In search of solace

Padma Viswanathan says not much has been written about the 1985 Air India bombing, on which her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, is based

February 23, 2015 07:04 pm | Updated February 24, 2015 02:16 pm IST

The alchemist Padma: ‘I live through what I have researched through my characters’

The alchemist Padma: ‘I live through what I have researched through my characters’

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is set in a tragedy that has faded away in public memory — the 1985 Air India Bombing. Canadian author, Padma Viswanathan’s second book has Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, as its central character. He returns to Canada to interview relatives and friends of the victims of the bombings. “The novel focuses on the political antecedents and consequences of the disaster,” says Padma, when she was in town for the launch of the book, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2014.

“Ashwin interviews 12 families in Lohikarma, a town I invented, and meets Seth, who is a charismatic and a warm person. He asks Ashwin, who did you lose on that plane?” While Ashwin does his “study of comparative grief”, he doesn’t mention that he, too, had family members who died on the plane.

Padma says her original intention was to write about Seth. “He is a physics professor and a devotee of a very popular Indian guru. Seth’s wife and his two daughters are unconvinced by his devotion to his Guru. I thought, what would make Seth attached to a Guru? He comforted a friend through the loss of his wife and son in the bombing of the Air India flight. That shock brings him to his guru.”

Air India Flight 182 was bombed, while on its way from Montreal to New Delhi, and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 on board. Most of the causalities were Indian-Canadians. The attacks are believed to have been carried out by the Canada-based Khalistani group, Babbar Khalsa. After almost two decades, in 2004, two suspects were put on trial. “There have been no in-depth studies on the 1985 bombing. Bharati Mukherjee wrote about it,” says Padma. “The Canadian government failed to acknowledge it as a Canadian loss. A whole generation grew up in Canada in limbo with regards to the tragedy. It brought us into a new space of consciousness in Canada.” Padma says she was conscious of not generalising the grief the families felt, but “to show the intimate and unexpected consequences in their minds and in their lives.”

Padma’s debut novel The Toss of a Lemon is set in South India, and opens at the turn of the 20th Century. “Sivakami, after losing her husband Hanumarathnam, collaborates with her gay manservant to raise her children. Some people were attracted to the book because it is an opposite way of seeing the world, from someone else’s point of view, different from your own. The Toss of a Lemon is about a mother making choices for her children and living with those choices. Italians loved the book.

Padma says research does not overwhelm the plot of her stories. “I love to do research. There’s a freedom of pursuing information and understanding with fiction. I live through what I have researched through my characters. Otherwise the information sits like a lump in the story. The information has to give the reader some background. It has to advance the plot and characters.”

“There is something alchemical about writing,” she adds. “An idea takes root and I become obsessed with it. When I started writing, I wrote a play. I came to theatre as a social activist. I was never a theatre person in the way I was a reader. Prose in many ways felt much more like a natural home.”

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