The Ever After Of Ashwin Rao Tracks The Emotional Toll Of Violence

On June 23, 1985,Air India Flight182 from Montrealto Delhi was felledby a bomb overthe AtlanticOcean. Of the 329individuals aboard,none survived, andthe attack remainsthe largest massmurder inCanadian history.This tragedyframes PadmaViswanathan’s secondnovel, TheEver After ofAshwin Rao, yet the story’s power residesin its measured treatment of sorrow andrage. The Arkansas-based author avoidscheap sensationalism and easy conclusionshere and offers instead a solemnmeditation on faith and mourning, possibilityand consequence.“Grief,” she writes, “is as subject to theforces of time as every other real thing,from love to trees to stones.”In the summer of 2004, with the AirIndia trial finally under way, Ashwin Rao,a McGill-educated psychologist living inNew Delhi, returns to Canada to conductinterviews with families of the victims.Like those participating in his study ofcomparative grief, Ashwin lost lovedones that day, and he finds himself unexpectedlydrawn to the Sethuratnams, aclose-knit clan whom he meets in the fictionaltown of Lohikarma, B.C.