THE ostensible narrative focus of the Canadian author Padma Viswanathan’s second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, is on the 2004 trial in Vancouver of two Sikh male suspects thought to have been responsible for the Air India crash that took place nearly 20 years previously, and which the Indian narrator, psychologist Ashwin Rao, returns to Canada to witness. But in Viswanathan’s new work of fiction the spotlight barely falls on the belated trial itself. Rather, it illuminates the subsequent trajectories of a trio — or a triangle — of characters whose lives the bombing of the Delhi-bound Flight 182 has affected profoundly, and in apparently quite different ways.

This trio consists, firstly, of the unmarried, single, middle-aged Ashwin, who has lost his sister Kritika and her children Anand and Asha in the 1985 disaster. The Canada-educated and New Delhi-based Ashwin specialises (conveniently for a narrator) in “narrative therapy” or “framing individuals’ maladies as stories within stories within stories, the way people themselves are nested within families and societies”, but has himself been floundering since the loss of his own family.

For him the suspects’ trial in Canada and his return act as a stimulus: a spur to search for psychological insight, not into the mindsets of the attacks’ perpetrators (as has so often been the case with fiction penned post-terror), but rather into the minds of the families of the victims: “this was why I had come”, decides Ashwin, “to find out how these people had coped. Not only how as in how well, but rather by what means did they go on?”

The “means” Ashwin maps are neither wholly functional nor homogenous; nor is his charting of these people’s ways of continuing unproblematic. For example, it is easy to forget that when the living family members’ experiences are related, we see them from Ashwin’s perspective: their survival tactics are perhaps the product of his projections, his intuitions, and his imagination, as he seeks to fill in their gaps, and so somehow make himself whole.

The picture that emerges of the coping mechanisms deployed by Canada’s immigrant Indian population post-crash appears initially dichotomous. The life of the misanthropic Venkataraman, whose wife Sita and son Sundar disappeared when Flight 182 crashed into the cold waters of the Atlantic off the south-west coast of Ireland, spirals into chaos. Volatile, erratic, and increasingly intolerant, he proves unable to retain his teaching post, spends his days companioned by a surrogate family of gifted parrots, and appears to replace a loss of faith with a fervent commitment to facilitating the activities of militant Hindu nationalists: “Khalistan or Kabristan?” Venkataraman asks his parrot; “Kabristan” comes the chilling answer.

Meanwhile, his family friend and colleague, Dr. Sethuratnam, a Tamil Brahmin and physics professor, husband to the beautiful, nurturing Lakshmi, and father to Brinda and Ranjani, two intelligent, seemingly successful grown-up daughters, is deeply unsettled — indeed, terrified — by the experience of their having escaped the crash to which Venkataraman’s family succumbed.

He finds ecstasy in devotion to, and the teachings of, Shivashakti, the guru whom Venkataraman eventually abandons. Yet Sethuratnam’s dependence on Shivashakti leads ultimately to disillusionment and uncertainty, and perhaps a recourse to ordinary moments of solace (for example, assisting at the devotee-run soup kitchen, which serves Lohikarma’s community of down-and-outs). Whereas, the solidification of Venkataraman’s fundamentalist Hindu convictions provide him with a clear and terrifying pathway: with Canada “dead to [him]”, he turns to an exclusive, purist “Bharat” as “home”.

Both men’s experiences seem to confirm the skeptical Ashwin’s own belief (despite the “glow” of empathetic “credulity” that Sethuratnam’s childlike submission provokes) that, even as it may provide a supportive sense of community, “religion has hobbled [his] countrymen” and “poisoned [his] country”, bringing it to the brink of communal crisis and poising individuals on “the precipice of [the] unknow[n]”.

There are certain aspects of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao that seem improbable or unpalatable (Ashwin’s man-crush on Sethuratnam, for instance; or a passage written from the perspective of the bombs themselves, which could have been left out). Yet other moments, for example the confusion and humbling of Sethuratnam following the loss of his guru, are touchingly rendered, even compelling. Also important, although again perhaps a little crudely handled, is Viswanathan’s attempt in this Giller Prize shortlisted novel to write back to earlier, non-fictional accounts produced in the aftermath of the downing of Flight 182. Most significantly, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao challenges the “vivid and dramatic” treatment the events of the crash were given by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise in The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, whose characterisation of the children killed as emblems of Canadian multiculturalism — “stiff little brown Barbies and Kens” — Ashwin in the narrative present (and, we sense Viswanathan herself, who was a teenager at the time of the bombings), finds patronising and repellent.

It is significant that in Viswanathan’s narrative, the Air India attack, and the subsequent directions taken by members of the victims’ families, are situated in the context of historic acts of violence predicated on putatively religious grounds.

The novel starts — graphically, and movingly — with Ashwin’s account of having witnessed the anti-Sikh pogroms which took place during the autumn of 1984 in Delhi following the assassination of the ‘Dragon Lady’ prime minister Indira Gandhi: “the smoke was thick and thicker, as were the crowds, but we caught a glimpse of a man being pulled from a house by his unbound hair, his turban also unbound … He held his arms out, shaking, reaching, staggering. A whole man alight. We reached towards him, we froze. What can you do? These are the smells of a man burned alive…”

Later, one particularly tumultuous passage seeks to trace the origins of this violence further and further back, chasing a sense of “murderous rage” through the annals of India’s post-independence, colonial, pre-colonial and ancient, mythic history. Although no conclusions are, or can perhaps be drawn, the mining of history for an originating moment seems an important means by which to unsettle ideas about the bombing’s exceptionality and link it to a cause of grievance.

However, considering the path taken post-crash by the morose, embittered and increasingly crazed Venkataraman, in particular, I am reminded of the comments of Urdu novelist Ikramullah’s troubled character Ehsan in his novella Regret. Reflecting from Pakistan, in the aftermath of Partition, on the flaws in Congress ideology, which assumed a capacity for subcontinental unity that had failed to materialise, Ehsan suggests: “the general Indian temperament was, and still is, one of religious fanaticism. Despite having lived next to each other for a thousand years, the followers of every religion … are so intolerant of the followers of others that they haven’t made the slightest effort to understand them.”

This disquieting chord is perhaps not quite the one Viswanathan seeks to strike in The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. However, a sense of tension and unease overshadows her depictions — as seen through the eyes of her narrator — both of the sectarian atrocities that swept mid-80s Delhi, and of the ‘moderate’ quotidian religious activities of the diasporic Hindu community in the fictional, multicultural, 21st-century Canadian town of Lohikarma.

The reviewer is research lecturer at the School of Arts and Media at Teesside University and the author of Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie.

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

(NOVEL)

By Padma Viswanathan

Soft Skull Press, US

ISBN 978-1593766139

320pp.