“Well, I’m forensic anthropologist,” he replied, happy to oblique Katie’s new topic of conversation. “I’ve been working with Amnesty International for years on and off. My wife and I just returned from a post in India you see. Feel that I’m overdue for a bit of therapeutic magic.” He laughed lightly, declined of course to mention it had been a rather forcible removal. Hardly routine.
“Well,” he assented good naturedly to Katie’s comment about therapeutic stresses, “the occasional psychological exam for the sake mental soundness I certainly understand – the nature of my job requires it. We are not machines, but they’ve taken this one a good step beyond a mere formality. I find it mildly insulting.”
He was sick most primarily of his friends of colleagues – his wife even – moving about him as though treading a minefield, as though the faintest pressure on some fragile imaginary threshold of resistance would send him weeping to his knees. He understood the visceral reality of what happened in Kashmir. What happened in that clinic had been terrible and, yes, emotionally unsettling to the extreme but the fact they seemed to think this was the first tragedy to shape his experiences was annoying and a low estimation of his psychological durability.