{"id":37567,"date":"2015-06-15T10:45:49","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T14:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/?p=37567"},"modified":"2015-08-17T09:52:47","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:52:47","slug":"the-ever-after-of-ashwin-rao-by-padma-viswanathan-christian-science-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-ever-after-of-ashwin-rao-by-padma-viswanathan-christian-science-monitor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan [in Christian Science Monitor]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ever<\/a>The Ever After of Ashwin Rao<\/em> explores grief that lingers long after the bombing of an airliner<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Two weeks short of the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 \u2013 which disintegrated off the Irish coast on June 23,1985 \u2013 psychologist Ashwin Rao makes the reverse journey from Delhi to Vancouver. He\u2019s on his way to conduct research for his next book, \u201ca study in comparative grief\u201d in which he hopes to explore \u201chow \u2026 the [surviving] families coped up? How have their lives progressed?\u201d What he hasn\u2019t revealed to his colleagues nor his interviewees is that of the 329 crash victims, he intimately knew three: his sister and her two young children.<\/p>\n

Almost two decades after the tragedy, Rao concedes, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t only the need for scholarship that was motivating me. It wasn\u2019t only the desire to give the victims a voice.\u2026 It was, as much as anything, my desire to understand what had happened to me. I had not recovered.\u2026 I had, in some way, stopped my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus begins The Ever After of Ashwin Rao<\/em>, the 2014 Giller-shortlisted second novel from Canadian-born (now a resident of Arkansas) Padma Viswanathan<\/a>; her debut, The Toss of a Lemon<\/em> (2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Fiction Book Award Canada and Caribbean.<\/p>\n

Her protagonist\u2019s quest to understand the bombing\u2019s aftermath \u2013 Canada\u2019s \u201clargest mass murder\u201d according to the Canada Broadcasting Corporation \u2013 mirrors Viswanathan\u2019s own: Although the majority of the victims were Canadian citizens, \u201c\u2019this tragedy was not owned \u2026 by Canadians at large,\u2019\u201d Ashwin comments. \u201c\u2019It wasn\u2019t owned by the government either,\u2019\u201d his (former) brother-in-law adds. That 18 years passed before two suspects were finally brought to trial, and another two years passed before there was a not<\/em>-guilty verdict, provided justification for those who believed that Canadian lives of Indian descent were not considered equal to that of other, paler Canadians.<\/p>\n

In order to somehow reclaim his life \u2013 so much of it is now spent alone, without family, without a partner, without the possibility of a next generation \u2013 Ashwin attempts to find some comfort in answers. His research requires extensive travel, but he finds himself repeatedly drawn to the Sethuratnam family in Lohikarma, British Columbia, whom he meets in June 2004; they are his seventh family in the fourth city of his research, but they will become much more than mere subjects over the months that follow.<\/p>\n

Although the immediate Sethuratnam family remains intact, Seth\u2019s close friend and distant relative, Venkataraman, lost his wife and son; since the bombing, the Sethuratnams have been Venkat\u2019s main support. Venkat, like Ashwin, has never recovered. Working with him proves challenging at best, and Ashwin instead grows closer to Seth, who escapes into his fervent devotion to a faraway guru to make sense of the unknowable, and to the oldest daughter Brinda who initially reminds Ashwin of who his lost niece might have become, who entreats him for advice about her troubled marriage.<\/p>\n

The town\u2019s name, an homage to the founder\u2019s mispronunciation of the Finnish word for \u2018dragon,\u2019 couldn\u2019t be more prescient: inaccurate phonetics aside, try \u2018low-high-karma.\u2019 This is where Ashwin experiences a pivotal epiphany: that he is \u201ca man thrice-struck by lightning\u201d but he is, \u201cmore accurately, Thrice-Missed.\u201d Three times, he brushed up closely against near-fatal conflagrations: the anti-Muslim pograms after Indira Ghandhi\u2019s assassination in 1982; the Air India bombing in 1985; the Coach S-6 Ghodra train burning of Hindu pilgrims in 2002 and the ensuing riots. Yet here he returns to Lo-hi-karma to be confronted with a challenge: \u201cYou must change your life<\/em>\u201d \u2026 and so marks Ashwin\u2019s own journey towards healing, redemption, and even the possible renewal of neglected love.<\/p>\n

Family. Death. Race. Identity. Betrayal. Justice (and lack thereof). Faith. God. All the Really Big Topics are included, spanning both sides of the globe. Between the pages are the types of literary references that certain readers will acknowledge with self-satisfaction, from the chummy interruptions of \u201cDear Reader\u201d; to arguing with Bharati Mukherjee and husband\/co-author Clark Blaise\u2019s post-bombing book, The Sorrow and the Terror<\/em>; to off-handedly quoting from the poem, \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d without mention of title or author.<\/p>\n

Beyond a well-read community, however, Viswanathan\u2019s narrative suffers from over-layered sprawl as it combines family saga, didactic history, socio-political analysis, terrorism, spiritual pilgrimage, religious expos\u00e9, and even more. The novel meanders in too many directions, unable to sustain clear navigation. While Viswanathan\u2019s ambition is to be lauded and her prose admired \u2013 she will<\/em> make you think deeply \u2013 be warned: impatient readers may not last through to the unanticipated, bittersweet final pages to fully appreciate her probing explorations.<\/p>\n

Review<\/strong>: “‘The Ever After of Ashwin Rao’ explores grief that lingers long after the bombing of an airliner<\/a>,” Christian Science Monitor<\/em>, June 11, 2015<\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao explores grief that lingers long after the bombing of an airliner Two weeks short of the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 \u2013 which disintegrated off the Irish coast on June 23,1985 \u2013 psychologist Ashwin…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,274,9,6,52,53,6535,18],"tags":[83,84,6608,148,75,6387,10,189,24,51,13,212,6388,39,28,44,57],"class_list":["post-37567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-canadian","category-canadian-asian-pacific-american","category-fiction","category-indian","category-indian-american","category-repost","category-south-asian-american","tag-assimilation","tag-betrayal","tag-bookdragon","tag-christian-science-monitor","tag-death","tag-ever-after-of-ashwin-rao","tag-family","tag-father-son-relationship","tag-historical","tag-identity","tag-love","tag-murder","tag-padma-viswanathan","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-politics","tag-siblings","tag-terrorism"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan [in Christian Science Monitor] - 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