The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (2 page)

My auto slowed in the thickening traffic as we near Indira Gandhi International. Time can be defined by motion, I mused; the airport should be its own time zone. I wanted to be in bed, not assailed by people, vehicles, shouting, honking, business. Can one have jet lag in advance of a trip? I was hastily erecting a Potemkin village of mental activity, to let me get on the plane.

Last spring, I had booked a month in Vancouver, but after only a few days attending the trial, I could take no more. What to do with the three-plus weeks left to me? Try to answer my questions, perhaps. So instead of returning to India early, I retreated to my comfort zones: the university, the library.

Surely others had written about this, I was thinking. Over the years, in psychology journals, I had come across so many studies on victims of mass trauma. Longitudinal, informational, survey- or interview- or standardized-test-based. Beirut, Belfast, Kigali. I had never seen one on the Air India disaster, but then, I’d never properly searched.

After the World Trade Tower attacks, nearly half of all Americans showed PTSD symptoms. How did the researchers think to test for that? They must have observed the symptoms in others; they might have felt them themselves. Had Canadians suffered similarly, following the bombing? The U.S. has about ten times Canada’s population. Three thousand plus people were killed in the September 11 attacks, three hundred plus in the Air India disaster. Do the math. It should add up, but it doesn’t.

Canadians at large did not feel themselves to have been attacked, although nearly every passenger aboard that flight was a born or naturalized Canadian. Canada’s prime minister infamously sent a telegram of condolences to the Indian government, who had lost what? A jet. Oh, and a couple of pilots. No wonder Canada had failed to prevent the bombing in the first place. No wonder they had failed, for eighteen years, to bring it to trial.

And, I learned now, failed to take the bombing up in scholarship. I found no articles that addressed my questions. I looked, though it seemed even more improbable, for books. I found the same three I had read over fifteen years ago, one sensational, one implausible, and one by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise.

Mukherjee: tough broad. I’ve never met her but I’d like her, even if we would almost certainly fight. I loved her novels back when I lived in Canada: she was one of the very first to write about the no-man’s land—or, more often, no-woman’s land—of the transplant. I might have felt nothing in common with her protagonists had I met them in life, but I identified with them as I never had with fictional characters before.

Her book on the bombing was called
The Sorrow and the Terror
. (That title, in huge block letters and lurid flame-tones: really?) I sat with it in the reading room of the Vancouver public library. Much of it was good, far better than I had given it credit for the first time around, back when my pain was most acute.

Like all of us, Mukherjee and Blaise were appalled by the Canadian government’s refusal for six months to acknowledge that the jet had been destroyed by a bomb, even given that another Air India jet, also originally departing from Vancouver, had blown up an hour earlier in Tokyo. Officials didn’t want to admit their negligence. An FBI plant had met radical Sikhs who wanted to blow shit up in India, poison the water supply, disrupt the economy, kill thousands. The newly formed Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had tailed a motley crew of brown radicals who kept muttering to one another in secret code in Punjabi, a language none of CSIS’s west coast agents spoke, despite five generations of Sikh settlement here. Phones were bugged, conversations were taped and sent back to Ottawa for transcription, all routine, no sense of urgency. After transcription, translation. After translation, decoding. (“Ready to write the book?” asked a pay phone caller. “Yes, let’s write the book,” responded the man who had picked up in some suburban home.) After decoding, perhaps alarm. (Wait a sec, is this—?
What
are they—?) But then, of course, it was too late.

And right after the tapes were transcribed, they were erased, per routine, leaving no original evidence to present at a future trial.

All that is laid out in the first part of Mukherjee–Blaise’s book, a very serviceable catalogue of failures. Part two “honours” the victims, telling their stories in their voices, but framing and bending them so that this stream converges with the first to become a single roaring river of accusation: that the Canadian government failed to see this as a Canadian problem and a Canadian tragedy, even though it was a plot hatched by Canadians in Canada that resulted in hundreds of Canadian deaths.

“But it is never so simple!” I said, slapping the book’s face, even though they were right. It was their methods and their tone that I disagreed with—but more on that in time.

Whatever I thought of the analysis, the interviews were a generation old. Had no one tried to learn what had happened to these people since? I hunted again for articles. I enlisted librarians to double-check my search terms. They were as puzzled as I—
What a good question
, they said.
I can’t believe no one has asked it before
. “Sorry, sir. Looks like you’re going to have to do a study,” one gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses told me, glancing away from his screen to flash me a grin, then freezing when he saw my frozen face.

I had been in a thick, paralyzing fog, less and less able to work—I still believed in my work, but had lost faith in my ability to do it. I overcame this tower of self-doubt, this mountain of lassitude, to come to Canada, to witness the start of the trial. This decision, this trip, was the single meaningful thing I’d done in a year, which is not to say I had known what it meant. I had been suspicious, because it couldn’t be the trial I was coming for. Rather, the trial led me to this: the subject of my next book. I should have known, as they say.

Fifteen months later, the trial was still dragging on, and I was returning to Canada to begin work on that book. I had avoided Air India on my last trip, but this time, I made myself fly Delhi–Heathrow–Montreal,
reversing the route of all those dear departed and retracing my own of so many years ago.

At Indira Gandhi International’s security gate, I slipped my bare feet back into my sandals and tried to see the X-ray of my single carry-on through a security guard’s eyes.

I FIRST LEFT INDIA IN 1969
, to attend medical school at McGill, but then abandoned that course of studies during my third year, in favour of a PhD in psychology. It was a move that might have been impossible in India, where I would have been restricted by my parents’ wishes, but that is not to say it was easy in Canada, where visa requirements still meant I had to cling to the trapeze of my student status until some other swung close.

Such a handhold presented itself in 1975, as I was finishing my doctorate. I hit it off with a couple of Ottawa psychologists at a conference. We stayed in touch, and they eventually invited me to join their practice.

The conference was on Narrative Therapy, a term I heard for the first time that year, an idea that, at first, grasped me more than I grasped it.

Ever since I was very young, I’ve kept a journal. Not unusual, you might say. Lots of people do. True. My father kept a journal—he recorded in it the details of his days, where he went, whom he met, what he ate, what irritated my mother. My uncle kept a journal—he recorded each thing he bought and how much it cost. His entire life in purchases. He showed it to me once, with unreflexive pride. He thought everyone should keep such a book.

But I keep a journal differently. I note, on a left-hand page, an anecdote—something characteristic or outrageous a friend or family member said, or perhaps a confidence told to me. On the facing page, for as many pages as it takes, I properly tell the story: third-person, quasi-fictionalized, including matters not witnessed, details I can’t really know; and so try to explain what I have seen or heard.

All my friends are in there. Everyone in my family, except my mother—I have often described the inexplicable things she says and does, but long ago bowed to their inexplicability. There was no sense in my trying to write fiction that explains 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 his
breath 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 Canadian
middle-class clientele. But
disaffection
is too strong. Boredom? Not quite that either, though it seemed that if I saw children, it was for tantrums and truancy; adolescents, anorexia and related rebellions. Adults? Marital woes, anxiety, depression.