Padma Viswanathan‘s novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao has just been published by Random House Canada.
The jacket copy describes the book as: ‘… a stunning new work set among families of those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, registering the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. A book of post-9/11 Canada, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao demonstrates that violent politics are all-too-often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril.‘
Padma is also the author of The Toss of a Lemon.
Padma sent me this letter on April 12, 2o14.
Dear Amitav,I’m not sure whether you’ll recall having met me many years ago at Merrily Weisbord‘s place in Quebec. She wanted to introduce us because I had reviewed THE GLASS PALACE for the Montreal Gazette, and was such a fan of that book and your earlier ones.
I’m writing to you now to let you know that my second novel, THE EVER AFTER OF ASHWIN RAO, has just been published by Random House Canada and will be out from Westland India late this year.In the book, a cranky Indian psychologist comes to Canada to do what he calls “a study of comparative grief” on people who lost loved ones in the Air India bombing of 1985. (Incredibly, no such study has ever been done.) Ashwin, however, finds himself unexpectedly embroiled in one such family, and, in telling us their stories, is made to reveal his own.The reason I wanted to let you know is that I make reference, at some length, to an essay, “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” which you wrote for The New Yorker many years ago. I couldn’t talk about the bombing of AI182 without talking about the long chain of violence that led up to it, including the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984. As you say in the essay, remarkably few people have written about the riots. Your piece was a very welcome first-person account of the time, though also I very much appreciated your analysis of the reasons it took you so long before you could write about what you witnessed. My narrative draws to an extent on your descriptions, but my narrator also cites your essay in discussing how to think about what happened.You might also be interested to know that another Canadian writer, Jaspreet Singh, whose home in Delhi was attacked in 1984, has just published a novel, HELIUM which takes up the pogroms. I have been waiting for the book for some time, and just read this glowing review.Hoping this finds you well!Warmly,