Free The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan Page A

affection and community. He might like you; he might even, somehow, someday, help you.
    “And you would like to hear about our involvement with Venkat?”
    “If that is what you want to talk about. Also your own experience of the disaster.”
    He sat with elbows on the armrests, hands in his lap. I waited for him to ask more about the focus of the study, as others of my interviewees had.
Why are you doing this?
Or, as Suresh had:
Why dredge this up?
    “And your experience?” he asked instead.
    “I, mine?”
    He cleared his throat. “Did you not lose loved ones in the disaster?”
    To this point, none of my other subjects had asked me this, and I can tell you now that none but Seth ever did. They were caught up in their own grief and their own stories; they must have figured they would have known my name if my wife or children had died.
    Since this was not a therapeutic relationship, and since I had withheld that information for no reason I could name, it seemed wrong to deflect. “My sister and her children.”
    I watched Seth’s face. Not much changed, except for a shift of those eyebrows. And yet I distinctly felt that my pain was filtering through him, and that he had no sense of how vulnerable this made him.
    I elaborated, my mouth dry. “My brother-in-law, who still lives in Montreal, was my first interviewee. His wife, my sister, Kritika, and my nephew and niece were coming to India for their summer holidays.”
    His eyes looked steadily into mine. “Your parents are still alive?”
    “No, not anymore.”
    He hadn’t moved, nor had I, and yet it was as though some column connecting our chests was collapsing, drawing us toward an unseen centre.
    “And your own family, is anyone travelling with you?”
    “I don’t have a family. I …” This, too, is always an awkward thing to say, particularly to men of my own age and station in life. “I chose to remain unmarried.” I broke his gaze. Too much. I was short of breath. Looking around the office, I saw a PhD from Indiana State University, framed on the wall, together with several teaching awards. Jumbled into the shelves, physics toys: a drinking bird, a Newton’s cradle, wooden blocks in a Roman arch.
    Seth looked out his window. “The sun is out! Perhaps let’s go sit in the, what do you call it, gazebo sort of thing, in the garden. There are comfortable chairs that stay dry.”
    “That rainstorm was quite something.” I don’t make small talk. It really was quite something.
    He swept some untidy stacks of papers into a briefcase and closed his door behind us. “It’s the lake. Pulls the freak rainstorms in.”
    “You are a professor of physics?” I asked as we descended.
    “Everyone has to profess something. I profess physics and God.” Sly and harmless delight.
    “Ah?” I said. The G-word raised my arm hairs a little.
    “Associate Professor only,” he said.
    He was approaching retirement, not as a full professor but one rank below. Some halt in his career? “What is your specialty?”
    “I don’t specialize, as such. I like to think my specialty is making people love this subject.” He cleared his throat. “Let me put it to you this way. Every scientist sees the world through his discipline’s teachings. When people learn about physics, the world expands for them. The Big Bang, I like to call it: if a man continues to learn, his universe will be constantly expanding, isn’t it? So I teach Introductory Physics, Physics of Chemistry, Physics of Biology, Physics for Non-Majors. Courses that might typically rotate among faculty, but I like to teach them. I have never gone in much for research.”
    “And yet … teaching here?” We found seats in the garden, very nice, an outdoor student lounge. “Harbord is a research institution, isn’t it?”
    He cleared his throat again. “When I first came to Harbord, the physics department was not the best in the country. If it was, they wouldn’t have hired me! Maybe they didn’t know