Air India novel looks at the power of grief
Victims often get sanitized, denying them humanity, Padma Viswanathan says
Padma Viswanathan remembers where she was when she learned about the Air India bombing.
It was June 23, 1985, and the then-high school student was in her kitchen in St. Albert, Alta., when her father came into the room to deliver the news: More than 300 people — the vast majority of them Canadians — had been killed when Flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Delhi from Montreal.
Since that day, the bombing has inspired all kinds of intensely emotional responses, aimed at everyone from the Sikh nationalists thought to be behind the hijacking to the RCMP and CSIS, whose mishandling of the case led to 20 years of investigation and prosecution, as well as the most expensive trial in Canadian history.
It’s been described as Canada’s 9/11.
The teenage Viswanathan, however, felt nothing.
“I remember that kid blankness,” she says, reached by phone in Toronto.
“The information comes, and you have no emotional template into which to fit it. It was as though the bombing made me so aware of the vast realms of human psychology that I had no access to.”
At school, Viswanathan had been intrigued by uprisings such as the Communist Revolution in Russia.
“But this seemed so random. So vicious. I couldn’t understand it as a political act at the time.”
Nearly 30 years later, Viswanathan continues to strive toward such an understanding with the publication of her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Random House Canada).
Her first, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in eight countries and was a bestseller in three of them.
Ashwin Rao uses the Air India bombing as the backdrop for a larger investiga- tion into the mechanics of human grief, and the ways in which people forge unlikely new connections in the wake of tragedy.
The narrator is Ashwin Rao, a psychologist who decides in 2004 to return to Canada from India to interview the bombing victims’ families as the trial commences.
His ostensible purpose is research: “My therapeutic interest,” he tells us early on, “is in framing individuals’ maladies as stories within stories within stories, the way people themselves are nested within families and societies.”
But we quickly learn that he has also lost family members in the Air India bombing.
There are obvious parallels between Rao’s “narrative therapy” and the role of an author.
Viswanathan says that she, too, believes in “the curative powers of storytelling,” but she was also motivated, she says, by the ways in which government statements and official apologies tend to sanitize the lives of the victims.
“I find it dehumanizing,” Viswanathan says. “When I lose somebody close to me, when I recall them, I don’t only want to recall the wonderful things. I do recall the wonderful things.
“But I also recall their problematic aspects, and their pains, and the ways that they caused pain. All of this is part of who they were.”
Enter the novel: a space where characters, fictional though they may be, can be fully represented on the page, in all their complexities and imperfections.
“It’s important that people’s grief be recognized, and not to just put the bombing in a box with a pretty bow on it.
“Because then you don’t need to acknowledge the political antecedents, and you don’t need to acknowledge the personal and political consequences. It’s just something sad that happened. And I think it’s much greater than that.”