My father, however, would talk about it for years as a seminal moment in his life. He had awoken to a new reality. He wasn’t sure whether it had been hidden from him or he had been hiding from it. Now that he had seen it, though, he would never turn away.
My mother’s reaction would have been strange for anyone else, but was typical of her. She stayed in the house and, somehow, after the neighbours left, came to insist that practically none of what we had experienced had happened. She had seen nothing, she said. When we asked why she thought the neighbours were hiding in our house, she said it was because they were afraid, which proved nothing. When we asked if she didn’t see what was happening on the street, she said we had told her to stay away from the windows. None of it was false, but all was incomplete, and inarguable. She objected to the protests, said we were agitators, that we should let the authorities handle it. My anger at her made it easier for me to stomach the marches, though I imagine her behaviour made it all harder for my father.
By the evening of November 3, the army and police had rediscovered their role as keepers of the peace. The mobs evaporated as quickly as they had formed. Official estimates range upward of 2,700 Sikhs killed; unofficial ones reach past five figures. Undisputed is that thousands more had lost their homes and livelihoods, were made instant refugees in their own city. Relief workers, sociologists, psychologists and lawyers dedicated themselves to the needs particularly of the women and children whose husbands and fathers had been killed.
I was not involved in the organization of tents and cooking pots. Making people comfortable? I wouldn’t know where to start. But a former IRDS fellow contacted me to say that she would like to see whether my therapeutic skills could help these bereaved and traumatized women take up the work of heading their families.
I made no guarantees, but she took me on anyway. “I’m pretty sure you can do no harm,” she said. I thanked her for the vote of confidence.
All in all, I saw a dozen or so families. I tried to help them in redefining and accepting their new circumstances, a task hundreds more managed without my help. They were usually referred to me because of some particular or extreme problem—guilt, debilitating anger, mental illness—that was preventing them from making the necessary adjustments and pursuing what little compensation was beginning to dribble forth from tightly shut government coffers.
The government claimed, much like my mother, that we had not seen what we saw. They set up “Commissions of Inquiry”—omissions of inquiry would have been more apt—whose main purpose seemed to be to shield those to blame for the atrocities. And our crown prince, Rajiv Gandhi, unexpectedly and uncomfortably inheriting the throne of what we had thought to be a democratic nation, passively voiced this summary of the three days of mayhem that his party had willed into being: “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”
He may not have been responsible for the violence, but he was grateful to those who did what he lacked the cojones to do. And after he washed into office a few months later on a tsunami of sympathy, he kept on protecting the perpetrators.
In addition to the victimized families, I saw people in the course of my regular therapeutic work who had been implicated in the violence, and were haunted. Three or four police officers, at least two of whom were on stress leave because they had been held back from acting as duty and morals demanded. Whether the leave was imposed by their superiors as punishment or given to them as time to accept the drowning of their innocence is not clear in my recollection; perhaps it is somewhere in my notes.
I saw a few of the relief workers, whose overexposure to others’ grief was beginning to addle them. I saw some middle-class people from middle-class neighbourhoods, stalwarts like my father, whose guilt and disillusion were eating into their livelihoods and relationships, particularly in cases of obvious disparity between their feelings and those of their family members and colleagues.
I wrote the stories they told me. I gave them back. The stories intersected and informed one another. Seeing this, one family asked for a meeting. I put it to the others, most of whom accepted eagerly. Two Sikh families, all women; several Hindus from the affected areas; a single Muslim police officer; and my Appa, who, when I described the meeting, asked to attend. For several hours, they compared their experiences of betrayal and trauma and spoke to one another across religion and class. Our puny-yet-potent effort at truth and reconciliation.
Their individual narratives, and the story of their meeting, formed my first book. It is mostly about treating individual survivors of a sudden incident of extreme, state-sponsored violence, but it also provided me a chance to talk about secrecy and hypocrisy and the ways they wear on the psyche.
Who Are the Guilty? asks a well-known exposé on the riots produced by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, but the title is rhetorical. I called my little book Who Are the Victims? Narrative Therapy in the Aftermath of the Delhi Riots. I thought my question better than the one of the pamphlet on blaming, because mine could not so readily be answered.
My book included my father’s experience, though I had half wanted to keep it out. His life had been premised on a sense of order and justice. Its course was altered by what he had seen, not just the violence but the failure of the state—his nation—to prevent it. I wanted to talk about all this, but not about my mother’s denials, and yet these, too, were intrinsic to his difficulties. He was, by this time, working with victims, helping with paperwork and shopping and so on, over my mother’s objections. He directed me to change his name, but put his story in. He had attended the meeting; he wanted his perceptions recorded. He was right, and I obeyed.
At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to write my own story. Now, writing it here, finally, I am obliged to say that the pogroms had brought on in me a visceral, almost debilitating, longing for Rosslyn. When I closed the door on our burnt neighbour, I closed my eyes to see her sepia-smooth hair by the reading lamp, her look of irritation when I interrupted her. After each phone call urging me out to the demonstrations, I sat thinking of the faint blue veins in her breasts, the way a slim hand had so neatly fit around the back of my neck. The way I had failed to let myself know her, or failed to let myself believe I knew her.
When I recalled her lemon-leaf scent, I would also, inexplicably, think of a white-painted swing, dangling, empty, from a tree in a green meadow. Her hair was the colour of a chestnut horse I patted once, as a child, on a visit to an apple orchard in Kashmir.
When the streets began to calm, I wrote her a letter, telling her what had happened, saying again how I was missing her. I may have been more emphatic than before, though I did not press her to come—how could I, in the wake of these horrors?—nor did I pretend I could leave my work in Delhi to return to Ottawa in any permanent way.
The day I sent it, a letter arrived, her response to mine of a month earlier, when I had talked abstractly of restlessness and usefulness, of belonging and non-belonging, and asked when I might come see her to talk more concretely. Her letter was straightforward and firm. She understood how I felt, but said I had entirely failed to take account of her shock. She was involved with someone else now, someone who, like her, longed for stability; someone who, like her, had no reason to leave. She did not encourage me to come.
I didn’t respond. A month later, I received her response to my letter about the pogroms, expressing regret at the violence—she had heard little about it—and sympathy for me.
How could I properly despair? I missed her bitterly by this time, but my loss was nothing compared to the losses of those around me. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
When I finally wrote her back, in the spring, I spoke of my book-in-progess. She responded, saying it sounded like a book she would like to read. She further—farther—said that
she was engaged, and expecting a child.
HEATHROW WAS MUCH AS I REMEMBERED it from the far-distant past, much as most airports have become. We had arrived in London two hours late—punctual, per Air India standard time—but the partner airline that took over from Heathrow was Air Canada, and so we departed on schedule at 3:15 p.m. The Potemkin screens of my mind got perilously shabby with the approach of the place where the bombed plane went down. Thankfully, cocktail hour coincided with it, right in the nick of Scotch o’clock.
When my colleagues at the Institute for Research on Developing Societies read my proposal to interview victim families in Canada, many were excited. They swallowed the 9/11 analogy, hook-line-sinker; they understood the question as I myself framed it.
… the effects, on the survivors, of a unique set of victimizations: First, the bomb, a relatively anonymous act of violence. Second, the adopted country’s ascription of the disaster and its precipitating causes to the victims, purely on the basis of their country of origin. Third, Canada’s failure to prevent the crime and its failure, for eighteen years, to prosecute it. In what ways are these victim families like and unlike those of other mass acts of terror?
Few of them knew of my own losses in the Air India disaster and I did not mention them in the proposal. One who did, Aziz Ahmed, currently the institute’s director, took me aside.
He asked to see the consent forms the subjects would sign, so that he could support my petition with the human subjects review boards. He also said, though I hadn’t asked, that he didn’t think the proposal needed to include my personal stake. I waited to see what else he would say, and he seemed to do the same for me, his fingers templed against his salt-and-pepper goatee, mine clutching the armrests. A therapist walks into a bar, I thought as I waited. Aziz said nothing further. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t either.
The proposal received harsher treatment from a small flotilla of my colleagues. One was a political scientist who had resented my assessment of his most famous study: “Small questions, medium data, big conclusions.” He said my method could not produce reliable results. Another, who called herself a Freudian economist and was working on some pea-brained notion that Bombay’s slums were not only anus mundi but needed to progress out of an anal retentive phase to, to … never mind. She accused me of—what? Parasitism? The two others who didn’t approve had been cold to me ever since I refused to attend their children’s weddings. I sent gifts, wished them well. Why hide that I thought the marital institution wrong-headed? (Apart from my instinctual repulsion at any display of communal emotion, modern marriage seems to me the supreme expression of conformity.)
This small band attacked my methods, flinging the erroneous criticisms that hard scientists have levelled at social scientists since the dawn of our profession, and that we now throw at ourselves: sampling errors, lack of a concise hypothesis. In other words, no serious objections. It made me realize I no longer had anyone who could advise me in my research. My late mentor and analyst in Canada, Marie Chambord, had vetted my prior manuscripts long-distance, but she could not do that from the grave. I thought to ask Paromita, an eco-anthropologist and my erstwhile, occasional lover, but she had recently married. Anyway, we had not been close enough that I ever spoke to her about the bomb and my losses, those matters I most worried might blind me to some fault in my methods, and there no longer seemed to be an appropriate way to tell her. I had a psychiatrist friend, Sudhir, but we had such differing views on method that, though I respected him, I would dismiss his response. I had always trusted my father’s advice. But Appa, like Marie Chambord, was dead.
I was flying blind. Perhaps any flaws or lacks would reveal themselves in the course of the work itself. I hoped they would do so in time for me to correct them.
My brother-in-law Suresh met me at the gate in Montreal. He looked not much different from the last time I had seen him: a little greyer, but then, I wouldn’t say nineteen years had done me any favours. We greeted each other awkwardly. He took my outstretched hand, clapped my back with the other, a symbolic hug, half open for easy escape. (Was he still my brother-in-law, even though my sister was dead?)
I had written to him, and to twenty other victim families, explaining my project. A dozen families from Montreal to Vancouver volunteered to participate; Suresh would be my first interviewee. I have tried to avoid the word subject, with its strange connotations: subject to another’s caprices, subjects of some ferenghi monarch. In psychological research, subject seems oddly interchangeable with object—the thing observed, probed, dissected. Is this what I would be doing? Strictly speaking, perhaps, but strictness is not the same as accuracy.
Suresh had invited me to stay with him, and I accepted. Now, arriving at his home—a new address, not the one he had shared with my sister—I was surprised to be greeted also by his wife, Lisette. Platinum blond, mid-thirties, I guessed, though she already had a deeply lined face. She greeted me shyly in French-accented English.
Supper was quiet, but not awkwardly so. After, she went to watch TV in their bedroom and Suresh told me how they had met on the cancer ward of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, where he had begun volunteering a couple of years after losing his own children. Hospice: that was where the thin wire of grief led him.
Lisette’s son had died there, shortly after his fifth birthday. Suresh used to volunteer four nights a week and Saturdays; Friday night he went to the temple. Lisette invited him to the funeral. A single mother, a receptionist. They had married two years ago. He cut his volunteering down to Saturdays, came home for supper every night. She came to the temple with him on Fridays, and he took her to church and lunch on Sundays with her family in Trois-Rivières. Lying that night in their spare room, I wondered, would they fill it with another child? They should, I mused, surprising myself.
I thought back to his wedding with Kritika. He wasn’t shorter than she, though he appeared so. PhD, employed in pharmaceuticals research, settled in Canada. I had recently started medical school at McGill, and my parents gambled on the likelihood that I would remain, so why not settle her here, also? It narrowed the groom search: there were only five Telegu bachelors of our caste and creed in Canada in 1970, one of whom was me. Suresh was the only one who could get home and get married that summer.
Kritika was a prize: curly hair, snapping eyes, educated, unambitious. Suresh adored her. I think he also liked me more than my sister did, and more than I liked him—he had a more generous spirit than either of us. Unpretentious chap, for all his aspirations; a much more patient parent than she (though she was warmer to the kids than I would have expected, given how much she was like our mother, no model of affection); a reader of poetry—obvious, sappy stuff, Tagore, Wordsworth, but still; and uxorious, which I admired, even more because I thought Kritika undeserving. Am I unkind? She would have said the same of me, were the roles reversed. The difference is that I would agree. In bleak moments—and most moments when I think of myself are bleak—I believe my solitary state confirms this. I am alone because I deserve to be. But then, wouldn’t the reverse logic also apply to her?
She had her good points. Not least of which were Asha and Anand.
Suresh had taken the next morning off to talk with me, and after Lisette left for work, we sat in their small front room. I had never been to this neighbourhood: urban but aspiring middle-class, street upon street of duplexes. Francophones have a higher tolerance for shared walls than anglos, though if they hear anything through the walls, they prefer it to be in French. We sat with our backs to the window. Children shouted their way to school behind us, before the street fell silent. In Suresh’s living room, a white sofa abutted blue recliners crowding houseplants from whose broad leaves dust motes floated into the morning sun. In lulls, we watched a patch of light creep along the back wall.
He told me of a tiff with Kritika on the way to the airport (she had forgotten to pack a small gift he had bought for his mother); the early-morning call from his sister in India, who someho
w learned of the bomb before he did; his trip to India, afterwards, seeing my parents, seeing his own; his return home to his empty house, full of their things. He reminded me how I had come to Canada and helped him clean it out.
I listened and made notes on my steno pad; that afternoon, I transcribed into a composition notebook marked with his name; and, late that night, I wrote a few small stories about him. I didn’t know yet whether I would show them to him. It was mostly that I couldn’t help myself.
He started with the baby’s room. He hadn’t stopped calling her that until she was seven, and here it was, again. He stood in the doorway, his arms around an irregular stack of empty boxes. The room was crammed with doodads—a collection of miniature scented erasers; shiny purses hanging helter-skelter from a pink-painted rack; a makeup mirror, its pockets stuffed with Lip Smackers. Kritika would periodically go wild about the clutter, but continued buying the crap for Asha. How could he bear to clear it out? He had to. Much worse to pass by it each day.
Her clothes went into a garbage bag for donation, keeping aside only a silk maxi and bodice she had worn to her cousin’s wedding in India three years ago, and a pink velour tracksuit that made her look sporty, sharp, ready for anything. On the floor beneath the bed, two lost teddy bears and a dustball made mostly of her hair. In one pocket of her school bag, the mush of a decomposed apple core in a tissue. In the other, a creased handful of notes, slips torn from notebooks, cryptic messages pencilled on both sides:
Mrs. G has abnormally long arms. Pass it on.
Kathy said she’ll be your friend again if you’ll take back what you said about her self-portrait.
Dana said she only said what she said because you said she said Valerie has hairy toes and she never.
I got my period!!!!!!
All the girls’ handwriting looked alike. He tried to follow the strands of debate—was Asha mediating or instigating? Was she not paying attention in class? She got top marks in everything, both his children did.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 4