Mind Picker: The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao has a promising premise: On June 23, 1985, Sikh terrorists planted a bomb on Air India Flight 182, and while en route from Montreal to Delhi (via London), the plane exploded over Irish airspace, killing all aboard, including 268 Canadian citizens. As a percentage of our population, this was Canada's 9/11 moment, but it failed to provoke national mourning, and as Padma Viswanathan writes in this book, Canadians saw it as "an act of brown-on-brown terrorism that a (nearly entirely) white government failed to prevent or even properly to investigate." As she reminds us, the Canadian Prime Minister at the time, Brian Mulroney, called the Indian Prime Minister to offer condolences -- as though this was their tragedy, not ours. Eighteen years later, as two suspects are finally being brought to trial, Ashwin Rao -- an Indian psychotherapist who was trained at McGill -- returns to Canada to interview the families of the Air India victims. Rao is a practitioner of Narrative Therapy:

My therapeutic interest is in framing individuals' maladies as stories within stories within stories, the way people themselves are nested within families and societies…My challenge is to tell the story on the individual's terms, giving a nuanced sense of his problems' origins -- in himself, in his community, in societal expectations.

What this means is that Rao is trained to listen to a person's discourse, and then with some practised intuition, can write the person's story out, adding all of the background and surroundings details that they might not realise are contributing to their current problems, and then he shares the fictionalised version, collaboratively tweaking details where necessary. With the start of the trial, Rao intends to write a book about the lives of the families of the Air India victims in the style of this Narrative Therapy; declining to share with his interview subjects the fact that he, too, lost family in the explosion; his sister and her two children.

That's what the beginning of this book appears to be about -- and I was intrigued to learn more about the Air India bombing and thought the format would lend itself well to exposing the Indian-Canadian community's grief and outrage -- but after showing Rao interviewing his former brother-in-law, the therapist's account jumps to the town of Lohikarma, B.C., and becomes centered on one family that Rao encounters there (noted as the fourth town, seventh family, although we don't meet any of the others). Through his encounters with Dr. Sethuratnam (known as "Seth", a physics professor who reminds Rao of his own father) and his daughter Brinda (who reminds Rao of his dead niece), Rao is mindful of his own life story and "the three lightning strikes" that spared him (which are the three Indian-on-Indian tragedies that affected him without harming him). Most of the rest of the book alternates between the telling of Rao's biography and Seth's growing attachment to a guru (whom he thinks of as God-on-Earth), and it was never clear to me whether Seth's experiences were real or merely Rao's fictionalised imaginings as he performed Narrative Therapy on himself. If they were meant to be Seth's literal story, they took up a huge chunk of the book for uncertain purposes -- the character is even peripheral to the Air India tragedy -- but being a physics professor, he is able to introduce Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and multiverses to the Hindu worldview (a connection I always like to read about, but doesn't really move the story forward).

As Rao looks at the big picture and tries to establish root causes for Sikh terrorism -- the Air India bombing was a response to anti-Sikh progroms in India, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi following the storming of the Golden Temple…going back to the Punjab at the dawn of the sixteenth century -- he seems to be making the case that this was "brown-on-brown terrorism" that just happened to have been perpetrated from Canadian soil and that seemed to undermine any useful point this book could have been making.

And as for the writing, there were some poetic passages, that while lovely, seemed out of place:

One upon a time -- here, I cannot be specific -- Hinduism arose, perhaps on the soil south of the Indus; perhaps brought by Northern invaders. Without Hinduism, there would not have been Sikhism. Without India, could there be Empire? Without Empire, could there be radicalizing? Without Canada, could there have been a bomb?
Once upon a time: poetry, syncetism, mysticism, death.
Once upon a time: evolution, matter, being.
Once upon a time: time.

And more than once, as Rao is telling his own life story, he'll say something like, "Count on a therapist for a fancy prose style" or apologises for "yet another laboured metaphor", and unless this is a reminder that Rao is a Narrative Therapist (and is meant to alert the reader to the semi-fictionalised nature of his methods) then it's unnecessarily self-conscious and distracting. And don't get me started on the surprise near the end -- talk about unnecessary.

I know it's pointless to be disappointed when a book doesn't turn out to be what I was expecting, but this feels like such a lost opportunity. At least Viswanathan attracted the attention of the Giller Prize judges with this effort.