded Lakshmi and his daughters to come to satsang. On the drive home, he wondered aloud whether Dunn attended every kind of service in town. “Is he hoping to get people to come to his church?” Lakshmi and the girls replied that the Unitarian philosophy might be closer to their own even than Shivashakti’s.

“What?” He turned around to look at them, three captivating, dusk-lit strangers. “You would go to that guy’s church but I have to beg you to come to satsang with me?”

“It’s nothing personal, Dad,” Brinda said.

He would think about this exchange for years. Nothing personal? What the hell did that mean? How could it not be personal?

It was an irony of the worst sort that those devotees most visibly buoyed by a surging elation in their Lord were the ones Seth least liked to talk to. The ones he liked best—Nick Copeland and Kaj Halonen—for all their steadiness and dedication, tended not to effuse in the way Seth himself wanted and needed. He had pinned some hopes on the Indian families. Maybe, he thought, he needed people who knew what his ideas of God had been before. But they, too, disappointed him.

Unlikely as it seemed, he wondered now if Venkat might understand. Venkat so often came across as insensitive, mostly because he was preoccupied with his own moral agendas. But he had also, occasionally, surprised Seth with an insight, proving not so absent as Seth’s women tended to think.

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