my best to record it the way he had told it, to try to follow the lines of his thought. He began with the accused, those in the dock and the ones who seemed to have gotten away. He ranted about governmental incompetence. Air India had been threatened, don’t forget. Planes were going to be bombed, that’s what they said, payback for decades of atrocities. Air India let the Canadian Aviation Security folks know, but, as happens, the white people thought the brown people were merely asking for a handout. Extra security? Make ’em pay for it. Next! Same with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service—insecurity and stupidity service was more like it! And whatever information they could get, they refused to share with the RCMP, who were working blind, not that they would admit it! He told me in nauseating detail, much of it redundant to me—we had read the samesources—how the bomb was made, how it was planted, right under the noses of everyone whose job it was to prevent such things. The RCMP made him fill out forms, then lost them. The Canadians didn’t bother sending anyone to Ireland to help with logistics—that fell to an Indian diplomat and the Irish themselves. Over and through he cycled—details, details, details—hardly mentioning his wife or child or how he lived his wreck of a life. I was unable to interrupt, to guide him or ask questions.
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
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
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