The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Read Free

them. I also make notes on my own life, though I have never tried to make fiction out of that.
    When I was young, I hid the journal above a rafter in the room where my sister and I slept and studied. Kritika saw me writing in it, but I tried to keep it from her. It was a private endeavour. My countrymen don’t believe in privacy, so I’m not sure how I got that idea. Perhaps some child in an English book kept a secret diary and the notion infected me.
    My sister told my mother about the journal. They found it and read it, then my sister took it to show my friends.
    Only one took it very badly, but that was because the passing around of the journal meant everyone knew about his incestuous relationship with his aunt, which I never would have divulged. He blamed Kritika, and rightly. She was a little like my mother, in her use of an imagined victimhood to justify morally dubious acts. Several others disliked one story about themselves, but found another story to redeem the first.
    I have neglected to mention that I had, some five years earlier, shown my journal to my father. This was when he got me started on writing, taking me to our stationer’s to get a notebook for me identical to his own. On our way home, we met a sycophantic neighbour who asked his help with a court case. My father was reluctant and told me later why. We sat together as he recorded this encounter in his journal and I recorded it in mine. Then I wrote my first story, fleshing out his meeting with that man, and showed it to my father. My portrayal struck him as accurate. He said he never would have known that his eyes and mouth became rigid as he listened to the man speak, that he held hisbreath a little, that shadows seemed to cross his face as he turned away. Juvenile stuff, but he acted impressed. And I felt proud.
    Even months and years after, my friends talked to me about my portraits of them, how these differed from their self-views, but seemed as true, as rich, even despite inaccurate or invented details. They also corrected me. In some cases, I wrote new drafts to show them.
    Kritika, by contrast, didn’t like the way I wrote about her, ever. One story was based on a series of small lies she told when we were on holiday, staying with relatives. Each one cast her as disadvantaged or needy and told how she had gained something for herself: the final portion of a dessert, the window seat on the train. I wrote the story from her point of view, so it wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, but as her fibs accumulated, it became clear they could be interpreted another way—my way. I may have been too close to her to get her right. Or it may have been my accuracy that offended her.
    After I came to Canada, my journal-writing stopped. I seemed unable to represent Canadians on the page. I couldn’t authentically write dialogue for them, for instance. I couldn’t imagine details or deduce motivations. I could write about Indian acquaintances (dinner friends, I called them—Indian families who brought me home and fed me, out of some fellow feeling), but this was a lonely enterprise. They were not, generally, people who interested me very much.
    Yet when, in my final year of grad school, I saw a notice for that conference, “Start Making Sense: the Uses of Narrative in Therapy,” I felt an instinctive pull. I attended the conference and had some excellent conversations. One of them resulted in a job.
    Four or five years after, I met Rosslyn. This was at another conference—“Mental Health Professionals in the Ottawa Public Schools.” I never would have attended except that someone from our practice needed to go. Boring as hell. Rosslyn agreed, even as a newly minted guidance counsellor with much to learn.
    There were many matters we agreed on, Rosslyn and I. It’s nice to recall that, though my recollections depend on my moods. By the time we met, I was already feeling a kind of disaffection with my Canadianmiddle-class clientele. But
disaffection
is too