It's the middle of the night in Yercaud, a lush hill station in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A thunderstorm has knocked out the land line temporarily, but Anant Anantaraman has a cellphone, and he has heard the news from Canada: the Air India inquiry has issued its final report.
He doesn't care. He doesn't even ask what it says.
"My life has changed so significantly that I have no room in my heart for vindication, for putting people in jail, for hate," says Anantaraman. "People asked me if I wanted to be a witness at the inquiry and I said no. I had taken a different path."
In 1985, Anantaraman was an engineer working on the development of fuel cells at federal labs near Ottawa. His wife, Bhawani, boarded Flight 182 to India to see relatives with their daughters Rupa, 11, and Aruna, 15. Both girls were talented violinists, and brought their instruments with them on the plane. Their bodies were never found.
In his grief, Anantaraman established the Bhawani Anantaraman Memorial Foundation, and set up scholarships in the names of his daughters at the University of Ottawa, the Ottawa Youth Orchestra and the Kiwanis Festival. Living in Ottawa was painful, so he changed jobs, even moving to Kingston for a while, but nothing worked. By the 10th anniversary of the bombing, Anantaraman was a broken man.
"I was searching for a reason to live, any little straw, any little twig, to give a point to my life," he says.
In 1999, he decided to move to India to work with poor children. After a disastrous first attempt to start an orphanage in Kerala, he took up an offer from his wife's sister to use her home in the Yercaud, an idyllic spot in the mountains.
"It was a two-room house. I started to teach school in one room and lived in the other," says Anantaraman. "The first year was great fun. There were seven children, and soon I was feeding them as well as teaching them."
The next year the class grew to 25, and now the enrolment is up to 105, from kindergarten to Grade 10. There are eight teachers and 14 classrooms, many of them stocked with books, microscopes and school supplies donated by Ottawa schools.
19/06/10 Louisa Taylor/Canwest News Service/Vancouver Sun, Canada
