My City Burning: Scaling the Aftermath of the Mumbai Attacks

I grew up watching with envy the gleaming cars that lined up outside the Taj Mahal Hotel. As a child, I was dwarfed by the Victorian ceilings of the majestic VT station. The Oberoi Hotel stood at the other end of Queen's necklace which fringed the ocean like a string of lofty dreams, cast over the horizon, tempting Mumbai's middle class. The city that has, year after year, risen up the day after every terrorist attack was too weary to do so today after watching the imposing Taj burn for hours, the smoke emerging from its dome stinging the pride of every citizen, the ashes bearing down heavy on people's already burdened psyches.

All is real and painful about every terrorist attack and yet Wednesday night's incursion was like none other before. The gunmen seemed young and brazen, inspiring an odd gamut of emotions. I felt shock at their callousness, rage at their stupidity and grief at their young lives wasted, misled. The innocent civilians killed by the indiscriminate shooting reminded me of my own helplessness; it is not every day that we ponder about what might happen if someone decided to rain bullets when we go about our lives, shopping, dining out, sightseeing or sleeping. Snapshots of bloodied bodies strewn across VT station brought home the fragility of life and the abrupt finality of death. The pictures I saw, left a rigid lump in my throat. A child was being offered a drink of water by a policeman and I worried like a crazed woman about where her parents might be and if they were still alive. The police officers in their tragic death makes us Indians want to trust law enforcement again, acknowledge their unimaginable sacrifices, grieve with their families, respect them in death like we never could if we had ever seen them before somewhere in the city in their uniforms. The inconsolable mother, the orphaned son, the shock frozen in the blood-shot eyes of a widowed wife will haunt me for days to come.

The international media may be just noise we want to fill ourselves up with, I think, to hold at bay the real questions about how safe we are, wherever we are. Reporters look to every political analyst they can lay their hands on and even questioned Deepak Chopra and Vijay Mallaya, of all people, to find out more about what organization may have done this. Maybe in our desperate need for simple issues with quick solutions, we all recognize but will not acknowledge the faceless arms of ignorance, poverty and frustration that drive people into religious extremism and cultivate terrorism. We don't want to hear this answer because that would mean we can no longer solve the issue, not as easily as we had hoped at least. Nations have formidable armies and technologically savvy intelligence. But with these in hand, nations cannot lift people out of their dismal, hopeless, alienated lives before they are recruited by extremists looking for easy candidates to execute their own agendas. Nations cannot get to people in time before someone else comes along, hands a frustrated teen a loaded gun and points to the opulent dome of the Taj Hotel that seems to him, in its plentiful glory, mocks his misfortune.

India was not in the global news for more than a day when our flag recently found its place on the moon. India was not mentioned more than twice in international media when we won our first Olympic Gold earlier this year. Even the nuclear treaty with the U.S did not bring for India a noteworthy mention in the mainstream media. Today, I heard the words "sophisticated, calculated, organized and carefully planned" used in describing none of our triumphs but the attackers who held Mumbai hostage. I watched the name of the beloved city I grew up in, flash repeatedly across television screens. I saw the tragedy of my city ignored, kicked into a corner as news reporters crowded all discussion with repeated mentions of American and British hostages. I watched from miles away, the ghost of my city, its voices snuffed out by a curfew and I could not tell if the silence was that before or after a storm.