‘The Ever After of Ashwin Rao’ by Padma Viswanathan

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson (originally posted April 6, 2014)

On June 23, 1985 Air India flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean off the Southwest coast of Ireland. All three hundred and twenty-nine passengers and crew, most of them Canadian, were murdered in the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. In July of 1985, then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered his condolences to the Indian government, but not to grieving Canadian families. To this country’s shame, no Canadian emissary received family members as they arrived in Ireland in the hope of recognizing a loved one among the 132 bodies recovered from the sea. A twenty-year-long investigation into the Sikh militant group known as Babbar Khalsa resulted in a single manslaughter conviction.

As tragic as this recounting is, it fails to capture the complexity and scope of an event that is at once so deeply personal and undeniably political.

Padma Viswanathan attempts to capture the emotional, psychological, and political intricacies of the Air India tragedy in her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Ashwin Rao is an Indian psychologist trained in Canada whose sister, niece, and nephew are killed in the Air India bombing. Almost twenty years after the tragedy, Ashwin returns to Canada to observe the prosecution of two men implicated in the bomb plot, but also to engage in a “comparative study of grief” among the families and friends of the victims. Ashwin wants to discover “how these people coped up. Not only how as in how well, but rather by what means did they go on?” Drawing on his skills as a narrative therapist Ashwin attempts to “tell the story on the individual’s terms, giving a nuanced sense of his problems’ origins–in himself, in his community, in societal expectations.”

His study brings him to the fictional town of Lohikarma in British Columbia to interview Dr Venkatara–Venkat–who lost his wife and son, Sita and Sundar, in the bombing. Through Venkat, Ashwin is drawn into the lives of the Sethuratham family: Seth, Lakshmi, and their daughter Brinda who are distant relations, but close friends of the Venkatara family acting to support Venkat even as their own grief swells.

From Ashwin’s interactions with Venkat and the Sethuratham family stories of surviving grief, systemic oppression, and large scale trauma emerge. Venkat falters between rage and desolation to steel himself against his grief: “Those bastards stole my life. They killed my family. They took meaning from me. They took belief. Sometimes he hears it, like this, in words. More often, his mind is a smoky blank, the anger it’s glowing embers.”

For Seth there is a different sort of retreat into the teachings and practices of Shivashakti, his newly found guru, to distance himself from his love of his family and to “enable him to love without fear of being destroyed.” Lakshmi, however, explores a secular self-knowledge to guard herself against the promises and seduction of spiritual leaders. She accepts loss by allowing it to become a part of who she is. Brinda’s experience demonstrates Ashwin’s assertion that “loss radiates” as her grief infiltrates her sexless marriage. Finally, Ashwin inserts himself into each of these stories, seeking solace in all the ways that the Sethurathams remind him of his lost love, and stoking his anger on the brimstone of Venkat’s rage. All the while, Ashwin provides the historical and political context of both the individual and collective narratives of Air India flight 182.

Viswanathan’s novel thus proves itself to be both emotionally and politically ambitious, and yet it fails to coalesce into a meaningful whole. Ashwin’s thesis that the families and communities of the dead faced a “unique set of victimizations” that include violent loss, systemic racism, and institutional incompetence, while true, simultaneously  overdetermines and weakens the narrative’s structure and tone. Consequently, the text often reads more like reportage than narrative and tends to adopt the pedagogical tone of a documentary film.

While this novel has many emotionally raw moments that can leave your heart ringing with sorrow and with anger, they are overshadowed by the novel’s attempt to grapple with too many weighty themes at once. Psychology, philosophy, transnationalism, colonialism, state violence, systemic oppression, national trauma, existentialism, identity, and even physics and mathematics are themes scattered throughout the novel. Some of these themes are inescapable, but others clutter and conflate the narrative leaving it without a common centre. Even the through-line of narrative therapy feels thematically forced to fit with the code words of the conspirators: “Are you ready to write the book?”

Stylistically, the novel often staggers, lurching uncertainly between tenses and perspectives and from one thematic trope to another. Sometimes the text is written like a private journal, or as a therapeutic document, or as poetic nonsense. At times, even Ashwin is apologetic for the stylistic foibles of the novel: “I am indescribably touched by anyone who has been moved to dig in the embers of his life and find what glows there. I stoke, blow, add wood or dung chips as needed… the metaphor founders, but I think you understand.”

Yet this novel attempts the important work of examining difficult and often neglected subject matter. There are few literary works that centre around the Air India bombing and its aftermath; in addition to this novel there is a book of poetry entitled Children of Air India: Un/Authorized Exhibits and Interjections by Renee Sarojini Saklikar, and Bharati Mukherjee’s short story, “The Management of Grief” among a handful of others. This is especially notable when compared with the plethora of fiction that attempts (for good or for ill) to grapple with the events and ramifications of 9 11. There is Falling Man by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and many more that fall into the category of post-9 11 fiction. There is no post-Air India subgenre of fiction. “After the World Trade Tower attacks,” Viswanathan writes, “nearly half of all Americans showed PTSD symptoms… Had Canadians suffered similarly, following the bombing? …Canadians at large did not feel themselves attacked, although nearly every passenger aboard that flight was a born or naturalized Canadian.” Viswanathan attempts the incredibly burdensome task of challenging the reader to examine the ways in which state, communities, and individuals are implicated in a heinous crime compounded by systemic oppression, and clouded behind the smoke-screen of multiculturalism.

Random House | 384 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307356345