On June 23, 1985 Lata Pada’s world changed forever when her husband Vishnu, a mining geologist, and their two daughters, Brinda, 18, and Arti, 15, fell out of the sky into the Atlantic, the result of a terrorist bomb attack that exploded Air India Flight 182 off the Irish coast.
“It’s a total blur for me,” she says of the day she and her brother were told the tragic news in Bombay, where she was waiting for her family, having arrived two weeks earlier from Sudbury to rehearse an Indian dance show.
The young widow remained in India with relatives, preserving her sanity while surrendering herself totally to her art of Bharatanatyam dance, one of the most cherished classical dance forms, inspired by Hindu mythology and celebrated for its grace, purity, tenderness, subtle gestures and sculptural positions.
Anyone interested in symbolism would find a rich trove of significance in her personal tragedy and recovery. Vishnu is the name of the central and major deity of a trinity that includes Brahma (Creator) and Shiva (Destroyer). His name means Preserver, and one of the most common representations is of him sleeping on the coils of a serpent deity over the waves of the ocean.
So, yes, ironies abound in Lata Pada’s story. The 329 passengers aboard Flight 182 were destroyed by fire, yet fire has a dual significance: one of the basic elements of all life, it consumes only that other things can live. And that serpent deity represents rebirth by the new skin that grows in place of the old one it sheds.
Pada was reborn through fire, her major dance piece Revealed By Fire (2001), articulated stunningly in Toronto where she had returned to make her life anew. Married to entrepreneur Hari Venkatacharya in 2000, she had already established her Sampradaya Dance Academy (now boasting 150 students) in Mississauga 10 years earlier.
Pada had to come to terms personally and artistically with her tragedy, so she choreographed and danced the 80-minute work. Critic Michael Crabb called this dance the most prestigious of 2001, and Now magazine recently hailed it as one of the 10 best dances of the past decade.
It was a daring work because in traditional Indian dance, you do not tell personal stories on the stage. “You universalize the personal,” explains Pada. “It’s always based on mythology and Indian literature, and a traditional rendering of a theme that centres it as an art form. It was daring because emotionally and personally it was a difficult work to do because I was enacting the horrific devastation of the tragedy in terms of myself. Who was I as a woman? If my husband died, was I still a wife? If my children died, was I still a mother? What happens to a woman’s identity when such cataclysmic events force you to be in that fire? What it reveals is how that essentiality, for me, is tied in with the feminine.”
Born in Bombay Nov. 7, 1947 (the year of India’s independence from British rule), Pada was the eldest of four children in a well-educated family. Her father was an electrical engineer in the Royal Navy, and her mother eventually had a career in insurance management.
Pada’s name means “graceful vine” – a most fitting description for a trim, elegant woman who speaks with an articulate English accent but always dresses in Indian fashion. She gave up her studies in science to pursue Indian dance, and even when her first husband took her to Thompson, Man., where he was working for Inco, she was able to combine her domestic duties with a social life and her artistic vocation.
“The memory that’s really embedded in my history is the train journey from Winnipeg to Thompson, which was a 24-hour train ride. It was clear that a large part of Canada was, in fact, uninhabited. You could see the tree line literally disappearing. So it was seared in my memory because it really spoke to the vastness of Canada. It was almost five times the size of India in terms of compactness and land size.”
She and Vishnu were the first Indian family in the mining town, but she did not experience any overt racism. “I think to a large extent it had to do with the fact that I spoke English, and that I was university educated gave me a different cachet and a different entry point into understanding my community. I think I was also something of a novelty because I dressed differently from everybody else and I was a dancer. Because there were no other South Asians or Indians, the responsibility of being ambassadors of India fell upon Vishnu and me. So we kept getting invited to the Rotary Club, to the Lions Club, to various Chambers of Commerce, where he would speak about India and I would perform.”
She learned to ice fish, ski, curl, and spend time with First Nations people from Flin Flon, the Pas, and Manson Lake. “I truly see myself as a Canadian, first and foremost.”
Her interest in multiculturalism has deepened further over time. Her latest creation, Samvad (Dialogue), premiered in Toronto in October, and was danced by three young women – one from the Caribbean, another who was aboriginal, and a third who was South Asian.
“They acknowledged very clearly what their backgrounds were, and they acknowledged how that wove into the texture of who they were as Canadians. If you live in Canada, you don’t have to give up who you are, but to a large extent, you have to make every effort to integrate into this society.
“I’ve made an effort to understand this society, to understand the politics of this nation, to try and understand Canadian literature, to try and understand the psyche of Canada, the history,” Pada says.
In January 2009, she became the first South Asian performer to be inducted into the Order of Canada.
“What I’m particularly pleased about is that it’s recognized South Asian arts as an important part of Canadian society. It’s also a wonderful acknowledgement of cultural diversity.”
