On the car radio: Innocent people dead in missile strikes. A missing plane, feared hijacked and crashed with more than two hundred people aboard. Nothing on radar, no radio transmission or distress call — the plane had disappeared, and the only evidence of its existence was the people waiting for it to land.
There was more: An ethnic minority forced out of their village without water or food. The suicide of a famous comedian, a man who’d made me laugh, made us all laugh, consistently. You could count on him. His assistant found him hanging in the bedroom. I was not so naive that I didn’t understand the tether between sadness and humor. But why couldn’t funny win?
