Free The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan

accompanied by the sound of your own laboured breath. I should not assume you and I are alike in this, dear reader: I am a grizzled old fart and perhaps you could run circles around me. Still, allow me to press my point: while Lohikarma gives a marvellous view of the mountains from almost anywhere, for no work at all,only when you climb do you get the full effect. Trismegistus, I came to call it: lake, mountains, and long, low sky.
    I was grateful to stop a hundred metres or so from High Street’s summit. I could see it ahead: the quad, with its eight or ten neo-classical, Canadian-Edwardian facades, always featured on the covers of Harbord U’s brochures, as if to demonstrate that the colonies’ inferiority complex was far from resolved. Physics was in a newer science facility closer to downtown, a modernist structure typical of the early seventies building boom in Canada, unfortunate materials but lots of light.
    In the atrium, I detected an organic chemistry lab by its unnatural, tart-and-sweet smell, chemical (I suppose it goes without saying) and burnt, but not in the comforting way of woodsmoke. It was a smell I had not encountered since leaving medical school, but the olfactory cortex is well-protected from the ravages of time, unlike, for example, the knees: my own, already complaining about the climb, confronted a wide brick staircase with anticipatory discomfort before I spied the elevator behind it.
    I found Dr. Sethuratnam’s name on his third-floor office door and knocked.

    I liked him from the very first. He was a small man, though not so much so by the standards of his origins. I, too, am South Indian, though of taller stock. In a gathering of our fellows, I, not he, would have stood out. And I am only five-foot-ten.
    I held out my hand. “Ashwin Rao.”
    He shook it and gestured me in, lifting some papers off a chair that faced his overflowing desk. “No student came to office hours today. My desk starts to colonize my chairs if they’re unoccupied.”
    “The impulse of empire,” I said, as he tried to find somewhere for the papers, ultimately stowing them on top of some others on a low shelf.
    He laughed. “I know it! At home, my wife confines my mess.” He found his way back into his desk chair. The spot on the green plush where his head rested was shiny and worn. As it was a Saturday, I hadbeen surprised that he was teaching, but he explained that summer school ran six days a week.
    He wore a new-looking suit, conservative but not unfashionable. Chartreuse silk tie dotted with tiny purple fish. A hint of cologne and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. He was clean-shaven, with hair thinning on top to expand a forehead dominated by a pair of remarkable eyebrows. If they were still, they might not have been so notable. But they were never still. His voice was pleasant, his face well-shaped, but his eyebrows were his defining feature. (These were also Brinda’s eyebrows, though she used them so differently that further comparisons were useless.) Seth’s brows spoke as he spoke; gestured when he did. They made me think that this man could never lie: his eyebrows, shooting like arrows from his third eye, would shout the truth even if he fought to suppress it.
    “Rao?” he asked. “Telegu?” It was the usual first question, sprung from that human desire to identify one another by clan.
What is your place, your people?
    “
Hah
, originally, yes. My father was from Nellore, and we spent holidays there, though I was raised first in Hyderabad and then New Delhi. I did graduate studies at McGill, though, and lived in Ottawa for some years.”
    I imagine he might have liked to know my caste, to add that stamp to my resumé. But such questions are no longer the done thing among the educated classes.
    “And you live in Delhi now?”
    “That’s right,” I said. There was a slight brightness to his eyes that conveyed genuine, relatively untainted interest. He struck me as a man concerned with bonds of