He had an intentness I didn’t remember. He truly wanted to understand.
“There’s media coverage, true, but no scholarship that I could find. Has anyone else talked to you?”
His expression suggested no one would want to. “I keep a low profile.”
“So you see.” I tried to sound convincing, but the more I talked, the less assured I felt.
“I don’t see, Ashwin.” He put his hand on my knee. “I’m happy to talk to you, if it’s important, but why dredge this up? Let it lie.”
It was only now that I realized: not only had I said nothing to my colleagues about my bereavement, I had said nothing about it in my letters to the victim families.
Okay, I thought, that was wrong. But I did nothing to correct it.
It wasn’t only the need for scholarship that was motivating me. It wasn’t only the desire to give the victims a voice. (As one grieving man had said to Mukherjee and Blaise, “‘We are so wanting to talk! That wanting to talk is in all of us . . . we who have lost our entire families. We have nothing left except talk.’” That was eighteen years ago, but so many were still wanting to talk.)
It was, as much as anything, my desire to understand what had happened to me. I had not recovered. Did anyone, from so severe a blow? Perhaps not, but I had, in some way, stopped my life. This, I suspected, might be less true for the others. It didn’t seem to be true of Suresh, or he didn’t feel it to be. How or why did some absorb loss into life’s flood-plains, while others erected a dam?
JUNE 19, 2004
Lohikarma, B.C. Fourth town, seventh family.
I arose with the dawn, my habit. Canada was terrible for me that way: despite many years here, I never managed to wake long before first light in winter, long after in summer. I cracked a window to fan out the fug of night gas and snore breath. That smell, akin to stale popcorn, can linger, even in a large room. A faint priapism deflated as my pyjama and kurta cooled in the morning air. Twelve degrees Celsius perhaps? Like October in Delhi. I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror, the double-bagged eyes, the beginnings of jowls to rival the cat’s. My cat. Had anyone—my widow, perhaps—taken over his feeding? I cranked the shower, pulled my kurta over my head, and was enveloped for a moment in the smell from my own pores, something dark and leafy, with the tang of iron. Cooked spinach? Lovely. I gagged a little, stepped into the coursing water, coated myself with strong soap, then antiperspirant, then aftershave. Sandalwood, bergamot, lime. By night the spinach would chew its way to the surface again, but then I would quell it with Scotch. The pleasures of a day fully lived.
I was accommodated in a self-contained suite at the top of a house. The owner rented it to holidayers, along with two suites on the ground floor; the middle was occupied by a dentist. At the back, where one entered my flat, off the fire escape, were two large windows. I took in the view before going out to find a newspaper: majestic mountains supporting an endless sky where the morning sun was carving mists away from the day’s clean promise, everything any visitor to Canada and particularly the beautiful province of British Columbia could want, but also (eyes dropping to take in a sweeping palette of industrial greys) back-alley-cum-parking-lot, chicken-wire fence, and dirt-dusted, supersized, aluminium Quonset. My guess: a curling rink. These ruddy northerners do love to sport on ice.
I eased the morning stiffness from my knees, descending the stairs of iron and air that climbed the back of the building. Walking around to the front and through the garden in the moist morning, toward the rising sun and the newspaper box across the street, I was entangled by a plague of green worms descending on sticky filaments. I should have backed off and found a way to bypass them, but instead I swore and flailed until all the strings were broken, the caterpillars all over me, then I swore some more and crushed and brushed them off.
Back in my room, I set the coffee to decoct, and opened the paper to search for a mention of the trial.
Last spring, the prosecution had opened dramatically, broad hints of intrigue and newly unearthed information setting the gathered families alight with speculation and hope. Then came weeks of hysterically banal minutiae: ticket purchase, baggage checking, details nearly universally known. Some heartbreaking, if irrelevant, moments, such as testimony from the stalwart Irish sailors who had fished bodies from their seas; as well as misleading ones, such as a suggestion that the Canadian spy agency had had a mole inside the terrorist cell until shortly before the bombing occurred, a mystery never solved. Then came a long summer break, occasioned by the prosecution’s attempts to shorten the process by presenting witness reports instead of witnesses. They could have pressed on. Instead, they pissed off.
The fall brought more testimony, more research, more witnesses, a growing weight of information. And so the trial sank down through the newspapers, off the front pages, out of the public eye. I could go days now and find not a mention in the press.
But look: this morning, Canada’s National Newspaper had published an article on the trial, a moment that might prove crucial—though who knew? A bookseller testified that he had given a book about the bombing to a star witness for the prosecution, bolstering accusations that the witness, “Ms. D,” had repeated what she had read, not what she had witnessed. As with all the trial news, I felt a detachment both familiar and disturbing.
Ms. D’s identity was masked by witness protection. She had been whisked away from her life years earlier. Death threats against those with inside information about the bombing were not uncommon. The publisher of a community newspaper, a man who had been part of the same Sikh-nationalist circles as the bombers but then began speaking out against them, had been killed.
In the courtroom, Ms. D’s identity was no secret. Plenty of those present knew her as the former employee of one of the accused. She said they were in love, although the affair had remained nobly platonic, with both of them married. When she testified, on October 31, 2003, she started with a description, under duress, of the hold he had on her. She loved him still, she said, though he had fully confessed to her his role in the bombing.
Her challengers, in cross-examination, said she was making this up. Wanting revenge for losing her job. How could she love someone as evil as he sounded? She stuck to her guns, but now, ten months later, the defence brought a witness who claimed Ms. D owned a book about the bomb plot, Soft Target, which contained all the details she was now regurgitating, including errors of a sort she couldn’t have made up on her own.
The sun was nearly above the horizon, and coffee was gargling up into the top of the mini-macchinetta I carried with me. I travel light, but this is one item I won’t be caught without, anywhere in the world. I had bought eggs and onions on arrival in Lohikarma the night before. Now I scrambled them, squeezed on hot sauce—I always toss a few packets in with my toiletries—and scooped them with improvised chapatis a.k.a. store-bought tortillas warmed in the pan.
Done with breakfast, I readied for the day’s interviews, taking out a fresh composition notebook and labelling it “Venkataraman,” the name of a man here whose wife and son had gone down on the plane. I would not be meeting him until Monday. Today, Saturday, I would meet individually with his closest friend, one Professor Sethuratnam, and Sethuratnam’s daughter, Brinda.
Dr. Sethuratnam seemed to be very involved in this Venkataraman’s affairs, and had told me that it was he who had first noticed my letter and encouraged his friend to open it. Whenever possible, I was interviewing not only direct family members but also other relatives and friends, if they volunteered. It would let me investigate a theory, that loss radiates, and also paint a fuller portrait of the survivors. Also, for Indians in Canada, family friends become the equivalent of family. I was never like this, needless to say, but most seek out those who share their language and their recipes, and raise their children in proximity the way we grow up with cousins back home.
I swirled my second and final shot of espresso