The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Padma Viswanathan

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      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, she went to watch TV in their bedroom and Suresh told me how they had met on the cancer ward of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, where he had begun volunteering a couple of years after losing his own children. Hospice: that was where the thin wire of grief led him.

      Lisette’s son had died there, shortly after his fifth birthday. Suresh used to volunteer four nights a week and Saturdays; Friday night he went to the temple. Lisette invited him to the funeral. A single mother, a receptionist. They had married two years ago. He cut his volunteering down to Saturdays, came home for supper every night. She came to the temple with him on Fridays, and he took her to church and lunch on Sundays with her family in Trois-Rivières. Lying that night in their spare room, I wondered, would they fill it with another child? They should, I mused, surprising myself.

      I thought back to his wedding with Kritika. He wasn’t shorter than she, though he appeared so. PhD, employed in pharmaceuticals research, settled in Canada. I had recently started medical school at McGill, and my parents gambled on the likelihood that I would remain, so why not settle her here, also? It narrowed the groom search: there were only five Telegu bachelors of our caste and creed in Canada in 1970, one of whom was me. Suresh was the only one who could get home and get married that summer.

      Kritika was a prize: curly hair, snapping eyes, educated, unambitious. Suresh adored her. I think he also liked me more than my sister did, and more than I liked him—he had a more generous spirit than either of us. Unpretentious chap, for all his aspirations; a much more patient parent than she (though she was warmer to the kids than I would have expected, given how much she was like our mother, no model of affection); a reader of poetry—obvious, sappy stuff, Tagore, Wordsworth, but still; and uxorious, which I admired, even more because I thought Kritika undeserving. Am I unkind? She would have said the same of me, were the roles reversed. The difference is that I would agree. In bleak moments—and most moments when I think of myself are bleak—I believe my solitary state confirms this. I am alone because I deserve to be. But then, wouldn’t the reverse logic also apply to her?

      She had her good points. Not least of which were Asha and Anand.

      Suresh had taken the next morning off to talk with me, and after Lisette left for work, we sat in their small front room. I had never been to this neighbourhood: urban but aspiring middle-class, street upon street of duplexes. Francophones have a higher tolerance for shared walls than anglos, though if they hear anything through the walls, they prefer it to be in French. We sat with our backs to the window. Children shouted their way to school behind us, before the street fell silent. In Suresh’s living room, a white sofa abutted blue recliners crowding houseplants from whose broad leaves dust motes floated into the morning sun. In lulls, we watched a patch of light creep along the back wall.

      He told me of a tiff with Kritika on the way to the airport (she had forgotten to pack a small gift he had bought for his mother); the early-morning call from his sister in India, who somehow learned of the bomb before he did; his trip to India, afterwards, seeing my parents, seeing his own; his return home to his empty house, full of their things. He reminded me how I had come to Canada and helped him clean it out.

      I listened and made notes on my steno pad; that afternoon, I transcribed into a composition notebook marked with his name; and, late that night, I wrote a few small stories about him. I didn’t know yet whether I would show them to him. It was mostly that I couldn’t help myself.