When the bomb struck, my first thoughts were not for the suffering of others. Except my parents. Well, except my father.
How was Suresh? How were these people around me? These people like me?
In the therapeutic context, such a question would be no problem. I am a psychologist. Put me across from a client and I will ask, intuit, tease or ferret out everything either of us needs to know. Surrounded by the crowds at the trial, though, I didn’t know where to start. Every two hours, after each break in the trial (lawyers need their Starbucks), I would have someone new next to me, such as the heavy woman in a salwar kameez whose aroma of frying dough couldn’t quite cover an inky, pooling despair, or the tiny, twiggy-smelling couple in outdated business suits who sat without touching until, hearing some detail I didn’t catch, they took each other’s hands without meeting each other’s eyes. Across the room, I saw a famous dancer whose husband and daughters had been killed. She had become active in the victims’ advocacy group, and I had seen her name and photo in news reports. She had remarried, a gentleman whose wife and children had been on that same plane.
This was why I had come, I realized, to find out how these people had coped up. Not only how as in how well, but rather by what means did they go on?
There were so many of them there, but not a single one I could sit down with and ask. I should have contacted Suresh, I thought, then. Was he still in Montreal? Was he still alive? Who had he become in the years since losing his family—since losing my family?
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 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 loved her novels 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.
