Review: THE EVER AFTER Illuminates at Simon Fraser University

Looking back thirty years ago, the world appears to have been a very different place. Soviet Russia continued to perplex the foundations of western civilization from behind the Iron Curtain, and apartheid South Africa would not see a political resolution for another ten years.

In the Guatemalan countryside of the 1980s, rape and murder, perpetrated by government, would eventually lead indigenous women to stand witness against their former head of state for crimes of genocide. In 2013, former de facto president and military dictator, Efrain Ríos Montt, had his case thrown out, overturned in Guatemala's highest court. Never before in the world had a head of state been tried for committing genocide in a domestic court.

The past is not past. That was the solemn understanding of three of Canada's brightest literary treasures, Padma Viswanathan, Jaspreet Singh and Devyani Saltzman, as they facilitated the well-attended event, "The Ever After," at Simon Fraser University's Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. (Incidentally, Goldcorp is implicated in unjust mining practices in Guatemala.)

The two Indian-Canadian authors shared conversation, readings, and insights under the spotlight, ultimately defaming the Canadian political system for its callous impunity in the wake of genocide and terrorism in India. "The Ever After" was taken from the title of Padma Viswanathan's latest book, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao.

Viswanathan is as humble as she is intelligent, with a mind deft and sharp. She has been celebrated with some of the most prestigious literary awards, and yet is steadfast in her exceptionally thoughtful presence. Her book begins as a question of the spiritual seeker, whose emotional turbulence leads him to embrace formal religion as a way to cope with trauma. In the case of her character Ashwin Rao, his trauma is losing family members to the India Air bombing of 1985.

In terms of Canadian-Indian socio-political relations, the India Air bombing has a very revealing relationship with the anti-Sikh pogroms that occurred in 1984, a year earlier. Whereas the India Air bombing was a blatant terrorist attack, easily condemned and politicized by both the Canadian and Indian officialdom, the 1984 pogroms could not be subject to such a simplistic political exploitation. In effect, remembering the trauma became part of a national amnesia in India, and was lost to subconscious neglect in Canadian-Indian relations.

The nation-state is invested and so controls what people remember, and what people forget. Singh reminded the audience of this painful truth, comprised largely of the Indian-Canadian community who attended the event as part of the fifth annual Indian Summer Festival. Wearing multiple hats in the writing of his book, Helium, he has balanced gracefully along the subtle differences of documentary and fiction writing.

Soon after the Israelis fought the terror of a broken ceasefire in Lebanon, and independence mounted against the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, there was genocide in India. On April 16, 2015, the California State Assembly ruled the anti-Sikh pogroms as genocide. Viswanathan emphasized this repeatedly as a hallmark of progress, with respect to the efficacy of the international community.

Meanwhile, in Canada, The Globe and Mail refused to print an editorial by Singh, recalling the countrywide trauma as a survivor who, as a teenager, took refuge on the streets of Delhi with a family neighbour. Singh is Canadian. While The New York Times was ready to run his story, the premier Canadian newspaper would not publish his piece.

"A real chill went through my spine," Singh said, recalling the bizarre memorial following the Air India bombing, when the leader of the Indian National Congress party, Rajiv Gandhi arrived to Canada, at the invitation of the then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, to lay a wreath for the victims.

Only months previously, the Congress party had conducted state-sanctioned genocide against the Sikh population of India in order to win a landslide political victory. Singh spoke with a charged eloquence, reinforcing his points with an authentic gravity. The gang rapes and mob violence wounded the nation as a whole, he said, not just the victims. "I don't know what happened," Singh said. "It's not become past yet."

Viswanathan and Singh are not only contemporary masters of the art of fiction. They are also, like so many legendary writers of the past, profound humanists.

In Helium and The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, both authors represent how their vocation to truth and justice lives in the medium of composed storytelling. Their books hoist up the flag of the heart and imbue the human spirit with intelligence, reflection and the spirited appreciation for life.

Their stories, both in their literary fiction and from their lived experience, prompt the public to remember not only how certain important historical events are fixed in time, but how they still boil in the social consciousness. Their stories ask all people, whether in India, Canada, Guatemala, Palestine, East Timor, or anywhere, to remember the sanity, curiosity and perseverance that has characterized all surviving peoples throughout the ages.

Photo: Courtesy of Indian Summer Festival

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