The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Padma Viswanathan

placid Rideau Canal. I saw from my bus window a crowd of newly minted Tibetan refugees; a protest, turned violent, against violence in Punjab; Indira Gandhi, with security agents and sons. What could she say? “Geez.” “Wow.” “Neat.”

      I wasn’t telling her everything. Delhi was tense, and dangerous because of it. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was long over, but the sense of her reign as decadent and bloody remained. The optimism that had still tenuously prevailed when I’d left in ’69 was in pieces, particularly in Punjab, our only Sikh-majority state, which was agitating for independence. Indira’s response was to put the state under President’s Rule. What’s that old saw? To a lady with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Being at the Institute for Research on Developing Societies, though, felt like being part of the solution, while in Canada, I had felt like I was hiding my head in a hole. I met political scientists and sociologists who were studying our government, its problems, our people’s response; I saw clients who personified, in many ways, our struggles.

      At the expiry of my second leave, June 1, the IRDS offered me a permanent place. I thought about it, for an hour or so, and accepted.

      Why did I not call Rosslyn that day? Why didn’t I ask her to join me? How could I? I would have had to propose, but we hadn’t quite got to that point before I left—or I hadn’t—in part because of my problems with the marital institution. Our relationship had been largely static in the months since I left. She couldn’t come to stay at my parents’ house unless we were married, but it was unheard of in India at that time for a woman to live by herself, nor would I ask it of her. Would it be right to ask her to leave her family, friends, job, all that was familiar, to come and join me? What would she do with herself in India?

      Really: did I think it all through like this, back then? No. I was revelling in the new force and clarity of my work. I had no wish to wade about in the marshes of my heart.

      It was in exactly this time that the tension in Punjab became suddenly concentrated in the area around the Golden Temple, Sikhdom’s holiest shrine, in Amritsar. The rebels’ leader would roam the Punjabi countryside with his followers on missions of “purification”—violent confrontations with members of other sects, as well as acts of nationalist assertion—and then retreat, regroup and re-pray in the the Golden Temple complex, their safehouse and stronghold.

      For as long as the renegades managed to survive in their bastion, they could continue to wage their war on the disagreeable sectarians and secularists. If, alternatively, by making Sikhdom’s holiest place his fort, their leader was trying to tempt Indira Gandhi to make of him a martyr there—well, he succeeded in that.

      June 3 was a holy day. The pathways and shrines of the temple were pilgrim-packed, as were the hostel, offices and library within the temple’s grounds. That night, a curfew silenced the city streets as the militants shrank from the temple thoroughfares into the sanctum sanctorum.

      June 4, the Dragon Lady’s army began its assault, a seventeen-hour shooting day, with brief pauses for the army to invite pilgrims to exit the complex. Few dared. Reports leaked out: The army locked sixty pilgrims into a hostel room overnight—this was to protect them—but without water or fans, all but five were dead when the doors were unlocked the next morning. Crossfire wounded innocents as they drank from the gutters blood-tainted water, all they could find.

      We followed it all, at the office, blow by blow, shot by shot. We heard later that the generals had never imagined the fighters would be so well armed or so persistent, but imagination is not, I suppose, a quality much cultivated in the army. Rebels popped out of manholes, shot at the soldiers’ knees, then disappeared again into the anthill that is the temple complex. The generals admired their courage and cunning, wished those Sikhs were on their side, as in days of yore. But the only way to get rid of ants is to kill them all.

      June 5, they brought in the tanks.

      Rosslyn called that night, a Sunday.

      “How are you?” I said. “Have you been following all this on the news?”

      “All what?” she asked.

      I was flummoxed.

      “The Golden Temple stuff?” she asked.

      “What did you think?”

      “I was confused because you said, How are you, and . . . oh, never mind. How are you, Ashwin?”

      “Shocked. Appalled. So many dead who have no association with the rebels.” I sounded accusatory, to my own ear, and could feel I was accusing her, though she didn’t take it that way.

      “Barbaric.”

      “Why can’t we all just get along, eh?”

      This time my tone penetrated. She took the bait. “I’m not saying it’s not complicated, Ashwin. I know it is. But it’s not like you’ve told me anything that’s not on the news.”

      I waited. She waited.

      “So are you going to tell me about it?” she asked. “The IRDS has to be buzzing.”

      “It is.”

      “And so . . . you’re still there? Your leave expired Tuesday. You’re, what—you’re just hanging around?”

      “They offered me a permanent place.” So much had happened. I hadn’t told her already? “I took it.” And then it occurred to me to ask, “Are you considering coming here, to join me?”

      “Should I be?”

      I took a breath, which she interrupted, saying, “Don’t answer that.”

      I didn’t.

      “I had better go,” she said.

      “That’s fine.” Did I really think it was? “We’ll talk next week.”

      She didn’t pick up the next week, when I called, or the week after. I was piqued. Why should I keep trying? A letter arrived the week after that.

       It’s not that I don’t want to be in touch at all, Ashwin, but obviously I’m not part of your decisions any longer. I’m hurting. I didn’t see this coming. It looks to me as if we’ve broken up just because you had to go back and not because of any problem in our relationship. Our relationship had no pull? I’m hurting badly.

      She was right that I had seized on an opportunity and an excuse: the work, the illness. Though my father seemed largely to have recovered, there was also pressure from my mother that her only son should be closer than the very farthest point on the globe. I didn’t fool myself that her complaints would lessen in proportion to my proximity, but my father also was glad to have me closer.

      Rosslyn was also right that these were reasons to return to India but not reasons to break with her. I hadn’t known, until she wrote, that I had broken with her. The shock of understanding also brought me to acknowledge the discomfort I had been denying, through these six months in India. While living in Canada, I had been able to avoid thinking of the many ways that I had always felt alienated from my native society. I am a naturally anti-social creature, born into the most social of places. Perhaps I had left India before I could articulate my own non-belonging. But then, the vocabulary of non-conformism was only coming into flower in the West when I arrived there, and it is only now, thirty years later, starting to gain a foothold in India. Spending nearly fifteen formative years in the West had, yes, formed me, in ways I had been denying. My thinking, my way of being, even my English, had changed. I could write about Indians, but perhaps I could have written about Canadians, as well, if I’d tried harder. I wrote to Rosslyn about these realizations, but didn’t press her to come. I suppose I was still not sure of what I was doing. She didn’t write back.

      By October, I was ready to consider visiting Canada. I wrote to Rosslyn to suggest I return for the winter holidays, when she would have time off. I said that we should talk, in person, about the possibility of a shared future. I said, since I was finally starting truly