Paper Cranes

Remembering Hiroshima

I was born in Bombay in 1949, four years after the United States detonated a nuclear bomb that wiped out the city of Hiroshima.

That September morning, my mother was getting dressed to go for an early morning walk with her sister, my aunt Amy. Halfway through wrapping her sari around her substantial belly, my mother went into labour, her contractions, intense, fast, with barely breathing room between them. A short while later, I arrived.

My aunt, who was a gynaecologist, delivered me into the world on my parents’ four-poster bed. Laughing, she said: “This baby came out like an atom bomb. Let’s name her Hiroshima!”

She was joking, of course. My aunt was a happy, sunny, woman whose voice I hear today in my granddaughter’s laughter. My father, on the other hand, was a life-long socialist whose thinking had been profoundly shaped by the struggle for Indian independence from British colonial rule. The devastation of Hiroshima was one of the defining events of his life. He named me Hiroshima.

My father believed in the power of truth. Even when I was very young, he answered my incessant questions clearly, comprehensively without condescension. Our conversations ranged from politics to law, philosophy, natural history, anthropology, music, poetry, and more. We shared the morning newspaper at the breakfast table and discussed the happenings of the day at dinner. He was a wonderful storyteller, who made history come alive. Ever since I could read – starting about age three -- I had free run of his library, whose floor to ceiling shelves filled our home.

So, I knew more about the Second World War than most kids my age; about promises made and broken by the British government to get Indian troops to risk their lives in defense of their colonial masters. About the war in the Pacific, the brutal Japanese colonization of much of Asia, and the racist agendas that seethed beneath the surface of the U.S. decision to unleash a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.

When my dad said: “I gave you this name so what happened will be remembered”, he entrusted me with something sacred, and – human memory being what it is -- fragile. He invited me into the unfolding story of Hiroshima.

For most of my childhood, my name felt like boulders in my belly. Nobody knew how to pronounce it; it made people uncomfortable, so they joked, “Is your sister’s name Nagasaki?” I hadn’t met anyone else whose name carried such a weight of death and destruction.

More than eighty thousand people died in Hiroshima that morning of August 6th, 1945. Many thousands more died of radiation poisoning in the years that followed.

I carried this knowledge inside me like a secret – one that no-one spoke about, just as they never spoke of the poverty, hunger, and death that stalked the streets of Bombay.

This was the world I had chosen to be born into, and, as a young child, I tried different ways to wrap my arms around the tensions between the love that had brought me into incarnation, into the sacred gift of this particular life, into the wild beauty of ocean and sky, mountains and mud, and into a world fractured by pain, disease, violence, injustice and suffering.

It’s been the journey of a lifetime, holding these tensions in relationship with each other, understanding the part they play in my own development and in that of the planet we share. Learning to recognize and trust my soul’s vision for my life and for all life. Learning to trust my senses, my inner knowing, and to check these against the emergent knowledge offered by science, poetry, and art. Falling in love with this world, with its heartbreak and glory, and learning to hold it in my heart, lightly, lightly, even when that seems impossible.

When I was ten years old, I won an international essay contest sponsored by UNESCO, in local partnership with the Japan-India Friendship Foundation, and the Japanese news conglomerate, Yomiuri Shimbun. In my essay, I wrote about my name. I wrote about what it meant to me; what I understood about Hiroshima’s place in human history; about how the world changed the day one country decided that another’s population would die in a nuclear conflagration.

That October of 1960, accompanied by an escort, I flew to Tokyo for a month-long tour as the UNESCO child ambassador to Japan.

Our first two weeks there, we were based in Tokyo, with brief visits to Nikko, Osaka, and Kyoto. Because this was an “official” trip, there were banquets and television cameras, media interviews, ribbon cuttings, speeches, and visits to schools most days.

Our first formal banquet in Tokyo was hosted by (I think – my memory is hazy here) the chairman of Nippon TV, whose name I want to say was Mr. Suzuki. Many practical details have drifted away over the past sixty-five years, and I can’t be sure if I am remembering his name correctly. Since that’s how I’ve always thought of him, that’s the name I will call him by.

I can see him now, all these decades later. Slender, patrician face; fine lines across a broad forehead; thick, white hair sprung back from a widow’s peak; dark suit; kind, sorrowful eyes. Throughout my life there have been times when I’ve met people whom I recognize instantly as soul friends – he was one of them.

When we walked into the banquet room, he was seated at the head of a long table. There were dozens of others at the table, and at other tables too, rows of men in dark suits, white shirts, solemn faces. White tablecloths. Flowers. Murmuring voices.

I was ushered to a seat next to Mr. Suzuki by the Japanese translator, who introduced me to him with a formal bow. Smiling, he had half-risen from his seat when he heard my name. His smile congealed to marble; his eyes brimmed with monsoon clouds. Bowing abruptly, he pushed his chair back, said something to the translator, and left the room.

There was a shocked silence. I turned to the translator, wondering what had happened, feeling the awful weight of grief that had descended on us all like a shroud. The translator swallowed, then murmured: “Please forgive. His family died in Hiroshima.“

The next morning, an invitation was delivered to my hotel room. I was to have tea that afternoon with Mr. Suzuki, at his home. He requested that I come by myself, without escort or translator. He would send a car for me.

His housekeeper ushered me into his living room, its spacious volume filled with light quivering through shoji-screened windows. I felt the peace of this place. My heart at rest, I felt at home.

Folding doors along one wall opened onto a lush Japanese garden, unlike any garden I’d ever seen. At first, it seemed wild, a private forest, fragrant, shades of viridian, olive, emerald, mint; flashes of red, pink, white. Then, a hidden order revealed itself, slowly, dark against light, rock against feathery azalea. A stone pathway wound through the trees to a teahouse pavilion half hidden by red-leafed maples, cypress, pines; other trees and shrubs whose names I didn’t know. A little stream sang over rounded black stones, splashing into a pond where fat goldfish glinted in dappled sunlight. Birds called and chirruped somewhere in the canopy overhead.

While he brewed the tea, Mr. Suzuki described the tea ceremony, its purpose and significance in Japanese life; he’d learned the ritual from his grandmother. His hands, as he kneeled on the tatami mat preparing and pouring tea, were precise, graceful. I felt welcomed into a place that was deeply familiar, though I’d never been here before – a place outside of time.

We drank green tea, ate small cakes, and talked all afternoon. He asked me what I imagined my life would be, what made me happy, what made me sad, who my parents were, how I came to be called Hiroshima. He told me a little about his own family, about Japan during the war years and after, about his love for journalism, for his country, his garden, his home. Much of what we talked about that afternoon has slipped into one of the many crevasses in my memory, but the feeling of homecoming, of ease, simplicity, beauty, grace, friendship, has stayed with me.

I never saw him again, after that day, but soul friends are like that – some remain in your life forever. Others brush your fingers briefly, and are gone, but their imprint lingers.

Over the weeks that followed, everywhere we went people heard my name and reacted with widened eyes, sharp in-breaths, retreat. So many had lost someone they loved in the inferno – this was an island nation, after all.

Midway through the third week of our stay, we finally flew to Hiroshima. As the plane began its descent, I peered through the small window, expecting to see a moonscape, bleak and sere. Shockingly, I saw a city like any other — as modern and urban-industrial as Tokyo.

The skyline bristled with tall buildings. The streets below were laid out in a neat grid and teemed with traffic. The only intimation that this was a landscape destroyed by the world’s first atomic bomb fifteen years earlier was a tangle of blackened steel girders which, from the air, looked like a giant sculptured rose.

This was ground zero — the exact spot above which the atom bomb had exploded.

Everything else seemed to have been cleaned up and rebuilt so completely, it was hard to believe there had ever been a nuclear holocaust here.

We landed at Hiroshima airport and were driven through busy streets to a luxurious hotel surrounded by lush Japanese gardens. More than a hundred thousand people died here just fifteen years ago, I reminded myself, as we walked through the elegant lobby. But the face of Hiroshima I saw that morning was the face of a porcelain doll, revealing nothing of its past, nothing of its inner life; a face perfectly composed.

After breakfast the next morning, we visited the A-bomb hospital. There, I met a young girl who looked to be about my age. Our interpreter told me she was in her mid-twenties. Her body, covered in purplish-red keloids that wobbled like fruit hanging from the branches of her torso and limbs, had stayed as small as she’d been in 1945, when the radiation seared her and left her with the cancerous growths that made it impossible for her to lie down in a bed. She slept, ate and lived in a woven hammock in her hospital room.

And she made paper cranes, for peace.

The cranes hung from the ceiling of her room, elegant origami birds in rainbow colours, poised on the brink of flight.

I no longer remember that girl’s name, but I remember her eyes, their bright darkness. I remember her hands, small and gnarled, which created such beauty, the illusion of space and air and freedom. She didn’t speak, but her presence filled the room.

When we returned to our hotel that afternoon, I went straight to bed. And slept, dreamlessly, until my escort woke me hours later for dinner with the mayor.

On our last day in Hiroshima, we were driven out to the Peace Memorial Cenotaph, where I was to give a speech to an assembly of school children, accompanied by parents, teachers, and other staff.

The memorial is a graceful concrete arch, sheltering a black stone cenotaph inscribed with the names of those who died in the bombing. On the face of the cenotaph is an inscription in Japanese. Our interpreter translated: “Let all the souls here rest in peace. We shall repeat this evil no more.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

A short while later, the interpreter led me up a flight of small wooden stairs to a podium. A microphone was lowered in front of me. Solemn, moon-faced Japanese kids stood in tidy rows, their dark eyes fixed on mine.

I said moshi-moshi, and the children bowed and smiled — beautiful gap-toothed smiles. Shining eyes. Shining black hair. There was clapping.

Until that moment, I hadn’t known what I would say. But as I looked at those bright faces, a crane opened its wings in my heart, poured its language into my throat.

I spoke of what it meant to me to be here, in the place for which I was named. How I had imagined it for so many years, growing up thousands of miles away in Bombay. How, when I was very young, in my dreams I would hear people crying, screaming, begging for water, calling out for their children, shouting for their parents. Wailing for someone to end their suffering.

Until I came to Hiroshima, I hadn’t really understood these childhood visitations. I’d woken up many nights with my heart pounding, feeling a desperate need to help somehow. Not knowing who, or how, to help.

Now, here they were — those who had survived the nightmare.

My chest ached, I felt a needling pain between my shoulder blades, I couldn’t take a full breath. These were people who had lost everything they loved – their families, homes, neighbourhoods, their entire world. Yet they had forged a monument to peace in the crucible of unspeakable agony. I was awe-struck by their courage, by their power to choose peace as their city’s reason for being.

The Japanese translator’s voice faltered, as I spoke. His translation seemed to get briefer; his voice a slender thread that stretched out behind mine and then broke. I turned to him, shaken out of my trance. Tears glimmered on his cheeks.

My own face was wet too.

There was a long silence.

Then the adults whispered to the kids. The children sang Sakura in clear, high voices. The Cherry Blossom Song, an ode to the fleeting world.

Afterwards, two solemn-faced kindergarteners walked up the steps to the podium with their teacher. All three of them bowed and presented me with an exquisite Japanese doll in a glass-fronted wooden box. The doll’s porcelain face was delicately tinted, smooth as ivory. She wore a brilliant red kimono, with a black and gold obi and wood-soled sandals. The box was so heavy, I had to brace it against the podium to keep it from slipping out of my hands.

I bowed too, thanked them, and waved goodbye. The interpreter took the doll from my arms and helped me down the podium steps.

The adults were waiting in an orderly line. Each one in turn bowed low; some wept; some smiled and touched my hand, my shoulder; some spoke. The interpreter translated. Their faces were naked.

“My wife was pregnant with our third child. When the black rain came, she ran with the children to the river. I worked an early shift that day, I didn’t get to say goodbye. My neighbour told me later how it was — they boiled in the water. The skin and flesh boiled off their bones. Nothing remained.”

“My son’s shadow burned onto the wall of our house. This is what we have of him now.”

“My niece is still alive, in the A-Bomb Hospital. She was a child when the bomb fell. Her body is covered in keloids. For fifteen years she has slept in a sling in that hospital room. Please come and see her. All day, she makes paper cranes. For peace. To bring peace to the world.”

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In 2024, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the group which represents survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.