Namaste

A little homage to Cauvery Madhavan's novel *The Inheritance*

Just after four in the morning, on June 23^rd 2015, Martin Dwyer rose early to drive the three hours of questionable roads from his home in Shannon Town to the memorial site in Ahakista. The weather was foul, the windscreen wipers whining, rocking back and forth at full speed, yet still barely clearing the driving rain hammering the car window.

There was no question of his staying at home that day though. Nor was there any doubt that when he arrived, a stalwart group of Indians would be there too, gathered around the sundial in saris and overcoats. The sundial which was barely three yards from the fury of the Atlantic. The nearest latitude and longitude to the point where…

Oh, Martin knew it. Fifty-one North, fifteen West. Thirty years, a wife buried, three grown children, and he had not forgotten those co-ordinates. His head throbbed.

When he turned into the car park, it was almost full. He pulled into a space and sat in the driver’s seat with the engine off, listening to the howl of the south-westerly and the endless tinny bombardment of rain. The car reeked of cigarette smoke. He craved another one.

Cleared to London, after BUNTY maintain the upper Blue forty to MERLY…

Lord almighty, the place was steaming up. He flung the door open and exited into the howling desolation of southwest Ireland, his coat bunched in his hand. He had to steady himself before he could put it on as the wind buffeted it, blowing it out until it looked like a mainsail.

Much use a sundial would be on a day like this.

Hunched, bending into that gale, he made his way down the path, passing the assorted shrubbery of broom, Atlantic ivy and fuschia. A group of about forty people huddled around a flickering lantern. Some Indian, some Irish. Local people, faces he had seen down the years, faces that aged along with his, but whom he did not acknowledge.

He did not want them to know what part he had played. It was all very well going on the telly, doing it for the documentaries, but in front of real people…he preferred reticence. Of course there was no question of it being his fault, none. Nor was there anything he could have done to save those people. Terrorists had bombed the poor bastards out of the sky. And yet –

He remembered the day before. June 22^nd, 1985. Himself, Tess and the kiddies on a holiday in Allihies. A week of bucket-and-spade weather until the last day, when it took a capricious turn. They loaded the kids in the back, the bags in the boot, then started off on the narrow, dangerous coast road back to Bantry in their Ford Cortina saloon. Barely five minutes out, just as Tess had put the latest Now That’s What I Call Music tape into the deck and Tina Turner was declaring she didn’t need another hero, the entire back left wheel came off the car and rolled down a steep hill, ending up in a ditch surrounded by a flock of inquisitive sheep. There had been cursing and swearing and a sick tummy (his five-year-old son Cillian’s), many cigarettes (his own) until he managed to flag down a passing tractor and get him to call for a recovery truck.

The car would be out of action until the next day, which was a pain in the hoop since Martin needed to be back for his shift in the control centre at Shannon Airport early the next morning. As the drizzle went on, the family tramped back through the village until Tess spotted a gaggle of people outside the village hall who looked like they were waiting for a bus. She approached them to enquire – there was indeed a bus in five minutes, but it was heading in the opposite direction, Cork.

They walked away disillusioned, the multicoloured painted houses losing their charm in the rain, only to see the passing bus slowing down and hooting at them.

“I told Marlo youse were in a fix,” an elderly man in a flat cap in the seat behind the driver remarked, “and he said he could do something for ye.”

The driver, presumably Marlo, nodded in agreement. “If you can help with petrol that would be great, but I can bring you there if you need, after I’ve done this run. Is it true you’re an air traffic controller?” He was surprisingly young, sallow and handsome, with a London accent.

“It is,” Martin averred, never getting tired of the impressed look that followed such an admission. It was almost as good as saying you were a pilot.

On the journey to Cork, the bus filled up, smelling of sweat and wet clothes and sheep manure on men’s boots. One passenger drew Martin’s attention. Just behind Bernard – the man in the flat cap – a small child sat alone, clinging onto his backpack, staring through the window.

“That’s Sully,” Bernard murmured. “He doesn’t speak.”

“Is anyone with him?”

“We all look after him.” Seeing Martin’s concern, Bernard clarified. “His mammy has to work and there’s nobody to look after him. She can’t bring him to school, they won’t take him because of his…disability.”

“So, he just sits in the bus all day by himself?” Tess exclaimed.

“Shush, he’ll hear. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

Just then, as the bus passed the Dursey cable car, the child turned his gaze on Martin, who suddenly felt his stomach drop with foreboding. Sully was dark-haired and preternaturally pale, with huge, grey eyes that seemed to hold the sorrows of the world inside them. Something in those eyes communicated to Martin a foretelling, or was it a recollection?

Old men, women and babies calling for mercy in Irish, as grim Englishmen on horses chased them at spearpoint until one by one they were pushed off a cliff, the crying of the babies finally ceasing as they were pulverised on the rocks far below. Unimaginable horror. But now, more children, now brown-skinned, falling from the sky, necks breaking from the endless tumble. The sea churning below, waiting to greet them as it had the Irish mothers and children…

Martin shook himself like a dog coming out of a river. He could not look the child in the eye, indeed, it took several minutes for the dreadful premonition, or memory, to leave his gut. Tess asked if he were all right, but his only response was to shrug her off and light up a cigarette. The smoke curled up to the bus’s ceiling, already yellow from many years of others doing the same. The kids coughed.

The bus went on to Cork, then back to Bantry, then turned north to Shannon Town so that Martin could get to work on time, as Marlo had promised.

The following morning, he drove to the airport and headed for the control room. It was small and windowless; he worked the Shannon flight information region, not the tower, so had no great need to see outside. He slid into his chair, lit up the first of many cigarettes of the day, then grunted a hello to Ger Flynn, who worked Shanwick. That was a region further out in the Atlantic, before the planes crossed an invisible border and an incorporeal waypoint to end up on Martin’s radar.

Then they were his. He was the one minding them as long as they were in his airspace.

Good morning to the TWA flight heading to London, then the Canadian Pacific, cleared all the way to Amsterdam. And the Swissair approaching from the outer circumference. And the Air India flight, when he got them on the right frequency, cleared to BUNTY. MERLY. London too. But that was just a stopover to other, more exotic destinations. And he, on the far end of this small country, on the far end of Europe, by virtue of geography a Charon of the overworld for these planes. Air India state your position please. Air India squawk two – zero – zero – five.

 Just as the pilot confirmed the message, the radar stacked up three of Martin’s planes, so he couldn’t see them. Happened sometimes, when they were all on top of each other. Inhaling his latest drag of nicotine, he’d pressed hard on one of the buttons to refresh the display.

Two signals showed up.

The Air India plane was gone.

*

At Ahakista, Martin faced the crashing sea with his back to the sundial and the other people. People who had lost entire families in the crash. Bodies, not all intact, being removed from the ocean, taken to the naval base at Haulbowline and laid out in a line near the barracks for doctors and nurses to inspect. How the people of Cork had rallied around the families as they made their way to the city hospital where a room had been transformed into a makeshift morgue. How he had never been so proud to be Irish, but had smoked and smoked and smoked.

“It was my plane. I was minding it.”

He did not know he had spoken aloud until he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around and knew those eyes instantly. Silent and grey.

“I was supposed to be minding them,” he repeated, his voice breaking, “and I let them down.”

The figure in front of him did not tell him he was not to blame. He just smiled, very softly, touched Martin’s shoulder again, murmured something and walked away. It sounded like Namaste, but Martin wasn’t sure. He looked around to call the man back, but he had disappeared. Just as the clouds were gradually disappearing and light was beginning to pour through, first grey, then white, then genuine sunlight from a blue sky. It was a miracle.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes past eight. In four minutes, the beam would cross the sundial and mark the line the sculptor had made along that fateful diagonal, the same one sun and shade had crossed each year for thirty years. Catholic or Hindu, they would pray there together. But the man who had looked him in the eye – Sully? – was gone.

*

His was the last house in the row of his estate, the strip of grass at the front indifferently kept, the paint slightly peeling. He pulled into his driveway, tugging the handbrake tight, and went inside. As always, he passed the Child of Prague on the wall that Tess had brought back from Lourdes decades before. She’d been worried about him in the weeks and months after the bombing, had been on at him to get off the fags. Cancer had decided to pick on her instead, rancid bitch of a disease that it was.

It was all long ago, a time when people lived in muted colours, took harsher poisons and didn’t get better. Where the only people of colour he saw were those Indians at the memorial. When a small child with special needs was barred from school and spent his entire day on a bus.

The narrow hall led into the kitchen at the back. Martin filled the kettle at the sink to make some tea. It was just past midday, and the sun was pouring in onto the oilcloth-covered table, the unswept tile floor, on Martin himself. His mobile vibrated gently. One of the kids, checking up on him. They knew what day it was. They were good to him – had done him and Tess proud.

The tea was so hot it nearly scalded his throat. He swallowed it down cautiously. The sun intensified until he could barely keep his eyes open in the glare over the low cement wall. And in its light, he fancied he could see crowds of Indian people: a child with a chocolate bar in his pocket, another clinging onto a small stuffed toy. A handsome man in his prime, with his black turban and a captain’s uniform. An old lady wrapped in a blue patterned cloak with a bindi on her forehead. They were all smiling, their hands in a prayer gesture, all saying the same word as the man had that morning. Namaste. The divine in me sees the divine in you. Dia dhuit, Dia’s Muire dhuit.

That in the face of such atrocity, there should be space for love, for absolution? An almost wordless surge of love from these people? That the past, thirty or three hundred years ago, could be set to rights? He did not know what he was repenting, but felt…forgiven was the wrong word, but what was the right one? His head and heart were hurting again, he couldn’t think in words any more.

He slumped forward, knocking the mug onto the table, the tea pooling on the cloth before dripping off the opposite end. Steam still rising. His head throbbing again. A choking, bunched sensation in his chest.

Cleared from BUNTY to MERLY, Upper Red thirty-seven to Ibsley, then eastward. Ever eastward.

Squawk two-zero-zero-five.

Namaste.

A pair of grey eyes.

At 12.45pm, Martin Dwyer disappeared from radar.

Note: This story is fan fiction which borrows a few of the wonderful characters in Cauvery Madhavan’s novel The Inheritance, which I warmly suggest you read without delay. It is heavily influenced by the idea of the past echoing back to the present which is such a strong note in that book.

Every summer as a child our family travelled to West Cork and the crash of Air India 182 was an event I was aware of as a child, particularly when sailing in Baltimore Harbour and seeing the infrastructure for the submersibles that would be sent down to salvage the wreckage. Reading The Inheritance, I realised that the crash would have been contemporaneous with the events in the main plot of the book, and that the memorial, which I visited last year, was just a peninsula away from Beara where the book is set.

The controller that morning was a real person, and the ATC transcriptions were taken from recordings of the last conversation between him and the doomed aircraft. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Chloe Howie at Disaster Breakdown in collating much of the material on which this section is based. The rest of “Martin’s” story is fiction. I know nothing of the real life of the controller, but his account is available on several documentaries, notably the Mayday episode. I hope he would be pleased.