Trauma lingers 41 years after Air India bombing
· Toronto Sun
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If family history is represented by a circle, there is still no closing the circle for one Toronto family.
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“It took us a long time to accept he was not coming back,” Neelam Kaushik said of her father Ompraksh Sharma. “Time is supposed to heal and give us comfort, but we haven’t had any closure yet. We are still hoping that justice will be done and we will have some comfort from this.”
Sharma was one of the 199 bodies not recovered from the Atlantic Ocean after the explosion of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985. Two terrorist bombs ended the lives of 331 people, 268 of them Canadians. Only 132 bodies were recovered from the wreckage site off the west coast of Ireland.
In this case, trauma didn’t skip a generation for daughter Shelly Kaushik
He died a decade before
“He died a decade before I was born,” Shelley said. “We have a better understanding on how these kinds of incidents can affect family members through generations and I think I have been getting an example of that as my dad didn’t know (my grandfather), my brother didn’t know him and yet we are affected by it every day through my mom.”
Even though reality has fully sunk in, in some ways it hasn’t completely as memories and images linger.
“On every occasion, you think that he should have been here and he is not,” Neelam said.
One Tuesday afternoon, the Kaushiks, other family members and dignitaries gathered on the south lawn at Queen’s Park to commemorate the 41st anniversary.
“I know it seems like a long time ago, but for us, every day you live that moment when you heard about it,” Neelam said. “The thought of not seeing my father is still very shocking. For 17 years, we lived in this dream that he was somewhere out there and that he was going to come back.
“I used to dream that he was in the sea and he swam to the shore, but he couldn’t remember, that he lost his memory and that dream kept playing over and over again.”