As she dressed her dead son, Aysha only kept herself from coming apart by holding Rajib’s eyes centrally before her. She had had to call him Swami Apadravya when others were about; but alone in the quiet calm of his room, dark hands sculpting her white flesh, he was her Rajib, loving her so totally it hurt.
And when he entered her, his eyes a searing mirror of bliss, the world split open anew until she thinned and thickened into slow explosion.
Vish lay cold under her fingers. As she joggled his body, she expected any moment he’d inhale suddenly out of sleep, find his thumb, offer a long protesting groan, and eye her archly.
But the chill of his skin and its pal or, like an all -over faint, kept his death at her fingertips. Underwear, undershirt, tight white socks, futile nonsense, must be insane, long corduroy pants, a pull over shirt with dead arms at angle around a halfwit’s lolled head that made her break down weeping—until Rajib’s eyes, cased in quiet brown wrinkles and containing the wisdom and compassion of all the world, brought her out of it. Sweater played his arms the same way, but by the time she rocked his coat on, it was like dressing a weighty ragdoll, both her and Vish more insulated from his death. But no. Had to experience it, had to keep it before her like a candleflame. Visions required faith, and faith could only function in the harsh light of the truth.
She would carry her boy to his father and he would interrupt satsang—or rather, he would surely incorporate her arrival into what he was saying (no agenda that excluded the world’s surprises) and then Rajib would touch his son, re-blood his cream-tan skin, re-bellow his lungs, infuse through the eyes his resurrected boy. But no. She couldn’t count on that. “Make no appointments,” he had said, “receive no disappointments.”
Why was that such hard advice to fol ow?
Aysha zipped up her boots, then muffled her neck and double-buttoned her night-blue coat. She jammed the knit cap down on her flattened blond curls and, Vish’s pillow cold against her knuckles, worked his cap over his scalp and down around the tops of his ears. She blew out the oil-lamp and stagger-lifted her son until he was snugged on her left arm and his head rested against her shoulder. Would be a test of her will, this walk: five blocks west and nearly as distant south; no new snow for two days but brisk winds, and there’d be snowbanks and patches of snow between scraped sidewalks.
She prayed she’d meet no one on the way out of her apartment building, and that proved true. A blast of air, caution on the icy concrete of her front steps, and she was on her way.
The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, Travis sensed something wrong. They were still three blocks from Sir George Williams University, a mostly evening school in one several-story building where the talk was to be held. Couldn’t guess what it was as he and Laura crunched along, her enthusing about their baby’s precocity as he tuned her out—but it increasingly nagged at him and then turned to disappointment. Volumetrically speaking, pedestrian traffic was too light: a first sign. And when they crossed Crescent and had a clear view of the corner of Bishop and Maisonneuve ahead, Laura interrupted her parental ravings with an “Oh shoot!”
Save for security lights on the central stairs and on the walkways left and right around them to the auditorium, the building was dark. “Look at this!” Laura said, and he joined her at the glass doors. Her hands were thrust into her coat pockets; she jiggled from the cold and her breath was dragon steam, comical from her Cupid’s-bow lips. Upon the door, taped askew on the inside, was a pasteboard sign in bold black: SATSANG POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND. SRI APADRAVYA IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. NAMASTE.
“Didn’t you check the paper?” she asked, accusing.
“Yesterday’s.” He caressed the back of her coat with his thick gloved fingers. “Hey, no big deal. We’ll go to the Cafe Au Lait, have some steamy roasted coffee and that honey-drenched dessert you like.”
“Baklava.”
“Right.”
“I had my heart set on a little spiritual well-being tonight, not to mention seeing old friends from the ashram and Apadravya himself.” Laura leaned her forehead against his shoulder-fur in mock sorrow.
“Make no appointments—”
“I know, you doofus, I know.”
And that’s when, with a shadowed crowd of pedestrians penguining oddly toward them south on Bishop, twin snicks of metal sounded behind them and two burly men yanked them apart and brought sharp blades and faces impossibly close.
“Your wallet in two seconds, sucker, or you’re dead,” and as much as Travis wanted to look after Laura and the other mugger, the hopped-up urgency in the man’s eyes went right to Travis’s nervous system, the arm, the hand, tearing off a glove to reach between the lower but ons of his coat, to lip the heavy fabric back, an inconsequential drag on his wrist as he gripped and drew out his black eelskin wallet, no shake in his hand, no time for fear, too much a luxury when faced with that much need.
And then the smell of death stung him. His own? Had he been slashed? But his assailant’s eyes bulged as Laura screamed, and still he lived. His wallet fell. A purpled foot toed forward and Travis saw a matching hand jam down, like a receipt on a spindle, upon the switchblade, fingers closing on the mugger’s glove, a sharp snap of bone. Time enough to feel blooms of gratitude mixed with astonishment before the rescuer dropped his head upon Travis’s shoulder and bit, as easy as baklava, through the thick fur, thick leather, the multi-layered cloth beneath, into muscle and bone, a sudden frenzied cramp of pain there.
The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, anticipation lit his soul. They quickened their pace, he and Laura, grinning like idiots. “Namaste, dollface,”
he said, side-hugging her as they walked.
Laura, laughing, scolded: “That’s not nice, making fun of spirituality.”
“Get me started on Jesus sometime.”
“I know, I know. My favorite blasphemer.”
Inside, the crowd was lumbering along the guideropes, halfway vestibuled, halfway inside the auditorium: an odd mingle of young and old, his generation touching once more a thread which guided them to the gold of an earlier time, Laura’s coevals refreshingly glint-eyed in their twentyish claim upon the world’s possibilities. On their way to the line’s end, Laura exchanged joyous if hushed hellos with a number of young men and women he’d never met, scrubbed and more naive-looking than his wife, wearing yoga-whites some of them and holding coats, although, inching past the side door they’d come in, blasts of winter assaulted them every time anyone entered the building.
At last the double doors. Travis let Laura unpurse a five-dollar bill for them and place it on a small mound of money in a box labeled DONATIONS. He took a flyer about a potluck, avoiding the fervid eyes of the redeemed druggie, or so he appeared, sitting, one knee pistoning, behind the table.
“Let’s try close,” Laura said, ever one for ring-side seats at plays and concerts.
“Right,” he said, but she was already on the way down the carpeted slope of the aisle. She tapped the sweatered arm of a petite Oriental woman, blowing a kiss to her wave and signaling later as she backwarded and then rightwarded herself toward the sparsely populated—because spiritually too presumptuous?—front rows.
The air was redolent with incense, sandalwood mingled with a fruity vanilla scent. The stage, as he approached it, brought him back twenty years, the oriental rug at its lip, fringe hanging over, the cushions, the flowers, puffs of incense rising nearly straight up like Lionel trains in mid-chug from an ornately carved table—and out of context yet never somehow out of place, the angled mike on a squat stand so that the reputedly soft-spoken Apadravya could be heard throughout the auditorium and so that his talk could be preserved for those unlucky enough to be elsewhere.