How many times can identity be hyphenated? What if an emigrant’s new country refuses to accept that person, or does so only superficially? Does death assign a permanent identity? What if no country claims the corpse?
In The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, Padma Viswanathan’s second novel, Ashwin Rao, a Canadian-trained psychologist, loses his sister, niece and nephew in the catastrophic June 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182 from Montreal to London and Delhi. After graduation from McGill University as a foreign student, Rao returns to India. But in 2004, when the British Columbia Supreme Court begins the trial of two suspects, he travels to Canada to interview the families directly or indirectly affected by the disaster. Rao’s therapeutic technique is to turn their suffering into a narrative that can help them heal.
Ava Homa’s collection of short stories, Echoes From the Other Land, was nominated for the 2011 Frank O’Connor prize. She is the second vice-chair of the national council of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the North American director of the Association of Human Rights for Kurdistan of Iran (KMMK-G). Homa is an activist and a political analyst specializing in women issues and Middle Eastern affairs.
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