In Touch

While promoting her debut, 26 Knots, the writer and pediatrician Bindu Suresh described a knot “as a complication in the thread of a character’s life.” Such imagery appears throughout the novel: its characters are tied inextricably to the choices they make, the people they love, and the sticky situations they create. Now, in The Road between Us, other entanglements abound. Spanning several decades, Suresh’s disparate plot lines and shifting perspectives throw a group of interconnected people in and out of one another’s orbits as they resist and capitulate to their impulses: romantic, self-destructive, and otherwise.

In the opening pages, Estela, a law clerk in Toronto, calls her former schoolmate Ash to ask a favour. Although inseparable as undergraduates at McGill, the two haven’t spoken in fourteen years. As Estela remembers fragments of their early friendship, her thoughts turn to Roman, her thesis supervisor, with whom she had an affair. “They used his desk, cleared of graduate students’ papers,” Suresh writes. “Estela denied being in love with him, the one time Ash asked.” Shame plagues her as she sifts through memories of the liaison that isolated her and left her pregnant at twenty. She blames herself for everything that happened — from the moment Roman first “placed his hand on her leg” to her abortion, from her leaving the academy to the wedge her relationship drove between her and Ash.

Short paragraphs that sparsely populate the pages carry us into Estela’s mid-thirties. The non-linear vignettes reflect the novel’s focus on regret and memory. Suresh’s elliptical prose forces her reader, alongside her characters, to parse the past and to wonder, What if it had happened differently?

In tracing the emotional fallout from her time with Roman, Estela must confront painful truths about love and aging. Despite the lingering guilt from terminating her pregnancy (and from her younger brother’s death), she considers trying for a child. She yearns for her “own, intact family, with a mom and a dad and one or two kids.” But when her long-term partner, Allister, admits that he doesn’t want any more children (his son, Oliver, died of osteosarcoma much earlier), Estela must choose between their life together and kids. “Regardless of what other consequences there might have been,” she finds herself wishing “that she’d had that baby.”

Like Estela, who sees parenthood as “the only way” to stave off misery, many of Suresh’s characters seek absolution or at least an escape from their suffering. Plagued with guilt following an accident at the hospital where she works, Ash’s fiancée, Ophélie, ends their engagement, with “a single suitcase in tow.” It is not until years later that she understands their breakup to be “the second-biggest mistake of her life.” The few characters who accept their pain stand out. Allister knows that raising another child with Estela would redefine his identity as a father, which is inevitably linked to mourning. Unlike the way of surviving Oliver’s death that his ex-wife, Sarah, has chosen —“to try to forget he’d even existed”— Allister’s sorrow becomes the only living reminder of the person he was when his son was alive. “I can’t again. I can’t start over like that,” he admits to Estela.

Roman’s perspective offers surprisingly tender insight into a character who otherwise appears to be a stereotypical predator. Despite his penchant for younger women, Roman’s insecurities render him rather helpless in their presence. We see him struggle with his own dishonesty; he regrets what he told his ex-wife Naomi, also a former student, about his reluctance to have a child with her. He wishes he’d said that it had “nothing to do with not being ready” and that the truth was he hadn’t “loved any woman enough” since his split with another ex, Kate, who is the mother of his son. In the end, Suresh portrays Roman as something more than a morally bankrupt man masquerading as a caring husband, father, and professor. Anguish, much more than bad intentions, leads him to hurt those closest to him.

Estela has phoned Ash after all these years to see if he’ll testify in their university’s hearing on Roman’s misconduct (though, strangely, her background in law is rendered incidental at most). Naomi, who filed the complaint, has asked her “to go from rival to co-conspirator.” Roman’s inbox fills with reactions to the investigation. “I hope they strip you of your tenure the way you stripped those women who came to your office hours,” one letter reads. “I had thought better of you,” says another. In putting the proceedings at the centre of the novel, Suresh positions the reader — the only one privy to just how enmeshed these stories are — as a judge. Whether Ash files his witness statement or Roman is ultimately fired for his wrongdoings, however, is irrelevant. The consequences that matter here are inner, moral ones; all characters are implicated. Their shifting views show how seemingly fleeting decisions have far-reaching and often unknown outcomes. This exploration of cause and effect culminates with a revelation from Kate —“the worst secret of all”— that throws much of the previous plot into question.

The Road between Us considers an unpleasant truth: that one’s supposedly complex impulses, needs, and ambitions can all be traced back to base desire. Only by untangling the many knots that make up our lives, Suresh suggests, can we reconcile the choices we make, the reasons we make them, and the people we become in their aftermath — for better or for worse.