The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2014 Padma Viswanathan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  this page is a continuation of the copyright page.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Viswanathan, Padma, 1968–, author

  The ever after of Ashwin Rao / Padma Viswanathan.

  ISBN 978-0-307-35634-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36692-4

  I. Title.

  PS8643.I89E94 2014 C813′.6 C2013-905740-4

  Cover design by Leah Springate

  Image credits: (landscape) © 4 X-image / Getty Images;

  (border) © Krishnasomya / Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  For the lost,

  And for the living.

  I dont think it makes no diffrents where you start the telling of a thing. You never know where it begun really. No moren you know where you begun your own self.

  —Riddley Walker, RUSSELL HOBAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Summer 2004

  Fall 2004

  Winter 2004/05

  Spring 2005

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  About the Author

  SUMMER 2004

  All the new thinking is about loss.

  In this it resembles all the old thinking.

  —ROBERT HASS

  9 June, 2004

  AT THREE IN THE MORNING, New Delhi’s air is mostly remnants. This is its quietest hour, though the city is not still. The sounds of night business concluding, morning business being prepared, all sorts of shrouded transactions: these carry. But the air itself is nostalgic with acrid exhaust, cookstove smoke, the dying breaths of jasmine and bougainvillea breaking down into each other, night exhaling the prior day.

  Please excuse: poetic lapse. I orient by smell. The night-scent excited me as I locked my door and ascended, then stopped, descended and re-entered the flat to check again: taps off, windows locked, no food anywhere. I don’t normally second-guess this way—I have many neuroses, just not this one—but I would be away in Canada for a year. I would leave my key with a fellow resident but didn’t want to leave her a reason to use it.

  I locked the door again, and went upstairs to lay the key in its envelope on Vijaya’s threshold. She was a widow I barely considered a friend, particularly since she wanted to be more than that. Fetching my bag from the landing, I trotted briskly down the stairs, across the courtyard and into the carport, clicking my tongue for the cat. Dirty-orange fur, three rickety legs, strangely swollen jowls; it slunk around as though hoping to be hit.

  I put out last night’s take-away, lamb biryani, at the usual spot. I had never wanted to keep a pet, but was overcome by the urge to feed the patchy creature. A memory knocked. My nephew, Anand, at six months maybe. When do they start with the pabulum? My sister, Kritika, was feeding him. She called me over—“Watch, Ashwin!”—as she lifted the little spoon toward his face and he opened his mouth, SO wide, his head bobbing a little, the eyes so serious, as though this were a contract he had agreed to fulfill: survival. My sister and I laughed until our sides hurt.

  And two years after Anand came my niece, Asha.

  Asha, my Asha. The child of my life. Sometimes I thought I recalled a whisper of her smell—green grapes and the pages of books; perhaps a hint of nutmeg?—but even the motion of my mind turning toward it fanned it away.

  The cat still hadn’t appeared and my auto-rickshaw was waiting. “Airport,” I told the driver, no good morning necessary. He had been, for fifteen years, my favourite among those at the corner rank—almost surly, always prompt. He tossed his beedi and unthrottled his engine.

  Two weeks from today, June 23, would be the nineteenth anniversary of a jet bombing that killed 326 people I didn’t know, and three I did: Kritika, Anand, Asha. It had taken nearly eighteen years to drag two perpetrators into court. Last spring, April 2003, I had gone to Vancouver to witness the trial’s start. My first time back in Canada since 1985. A Screaming Reluctance to See It had battled in me with a Driving Compulsion to See It. Guess which won?

  Victims’ families, along with various other concerned parties and/or gawkers, came from all over. They milled in the grand atrium at the provincial courthouse in Vancouver, their hot, thick optimism mingling with a slight steam from the bloodthirsty and giving me … what is it? When one’s skin crawls. The heebie-jeebies.

  The atrium’s high, glass walls gave the all-too-obvious image of transparency. Kafka’s trial could never happen here. Glass houses: Canadians don’t throw stones. On the government side, the excitement was both more stately and more tawdry: press releases, security expenditures, and a bullet- and bomb-proof courtroom custom-built several circles of hell underground, down where the sun don’t shine.

  Only two of the many hot-air buffoons allegedly involved in the bombing were standing trial. I would name them, but what’s in a name? I try to block their faces, but they rise in my mind’s eye. Specimens. Bad examples of their community, their race, their species. Bad men.

  I felt the trial to be a sham and yet I had gone to see it. Why? And furthermore, Why?

  Why a sham? Because it came so very late—and after so much had changed, from the political situations that fed the bomb plot to the security situations that permitted it—that it would do nothing to prevent future terrorist acts. The accused did not regret what they had done, but neither would they plant any other bombs.

  But what of punishment? you might ask. I hated those men. I might gladly have punished them with my own hands, not that I have ever done such a thing. But for the government to mete out, what—justice? Hardly. No government in the world possessed a moral scepter weighty enough to flog these puny fellows.

  The Yamuna’s sulphurous stench cascaded in the auto-rickshaw’s open sides as we approached the bridge. The city lights glinted sluggishly off the river. I gripped my bag with one hand and the back of the driver’s seat with the other—he had added some turbo-enhancer he probably never got to use in Delhi’s daytime traffic, and was taking advantage of the empty streets to go much faster than advisable.

  So. Why had I gone? At the time, I didn’t know why. In the courtroom, it wasn’t the accused who interested me but the bereaved, the others like myself, those who had lost the people most important to them. Apart from my now-late parents, I had only ever spoken to one other living victim: my brother-in-law, Suresh, Kritika’s husband. A good fellow, but we had not been in contact since a year or two after the disaster. I looked for him in the courthouse crowds, fruitlessly.

  How is he? I thought, for the first time in years. Perhaps it was the first time I had ever thought that. When the bomb struck, my first thoughts were not for the suffering of others. Except my parents. Well, except my father.

 
; How was Suresh? How were these people around me? These people like me?

  In the therapeutic context, such a question would be no problem. I am a psychologist. Put me across from a client and I will ask, intuit, tease or ferret out everything either of us needs to know. Surrounded by the crowds at the trial, though, I didn’t know where to start. Every two hours, after each break in the trial (lawyers need their Starbucks), I would have someone new next to me, such as the heavy woman in a salwar kameez whose homey aroma of frying dough couldn’t quite cover an inky, pooling despair. She leaned on a young man with a serious brow and neatly trimmed beard, who supported her on one arm while taking notes with his other. Two hours later, it was a tiny, twiggy-smelling couple in outdated business suits who sat without touching until, hearing some detail I didn’t catch, they took each other’s hands without meeting each other’s eyes. Across the room, I saw a famous dancer whose husband and daughters had been killed. She had become active in the victims’ advocacy group, and I had seen her name and photo in news reports. She had remarried, a gentleman whose wife and children had been on that same plane.

  This was why I had come, I realized, to find out how these people had coped up. Not only how as in how well, but rather by what means did they go on?

  There were so many of them there, but not a single one I could sit down with and ask. I should have contacted Suresh, I thought, then. Was he still in Montreal? Was he still alive? Who had he become in the years since losing his family—since losing my family?

  My auto slowed in the thickening traffic as we near Indira Gandhi International. Time can be defined by motion, I mused; the airport should be its own time zone. I wanted to be in bed, not assailed by people, vehicles, shouting, honking, business. Can one have jet lag in advance of a trip? I was hastily erecting a Potemkin village of mental activity, to let me get on the plane.

  Last spring, I had booked a month in Vancouver, but after only a few days attending the trial, I could take no more. What to do with the three-plus weeks left to me? Try to answer my questions, perhaps. So instead of returning to India early, I retreated to my comfort zones: the university, the library.

  Surely others had written about this, I was thinking. Over the years, in psychology journals, I had come across so many studies on victims of mass trauma. Longitudinal, informational, survey- or interview- or standardized-test-based. Beirut, Belfast, Kigali. I had never seen one on the Air India disaster, but then, I’d never properly searched.

  After the World Trade Tower attacks, nearly half of all Americans showed PTSD symptoms. How did the researchers think to test for that? They must have observed the symptoms in others; they might have felt them themselves. Had Canadians suffered similarly, following the bombing? The U.S. has about ten times Canada’s population. Three thousand plus people were killed in the September 11 attacks, three hundred plus in the Air India disaster. Do the math. It should add up, but it doesn’t.

  Canadians at large did not feel themselves to have been attacked, although nearly every passenger aboard that flight was a born or naturalized Canadian. Canada’s prime minister infamously sent a telegram of condolences to the Indian government, who had lost what? A jet. Oh, and a couple of pilots. No wonder Canada had failed to prevent the bombing in the first place. No wonder they had failed, for eighteen years, to bring it to trial.

  And, I learned now, failed to take the bombing up in scholarship. I found no articles that addressed my questions. I looked, though it seemed even more improbable, for books. I found the same three I had read over fifteen years ago, one sensational, one implausible, and one by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise.

  Mukherjee: tough broad. I’ve never met her but I’d like her, even if we would almost certainly fight. I loved her novels back when I lived in Canada: she was one of the very first to write about the no-man’s land—or, more often, no-woman’s land—of the transplant. I might have felt nothing in common with her protagonists had I met them in life, but I identified with them as I never had with fictional characters before.

  Her book on the bombing was called The Sorrow and the Terror. (That title, in huge block letters and lurid flame-tones: really?) I sat with it in the reading room of the Vancouver public library. Much of it was good, far better than I had given it credit for the first time around, back when my pain was most acute.

  Like all of us, Mukherjee and Blaise were appalled by the Canadian government’s refusal for six months to acknowledge that the jet had been destroyed by a bomb, even given that another Air India jet, also originally departing from Vancouver, had blown up an hour earlier in Tokyo. Officials didn’t want to admit their negligence. An FBI plant had met radical Sikhs who wanted to blow shit up in India, poison the water supply, disrupt the economy, kill thousands. The newly formed Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had tailed a motley crew of brown radicals who kept muttering to one another in secret code in Punjabi, a language none of CSIS’s west coast agents spoke, despite five generations of Sikh settlement here. Phones were bugged, conversations were taped and sent back to Ottawa for transcription, all routine, no sense of urgency. After transcription, translation. After translation, decoding. (“Ready to write the book?” asked a pay phone caller. “Yes, let’s write the book,” responded the man who had picked up in some suburban home.) After decoding, perhaps alarm. (Wait a sec, is this—? What are they—?) But then, of course, it was too late.

  And right after the tapes were transcribed, they were erased, per routine, leaving no original evidence to present at a future trial.

  All that is laid out in the first part of Mukherjee–Blaise’s book, a very serviceable catalogue of failures. Part two “honours” the victims, telling their stories in their voices, but framing and bending them so that this stream converges with the first to become a single roaring river of accusation: that the Canadian government failed to see this as a Canadian problem and a Canadian tragedy, even though it was a plot hatched by Canadians in Canada that resulted in hundreds of Canadian deaths.

  “But it is never so simple!” I said, slapping the book’s face, even though they were right. It was their methods and their tone that I disagreed with—but more on that in time.

  Whatever I thought of the analysis, the interviews were a generation old. Had no one tried to learn what had happened to these people since? I hunted again for articles. I enlisted librarians to double-check my search terms. They were as puzzled as I—What a good question, they said. I can’t believe no one has asked it before. “Sorry, sir. Looks like you’re going to have to do a study,” one gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses told me, glancing away from his screen to flash me a grin, then freezing when he saw my frozen face.

  I had been in a thick, paralyzing fog, less and less able to work—I still believed in my work, but had lost faith in my ability to do it. I overcame this tower of self-doubt, this mountain of lassitude, to come to Canada, to witness the start of the trial. This decision, this trip, was the single meaningful thing I’d done in a year, which is not to say I had known what it meant. I had been suspicious, because it couldn’t be the trial I was coming for. Rather, the trial led me to this: the subject of my next book. I should have known, as they say.

  Fifteen months later, the trial was still dragging on, and I was returning to Canada to begin work on that book. I had avoided Air India on my last trip, but this time, I made myself fly Delhi–Heathrow–Montreal, reversing the route of all those dear departed and retracing my own of so many years ago.

  At Indira Gandhi International’s security gate, I slipped my bare feet back into my sandals and tried to see the X-ray of my single carry-on through a security guard’s eyes.

  I FIRST LEFT INDIA IN 1969, to attend medical school at McGill, but then abandoned that course of studies during my third year, in favour of a PhD in psychology. It was a move that might have been impossible in India, where I would have been restricted by my parents’ wishes, but that is not to say it was easy in Canada, where visa requirements still meant I
had to cling to the trapeze of my student status until some other swung close.

  Such a handhold presented itself in 1975, as I was finishing my doctorate. I hit it off with a couple of Ottawa psychologists at a conference. We stayed in touch, and they eventually invited me to join their practice.

  The conference was on Narrative Therapy, a term I heard for the first time that year, an idea that, at first, grasped me more than I grasped it.

  Ever since I was very young, I’ve kept a journal. Not unusual, you might say. Lots of people do. True. My father kept a journal—he recorded in it the details of his days, where he went, whom he met, what he ate, what irritated my mother. My uncle kept a journal—he recorded each thing he bought and how much it cost. His entire life in purchases. He showed it to me once, with unreflexive pride. He thought everyone should keep such a book.

  But I keep a journal differently. I note, on a left-hand page, an anecdote—something characteristic or outrageous a friend or family member said, or perhaps a confidence told to me. On the facing page, for as many pages as it takes, I properly tell the story: third-person, quasi-fictionalized, including matters not witnessed, details I can’t really know; and so try to explain what I have seen or heard.

  All my friends are in there. Everyone in my family, except my mother—I have often described the inexplicable things she says and does, but long ago bowed to their inexplicability. There was no sense in my trying to write fiction that explains them. I also make notes on my own life, though I have never tried to make fiction out of that.

  When I was young, I hid the journal above a rafter in the room where my sister and I slept and studied. Kritika saw me writing in it, but I tried to keep it from her. It was a private endeavour. My countrymen don’t believe in privacy, so I’m not sure how I got that idea. Perhaps some child in an English book kept a secret diary and the notion infected me.