Remembering the Children of Air India

From her early beginnings as an undergraduate, BC poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s journey began much like that of many in the arts: hard work compelled by nothing but passion.

Saklikar earned a BA in English Literature and, in the late 80s, an LLB at UBC. She then began working with “three remarkable people at SFU”: Jerry Zaslove, Stephen Duguid and Michael Manley-Casimir. It was here at SFU that Saklikar began planting her own artistic seed, studying social justice, the humanities, and education programming.

Years later, she has tended to that seed and it has grown into a collection of poems, offering a revealing commentary on one of Canadian society’s most traumatic events. Children of Air India: un/authorized exhibits and interjections is Saklikar’s first work, and judging by the packed room at its launch at SFU Woodward’s Campus, the poems have touched many.

After her time at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in 2009, Saklikar discovered the words to describe her intimate connection to Canada’s traumatic history. With the loss of her aunt and uncle, who were among the passengers during the bombing of Air India Flight 182, Saklikar looked further into the event’s details to make sense of it all.

Of her research on the subject, Saklikar remembers two things distinctly, “[Firstly], the persistent haunting of the voices of those 82 children under the age of 13 who died in the bombing; and secondly, the discovery that the bomb was developed and tested in the woods outside a beloved heritage country: Paldi, BC, located near Duncan on Vancouver Island.”

The poems are based on — and contain excerpts from — actual records and the resulting work is artistically haunting and unsettling to read, as if the reader is privy to very private material.

Having learned that her home was so closely tied to Flight 182, the 82 children “spoke” to Saklikar and compelled her to write an ode to them in a way that is close to her heart: poetry. The poems are based on — and contain excerpts from — actual records and the resulting work is artistically haunting and unsettling to read, as if the reader is privy to very private material.

She says that “[a] kind of aphasia descends in contemplating [the poems].”

To Saklikar, the action of breath is essential to reading poetry, how it connects to rhythms, sounds, and the beats of lines. In the case of her book, breathing plays a critical role in allowing the reader to feel the raw emotion of the bombing of Flight 182.

“If we think of the breath as related to a poetic line, then in this book length sequence, the breath wrote itself out, jagged, interrupted, curtailed, compressed at time, and, at other times, strung out, disconnected, disintegrated,” she says.

In the tightly packed room of the launch, it was as if our own breathing synced with Saklikar’s as she spoke passionately about her writing process. Saklikar says that talking and writing about the experience made her realize how truly important sound was in the exploration of trauma. “The deeper I ventured into the Air India archive, the more sound became paramount, rather than meaning: through that process of listening, I jettisoned many earlier iterations of the work.”

Drafts and drafts later, the premiere of Children of Air India, in her home province, is certainly an experience all on its own, bringing up memories of inspiration for Saklikar. “The influences I channel come from all over. The Fraser River is a muse, for sure, having grown up in New Westminster. Also, the fact that I take Skytrain everywhere . . . what comes through are the sound and rhythm-motion of the train, the inside architecture of the individual cars, the way the body experiences a journey on the line, east to west and back again.”