Transcription took six hours. I permitted myself coffee at the three-hour mark, while my whisky stood like a Buckingham Palace guard beside the hot plate.
Ann Finkbeiner said that the parents she interviewed had found “subtle and often unconscious ways of preserving the bond” with their children. I had begun to see this in many of my interviewees’ stories. It sometimes took hours of talking for the subject to reveal the ways they had found, and I often didn’t recognize these until I transcribed the interview, even if it seemed obvious in retrospect. My brother-in-law, Suresh, had gravitated to hospice work, comforting other grieving parents and departing kids. Another man I talked to had given up his career as a research scientist to found a charity in India, its various branches named for his late wife and children, providing schooling and medical care for needy kids there. The dancer I had seen at the trial last year famously emerged from several years of debilitating grief to found what has become the premier academy of Indian classical dance in Canada. Eventually, she created and performed a choreography inspired by her horrendous losses.
I couldn’t tell, with Venkataraman, how, if at all, he had “changed his life to preserve the bond.” He was the only person I interviewed who hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Finkbeiner, like me, interviewed volunteers only. Perhaps people who found a way to “preserve the bond” were more willing to talk about the course of their lives following bereavement? Would Venkat be the exception that proved the rule, the one who had felt his family float away, leaving him grasping at ether?
Shortly after nine, I finished. Full stop. I creaked my back upright and tried to straighten my neck. I massaged my right hand with my left, then sat on it to undo the kinks. The goiter-like callus on my bird-finger’s first knuckle was throbbing. The sky was starting to pink.
It had been good to discharge him onto the page, but the feel of him lingered in me—his quaking inadequacy in the face of the disaster; his loneliness, for how could someone like him find anyone else to be with? I had let his emptiness pass through mine onto the page but still it blew about in me, its cold surfaces shifting and tumbling freely.
I should have boiled up some rice and dal and delivered myself early to bed with some poetry to read upon the pillow. I was carrying a leafing-apart copy of Robert Hass’s Praise, left by some tourist at a Delhi bookstall, just as I would leave it here for some other tourist, or maybe even the same one, on the same circuit as I, some invisible doppelgänger I was unwittingly trailing around the world, and who was trailing me . . .
Instead, I cracked open the whisky. An aluminium cap, perforations tearing as you twist, perhaps not as satisfying as magazine-subscription-card-tearing, or bubble-wrap-popping (this latter delight has come lately to India thanks to online booksellers), but quite good in its own special way, the brief cracking of something made to be torn.
It was 22nd June, the eve of the anniversary. All over Canada, we were in our rooms, alone or with others, readying ourselves for the onslaught of memory. I took up a small tumbler. I poured a shot. Shhh. Ahhh. T.
I would never have volunteered to be interviewed in such a study as mine. And now, I could not think of a way I had kept my bond with Asha. I never properly even had a bond with Anand. Let alone Kritika. Who were they? I would never know. No one would ever know. (Rosslyn. Thoughts of her lurked continuously since my return to her country.)
My glass was already empty. I poured a second shot. Remember the Mukherjee and Blaise book? I fetched my copy, wanting to hurt myself. Now let me tell you why it infuriated me. Not the polemics—those were merely inadequate. It was the way they talked about the dead.
They did interviews with the victim families. Suburban Indian parents, who tell their moving stories themselves, while the novelists describe them, and the scene around them, with only occasional lapses into the ridiculous: “The winding streets of middle-class Toronto suburbs, bearing names like ‘Brendangate,’ ‘Wildfern’ and ‘Morningstar,’ should never have known such tragedy.” What? Tragedy belongs to places with ugly names? “Schillong,” perhaps? “Ouagadougou?”
But here is the offensive part. Here is how they describe the children who died:
. . . truly bicultural children. They were bright synthesizers, not iconoclasts and rebels. Every day at school, where mainstream kids chatted around them about drugs and dates and at home where parents pressured them to study hard and not let go their Indianness, they negotiated the tricky spaces of acculturation. These were children with the drive and curiosity of pioneers, but they were also children who took family love, family support and family dependence for granted. They switched with ease from Calvin Klein and Jordache to saris or salwar-kameezes brought over by doting grandparents, aunts and uncles. They ate pizzas with friends in shopping malls, and curries with rice or unleavened breads at home. They were smart, ambitious children who won spelling bees in a language that their parents spoke with heavy accents; they were children who filled high school chess clubs and debate clubs, who aced math tests and science tests, who wrote poems and gave classical dance recitals while they waited to go into engineering, medical or law school; they were children who pleased their old-country parents by avoiding school proms and dances where kids misbehaved, and above all, they were newly affluent children with purpose and mission, who organized benefits for Ethiopia and Bhopal and projects closer to home.
These were our children, reduced to some majority opinion of what they should have been, perfect little conformists, the best of both worlds, untouched by darkness or dirt or curiosity. No iconoclasts. No rebels. No thinkers. No individuals. Stiff little brown Barbies and Kens.
Tch-tch, Canada, your loss, not India’s. Is that right? Get this: their chastity-obedience-intelligence had nothing to do with whether they deserved to be acknowledged as Canadians. Those children weren’t deserving of investigative attention because of their virtues. They deserved to live because they were alive. They were Canadian because they were born or raised here.
Besides, Mukherjee and Blaise are novelists. They should have known better.
I hate the sentimentalizing. I hate the saint-making. I hate that I hate. I threw the book down, poured another shot and raised it. A toast! Congrats, bombers! Conviction or no conviction, you did it.
On a wrought-iron chair on my balcony, I watched the Quonset’s aluminium roof grow roseate. My whisky blazed in the syrupy sunset. A memory blazed in my mind: a man—which man, which?—dying on my family’s street. The bombers took his revenge. The government would take ours. And then? What next? It was absurd! To “prove” these men’s individual culpability would change nothing.
Was this why I was so violently uninterested in who the accused bombers were, as men, as individuals? Alone in a room with them, what would I do? Anyway, I was not alone with them. They were off limits to me, with good reason. I was alone with myself, about whom I have mixed feelings. The whisky wobbled a little in my glass, but I steadied it, and drank.
Nineteen eighty-five: a year and a half since I’d moved back to India. The unforeseen bloody horrors of the past year—the Golden Temple invasion, assassination, pogroms—had made me go over and over my list of reasons for coming back, had seen them diminish as personal motivations even as their intrinsic importance increased. And Rosslyn’s news—engagement and pregnancy!—increased my self-doubt to the point of vertigo, even as I knew that my work was more meaningful than ever.
So as June approached, and with it the North American school holidays, when Kritika and the children would visit, when, with my parents, we would all take the train together to a hill station where my parents had