Padma Viswanathan remembers where she was when she learned about the Air India bombing.
It was June 23, 1985, and the then-high school student was in her kitchen in St. Albert, Alta., when her father came into the room to deliver the news: More than 300 people - the vast majority of them Canadians - had been killed when Flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Delhi from Montreal.
Since that day, the bombing has inspired all kinds of intensely emotional responses, aimed at everyone from the Sikh nationalists thought to be behind the hijacking to the RCMP and CSIS, whose mishandling of the case led to 20 years of investigation and prosecution, as well as the most expensive trial in Canadian history.
It's been described as Canada's 9/11.
The teenage Viswanathan, however, felt nothing.
"I remember that kid blankness, " she says, reached by phone in Toronto.
"The information comes, and you have no emotional template into which to fit it. It was as though the bombing made me so aware of the vast realms of human psychology that I had no access to."
At school, Viswanathan had been intrigued by uprisings such as the Communist Revolution in Russia.
"But this seemed so random. So vicious. I couldn't understand it as a political act at the time."
Nearly 30 years later, Viswanathan continues to strive toward such an understanding with the publication of her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Random House Canada).
05/04/14 Michael Hingston/Leader Post
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It was June 23, 1985, and the then-high school student was in her kitchen in St. Albert, Alta., when her father came into the room to deliver the news: More than 300 people - the vast majority of them Canadians - had been killed when Flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Delhi from Montreal.
Since that day, the bombing has inspired all kinds of intensely emotional responses, aimed at everyone from the Sikh nationalists thought to be behind the hijacking to the RCMP and CSIS, whose mishandling of the case led to 20 years of investigation and prosecution, as well as the most expensive trial in Canadian history.
It's been described as Canada's 9/11.
The teenage Viswanathan, however, felt nothing.
"I remember that kid blankness, " she says, reached by phone in Toronto.
"The information comes, and you have no emotional template into which to fit it. It was as though the bombing made me so aware of the vast realms of human psychology that I had no access to."
At school, Viswanathan had been intrigued by uprisings such as the Communist Revolution in Russia.
"But this seemed so random. So vicious. I couldn't understand it as a political act at the time."
Nearly 30 years later, Viswanathan continues to strive toward such an understanding with the publication of her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Random House Canada).
05/04/14 Michael Hingston/Leader Post
