It was a somber prelude to Thanksgiving to hear about the Mumbai terror attacks, like something out of a bad dream you’ve had one time too many. It was a Friday night, maybe, as I recall, we were searching for cheap flights in vain, when my friend gasped on the phone. There’s been a bombing in Bombay, she said. Shock, and sharp intakes of breath all around. A pause. We fumble for words about the news a little — it is always jarring, no matter how many times one hears about these things — but we are jolted out of it momentarily. It didn’t take long to return to what it was we’d been doing before we heard of it.
How terrible to think now of that day and how little attention we paid to it, how the news of a “bombing” easily slipped through our minds like an everyday occurrence, how accustomed we’ve become to news of such violence. An embassy bombed in Afghanistan. Over 100 casualties in the latest suicide bombing. Headlines that will never capture a tragedy’s true meaning.
This week, it chilled me to read of the bloodbath in Mumbai, even days late, for we never read about the killings, never learn the names behind the faceless victims, never feel the brunt of the senseless violence in the articles that read “20 killed in a marketplace attack” day in and day out. Did it have to take the storming of a city, the heartless shooting of husbands before wives, the massacre of a Jewish rabbi and the Hasidic Jews of Mumbai, and the indiscriminate open fire at unarmed civilians to shake a world already desensitized?“My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai?” It is an all-too-familiar cry, like a scene out of a nightmare you’ve had ever since you were a child. And though we pray never to experience the same anguish, we know all this never really comes to an end.
In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.
That all of this must boil down to a deep-seated callous hatred born of centuries of ignorance is sad and maddening. Hatred, especially that fueled by ignorance or vengeance, is a terrifying thing. I keep remembering a scene I saw in a movie of the 1993 Mumbai riots, where Hindus burned, pillaged, and massacred whole Muslim communities in the city. I was frozen to my chair, unwilling to believe this could have been real. It happened. People took sticks and beat women and children and burned houses down for being on the other side of the fence. To think it is happening all over again, and it’s been happening since God-knows-when, and no one side is blameless — it is a wonder life goes on sometimes.
Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia… In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.
Filed under: south asia, terrorism
