the book down, poured another shot and raised it. A toast! Congrats, bombers! Conviction or no conviction, you did it.
On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—
which man, which?
—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took
his
revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.
Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.
Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.
So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had taken Kritika and me as children, I dreamed increasingly of my niece. The child of my life. I hadn’t seen them since I left Canada, nearly two years back, and she already looked different in the Christmas pictures my sister had sent, skinnier, the teeth that seem so large in late childhood shrinking within the proportions of an almost-adolescent smile; that smile still, always, the focal point of the family composition.
I tried to incorporate that new face—surely it would be different again by the time they arrived—into hazy daydreams of us playing Snakes and Ladders, or reading novels in cots set at right angles so we would lie with our feet making an arrowhead and chat over the tops of our books, she perhaps enjoying one of my childhood favourites, which still fed worms on a couple of shelves in the upper reaches of my parents’ home.
Sometimes I pictured all of us together, my sister, nephew, parents, but those thoughts were more obligatory, more effortful. Images of time to be spent with Asha, in contrast, were like the japa mala Seth carried in his pocket. A particularly obnoxious colleague, a boring meeting, even a less than fully sympathetic client, and suddenly I was off in the clouds, quite literally: thinking of the hill station, where, if one were an early riser, one would take coffee on the veranda amidst the low clouds that settled onto the hilltops each night. I imagined Asha, wandering out to find me, trailing a quilt. She would nestle against my shoulder, watching the mist snake through the bushes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of my coffee, or perhaps asking for a contraband sip, as the rest of the house slept on.
In steadier moments, I gave thought to Anand. He was fond of baseball, and I wanted to take him to a cricket game. He also loved books, though I had been stung by his rebuffing my suggestions, or, worse, his starting a book I had loved only to rubbish it with a few choice descriptors. Of course I had had some successes, and his expression, whensomething intrigued him, was particularly pleasing to me. I should have found his inability to fake interest disarming, but we were too much alike, particularly in this way. Even my sister could see it and said so. She said it was her karma: she had done so badly on her first attempt to live with me that she was being made to try it again. Except, as I would point out, I wasn’t dead yet. Kritika
On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—
which man, which?
—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took
his
revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.
Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.
Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.
So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had taken Kritika and me as children, I dreamed increasingly of my niece. The child of my life. I hadn’t seen them since I left Canada, nearly two years back, and she already looked different in the Christmas pictures my sister had sent, skinnier, the teeth that seem so large in late childhood shrinking within the proportions of an almost-adolescent smile; that smile still, always, the focal point of the family composition.
I tried to incorporate that new face—surely it would be different again by the time they arrived—into hazy daydreams of us playing Snakes and Ladders, or reading novels in cots set at right angles so we would lie with our feet making an arrowhead and chat over the tops of our books, she perhaps enjoying one of my childhood favourites, which still fed worms on a couple of shelves in the upper reaches of my parents’ home.
Sometimes I pictured all of us together, my sister, nephew, parents, but those thoughts were more obligatory, more effortful. Images of time to be spent with Asha, in contrast, were like the japa mala Seth carried in his pocket. A particularly obnoxious colleague, a boring meeting, even a less than fully sympathetic client, and suddenly I was off in the clouds, quite literally: thinking of the hill station, where, if one were an early riser, one would take coffee on the veranda amidst the low clouds that settled onto the hilltops each night. I imagined Asha, wandering out to find me, trailing a quilt. She would nestle against my shoulder, watching the mist snake through the bushes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of my coffee, or perhaps asking for a contraband sip, as the rest of the house slept on.
In steadier moments, I gave thought to Anand. He was fond of baseball, and I wanted to take him to a cricket game. He also loved books, though I had been stung by his rebuffing my suggestions, or, worse, his starting a book I had loved only to rubbish it with a few choice descriptors. Of course I had had some successes, and his expression, whensomething intrigued him, was particularly pleasing to me. I should have found his inability to fake interest disarming, but we were too much alike, particularly in this way. Even my sister could see it and said so. She said it was her karma: she had done so badly on her first attempt to live with me that she was being made to try it again. Except, as I would point out, I wasn’t dead yet. Kritika
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