The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Padma Viswanathan
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question better than the one of the pamphlet on blaming, because mine could not so readily be answered.
My book included my father’s experience, though I had half wanted to keep it out. His life had been premised on a sense of order and justice. Its course was altered by what he had seen, not just the violence but the failure of the state—his nation—to prevent it. I wanted to talk about all this, but not about my mother’s denials, and yet these, too, were intrinsic to his difficulties. He was, by this time, working with victims, helping with paperwork and shopping and so on, over my mother’s objections. He directed me to change his name, but put his story in. He had attended the meeting; he wanted his perceptions recorded. He was right, and I obeyed.
At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to write my own story. Now, writing it here, finally, I am obliged to say that the pogroms had brought on in me a visceral, almost debilitating, longing for Rosslyn. When I closed the door on our burnt neighbour, I closed my eyes to see her sepia-smooth hair by the reading lamp, her look of irritation when I interrupted her. After each phone call urging me out to the demonstrations, I sat thinking of the faint blue veins in her breasts, the way a slim hand had so neatly fit around the back of my neck. The way I had failed to let myself know her, or failed to let myself believe I knew her.
When I recalled her lemon-leaf scent, I would also, inexplicably, think of a white-painted swing, dangling, empty, from a tree in a green meadow. Her hair was the colour of a chestnut horse I patted once, as a child, on a visit to an apple orchard in Kashmir.
When the streets began to calm, I wrote her a letter, telling her what had happened, saying again how I was missing her. I may have been more emphatic than before, though I did not press her to come—how could I, in the wake of these horrors?—nor did I pretend I could leave my work in Delhi to return to Ottawa in any permanent way.
The day I sent it, a letter arrived, her response to mine of a month earlier, when I had talked abstractly of restlessness and usefulness, of belonging and non-belonging, and asked when I might come see her to talk more concretely. Her letter was straightforward and firm. She understood how I felt, but said I had entirely failed to take account of her shock. She was involved with someone else now, someone who, like her, longed for stability; someone who, like her, had no reason to leave. She did not encourage me to come.
I didn’t respond. A month later, I received her response to my letter about the pogroms, expressing regret at the violence—she had heard little about it—and sympathy for me.
How could I properly despair? I missed her bitterly by this time, but my loss was nothing compared to the losses of those around me. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
When I finally wrote her back, in the spring, I spoke of my book-in-progess. She responded, saying it sounded like a book she would like to read. She further—farther—said that she was engaged, and expecting a child.
Heathrow was much as I remembered it from the far-distant past, much as most airports have become. We had arrived in London two hours late—punctual, per Air India standard time—but the partner airline that took over from Heathrow was Air Canada, and so we departed on schedule at 3:15 P.M. The Potemkin screens of my mind got perilously shabby with the approach of the place where the bombed plane went down. Thankfully, cocktail hour coincided with it, right in the nick of Scotch o’clock.
When my colleagues at the Institute for Research on Developing Societies read my proposal to interview victim families in Canada, many were excited. They swallowed the 9/11 analogy, hook-line-sinker; they understood the question as I myself framed it.
. . . the effects, on the survivors, of a unique set of victimizations: First, the bomb, a relatively anonymous act of violence. Second, the adopted country’s ascription of the conflict to the victims, purely on the basis of their country of origin. Third, Canada’s failure to prevent the crime and its failure, for eighteen years, to prosecute it. In what ways are these victim families like and unlike those of other mass acts of terror?
Few of them knew of my own losses in the Air India disaster and I did not mention them in the proposal. One who did, Aziz Ahmed, currently the institute’s director, took me aside.
He asked to see the consent forms the subjects would sign, so that he could support my petition with the human subjects review boards. He also said, though I hadn’t asked, that he didn’t think the proposal needed to include my personal stake. I waited to see what else he would say, and he seemed to do the same for me, his fingers templed against his salt-and-pepper goatee, mine clutching the armrests. A therapist walks into a bar, I thought as I waited. Aziz said nothing further. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t either.
The proposal received harsher treatment from a small flotilla of my colleagues. One was a political scientist who had resented my assessment of his most famous study: “Small questions, medium data, big conclusions.” He said my method could not produce reliable results. Another, who called herself a Freudian economist and was working on some pea-brained notion that Bombay’s slums were not only anus mundi but needed to progress out of an anal retentive phase to, to . . . never mind. She accused me of—what? Parasitism? The two others who didn’t approve had been cold to me ever since I refused to attend their children’s weddings. I sent gifts, wished them well. Why hide that I thought the marital institution wrong-headed? (Apart from my instinctual repulsion at any display of communal emotion, modern marriage seems to me the supreme expression of conformity.)
This small band attacked my methods, flinging the erroneous criticisms that hard scientists have levelled at social scientists since the dawn of our profession, and that we now throw at ourselves: sampling errors, lack of a concise hypothesis. In other words, no serious objections. It made me realize I no longer had anyone who could advise me in my research. My late mentor and analyst in Canada, Marie Chambord, had vetted my prior manuscripts long-distance, but she could not do that from the grave. I thought to ask Paromita, an eco-anthropologist and my erstwhile, occasional lover, but she had recently married. Anyway, we had not been close enough that I ever spoke to her about the bomb and my losses, those matters I most worried might blind me to some fault in my methods, and there no longer seemed to be an appropriate way to tell her. I had a psychiatrist friend, Sudhir, but we had such differing views on method that, though I respected him, I would dismiss his response. I had always trusted my father’s advice. But Appa, like Marie Chambord, was dead.
I was flying blind. Perhaps any flaws or lacks would reveal themselves in the course of the work itself. I hoped they would do so in time for me to correct them.
My brother-in-law Suresh met me at the gate in Montreal. He looked not much different from the last time I had seen him: a little greyer, but then, I wouldn’t say nineteen years had done me any favours. We greeted each other awkwardly. He took my outstretched hand, clapped my back with the other, a symbolic hug, half open for easy escape. (Was he still my brother-in-law, even though my sister was dead?)
I had written to him, and to twenty other victim families, explaining my project. A dozen families from Montreal to Vancouver volunteered to participate; Suresh would be my first interviewee. I have tried to avoid the word subject, with its strange connotations: subject to another’s caprices, subjects of some ferenghi monarch. In psychological research, subject seems oddly interchangeable with object—the thing observed, probed, dissected. Is this what I would be doing? Strictly speaking, perhaps, but strictness is not the same as accuracy.
Suresh had invited me to stay with him, and I accepted. Now, arriving at his home—a new address, not the one he had shared with my sister—I was surprised to be greeted also by his wife, Lisette. Platinum blond, mid-thirties, I guessed, though she already had a deeply lined face. She greeted me shyly in French-accented English.
Supper was quiet, but not awkwardly so. After,