mini
-macchinetta
I carried with me. I travel light, but this is one item I won’t be caught without, anywhere in the world. I had bought eggs and onions on arrival in Lohikarma the night before. Now I scrambled them, squeezed on hot sauce—I always toss a few packets in with my toiletries—and scooped them with improvised chapatis a.k.a. store-bought tortillas warmed in the pan.
Done with breakfast, I readied for the day’s interviews, taking out a fresh composition notebook and labelling it “Venkataraman,” thename of a man here whose wife and son had gone down on the plane. I would not be meeting him until Monday. Today, Saturday, I would meet individually with his closest friend, one Professor Sethuratnam, and Sethuratnam’s daughter, Brinda.
Dr. Sethuratnam seemed to be very involved in this Venkataraman’s affairs, and had told me that it was he who had first noticed my letter and encouraged his friend to open it. Whenever possible, I was interviewing not only direct family members but also other relatives and friends, if they volunteered. It would let me investigate a theory, that loss radiates, and also paint a fuller portrait of the survivors. Also, for Indians in Canada, family friends become the equivalent of family. I was never like this, needless to say, but most seek out those who share their language and their recipes, and raise their children in proximity the way we grow up with cousins back home.
I swirled my second and final shot of espresso into a pan of hot milk, and took it to drink in the window seat. The view: let us edit out the pavement, chicken wire, Quonset. See instead soft, low mountains surrounding Kootenay Lake, which stretched fingers into the landscape’s crevices and drew storms over the mountains as quickly as it drove them away. Three wispy clouds drifted against the black-green mountainside, as yet unlit by the rising sun. Two resolved into figures, so clearly that even I couldn’t miss them. I’m not like Asha, for whom one thing always became another, some crumpled paper a rabbit, her bitten sandwich a ship. The two cloud-figures danced, while the third galloped past beneath them. The uppermost rose, feet in the air, like Chagall’s wife in his paintings of the two of them, she upside-down, smiling, hands stretched toward him. Her limbs pulled apart and she vanished. The sun hit the top of the peak opposite and her partner, too, fled. The third figure ambled briskly forward, a buffalo from a cave-painting. Its hump grew as the sun crept down the mountain; it became a fish, a deer, five little v-sketched birds, then nothing. The sun shone as it had to.
I walked to the town centre, which lay between my apartment and the university. The Kootenay river valley descended to my right. To my left, High Street, where a stylish wine shoppe advertising B.C. vintagesabutted a yoga studio with homemade beeswax candle displays that shared a wall with an upscale vintage furniture store. The air smelled as much of incense or baking as exhaust. Families of tourists occupied iron benches, unless they had been driven off by a homeless person parking a shopping cart in the curbside landscaping. There were a few of those, adding to the smells.
Brinda Sethuratnam had chosen a coffeehouse, Brewed Awakening, for our meeting. Tastefully restored art deco architecture; staff indistinguishable from patrons; lemon bars and Linzer squares baked in-house and cut to modestly sized portions suitable for modestly sized consumers—the type of place where Rosslyn and I used to pull apart the Saturday books section before tackling whatever work we had brought home for the weekend. An hour remained until my appointment. I did some reading. I prepared.
And then there she was: an attractive girl, thirty-five, I learned, though she looked ten years younger. Longish hair, clear complexion, fit and fashionable, though with a twitchiness that undermined her looks.
“I’m very pleased that I got to Lohikarma
-macchinetta
I carried with me. I travel light, but this is one item I won’t be caught without, anywhere in the world. I had bought eggs and onions on arrival in Lohikarma the night before. Now I scrambled them, squeezed on hot sauce—I always toss a few packets in with my toiletries—and scooped them with improvised chapatis a.k.a. store-bought tortillas warmed in the pan.
Done with breakfast, I readied for the day’s interviews, taking out a fresh composition notebook and labelling it “Venkataraman,” thename of a man here whose wife and son had gone down on the plane. I would not be meeting him until Monday. Today, Saturday, I would meet individually with his closest friend, one Professor Sethuratnam, and Sethuratnam’s daughter, Brinda.
Dr. Sethuratnam seemed to be very involved in this Venkataraman’s affairs, and had told me that it was he who had first noticed my letter and encouraged his friend to open it. Whenever possible, I was interviewing not only direct family members but also other relatives and friends, if they volunteered. It would let me investigate a theory, that loss radiates, and also paint a fuller portrait of the survivors. Also, for Indians in Canada, family friends become the equivalent of family. I was never like this, needless to say, but most seek out those who share their language and their recipes, and raise their children in proximity the way we grow up with cousins back home.
I swirled my second and final shot of espresso into a pan of hot milk, and took it to drink in the window seat. The view: let us edit out the pavement, chicken wire, Quonset. See instead soft, low mountains surrounding Kootenay Lake, which stretched fingers into the landscape’s crevices and drew storms over the mountains as quickly as it drove them away. Three wispy clouds drifted against the black-green mountainside, as yet unlit by the rising sun. Two resolved into figures, so clearly that even I couldn’t miss them. I’m not like Asha, for whom one thing always became another, some crumpled paper a rabbit, her bitten sandwich a ship. The two cloud-figures danced, while the third galloped past beneath them. The uppermost rose, feet in the air, like Chagall’s wife in his paintings of the two of them, she upside-down, smiling, hands stretched toward him. Her limbs pulled apart and she vanished. The sun hit the top of the peak opposite and her partner, too, fled. The third figure ambled briskly forward, a buffalo from a cave-painting. Its hump grew as the sun crept down the mountain; it became a fish, a deer, five little v-sketched birds, then nothing. The sun shone as it had to.
I walked to the town centre, which lay between my apartment and the university. The Kootenay river valley descended to my right. To my left, High Street, where a stylish wine shoppe advertising B.C. vintagesabutted a yoga studio with homemade beeswax candle displays that shared a wall with an upscale vintage furniture store. The air smelled as much of incense or baking as exhaust. Families of tourists occupied iron benches, unless they had been driven off by a homeless person parking a shopping cart in the curbside landscaping. There were a few of those, adding to the smells.
Brinda Sethuratnam had chosen a coffeehouse, Brewed Awakening, for our meeting. Tastefully restored art deco architecture; staff indistinguishable from patrons; lemon bars and Linzer squares baked in-house and cut to modestly sized portions suitable for modestly sized consumers—the type of place where Rosslyn and I used to pull apart the Saturday books section before tackling whatever work we had brought home for the weekend. An hour remained until my appointment. I did some reading. I prepared.
And then there she was: an attractive girl, thirty-five, I learned, though she looked ten years younger. Longish hair, clear complexion, fit and fashionable, though with a twitchiness that undermined her looks.
“I’m very pleased that I got to Lohikarma
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