FACT & FICTION

The Copy-Kitten (my younger daughter) is a bold little mite. She tries her loudest best to argue the pants off people ten times her size (and age), and her voice is the 'most-heard' (top-of-the-volume-charts) in the playground.

But two things scare her, especially at night. Especially when she's in her bed listening to her routine bedtime story, and she wants to go to the drawing room to get a new book. So I have to suspend my story-telling and accompany her - small hand gripped tightly in mine - to the bookshelves to pick out another book.

She's scared of Wee Willie Winky. You know, the fairy fella who looks in at windows and peeps through the locks, to see whether all the children are in bed by "eight o' clock" (That's for Brits, I've modified it to 11 o' clock). The Copy Kitten calls him Winky Willie and gets all round-eyed when the curtains blow in the night-time breeze. It just might be Winky Willie, she claims in a hushed voice.

But she is re-assured by my BIG-ness (age-wise and size-wise). From the pictures of the puny, pointy-eared Winky Willie in nursery rhyme books, she has deduced that her Maa will be more than a match for him.

What scares her more are AATANKWADIs (Terrorists - she pronounces the word in the Hindi way). Whenever there are noises of crackers bursting too loudly, she'll get all worried and plaintively ask whether there are Aatankwadis around. What do they do? Where do they come from? How can we save ourselves if they do come? How will we fight them? How will the police fight them? ....

I don't know where she learnt about terrorism. I don't know when and where terrorists will strike. And this not knowing makes my reassurances rather unconvincing, at least to myself.

The Winky Willies of fiction I can combat. But as for the aatankwadis, I feel as helpless as any four-year old. And angry, at this spoiling of innocence that is the legacy of our terror-riven world.

DO YOU?

TAINTED BY TERROR

And so, another ordeal has come to an end. The ten terrorists, monstrously rearing up from the sea, have been killed or captured. The freed hostages will pick up the pieces of their life as best as they can. The families of the dead will mourn. There will be body-counts and postmortems, investigations and blame-games, tales of heroism and horror.

Mumbai, which collectively held its breath for three days, has sighed and moved on, grim and mourning, scarred and somber. The hate of a few cannot kill the hope of millions, and Mumbai, or any other city stunned and crippled by horror, will slowly go back to normal. The lust for death cannot defeat the instinct for life.

The fascinated horror with which we sat glued to the TV screens has been replaced by fatigue and a whole lot of confused thoughts and emotions.

Incomprehensibility - not how this happened (the security lapses are obvious enough), but why? WHY? Why go into open confrontation for so long, why take hostages, why plan carnage if there are no ideological messages, if no terror-group is gloating openly, if the jihadis made no bargains or demands? And, also, of course, the total incomprehensibility of how a human can metamorphose into a death-spewing terrorist?

Fear – Are there more? Who or where is next? When? Every day is a Friday the 13th. We may do a post-mortem on the terror-trail, but we can never really predict, or pre-empt, where it will flare up next.

Sadness – So so many lives lost. The Jewish rabbi and his wife, dying on their son’s birthday, the young NSG officer, the staff of the hotels dying to fulfil their duty, the wife and children of the GM of the Taj, the policemen and railway employees, the tourists, the people at the long-distance platforms dreaming of their homes….Not just the well-known and the well-heeled, but all of them.

Anger – No punishment is too much for the masterminds of terror. Not even death a million times over. If they are sheltering behind Islamic ideology, if they are indoctrinating impressionable minds with imagined slights and victim-complexes, if they are promising heavenly glory for the murderer-martyrs, they are actually doing irreparable damage not just to their so-called enemies but also to their own religion.

Paranoia – Can you trust any stranger anymore? Can you look at a person carrying a backpack without fear? Can you travel on trains, check in at hotels, walk into restaurants without looking over your shoulder time and again? Can you even look at the sea without suspicion? Terror has tainted us, our streets and buildings and even our sea, the seafront which is the Mumbaikar’s pride and joy.

What do you feel?

TERROR STRIKES MUMBAI – WITH A NEW FACE

Terror has struck again, but using different means and modus operandi. In the 2006 peak-hour serial blasts in the suburban trains (the lifeline of Mumbai), the terrorists hid explosives in the first-class compartments, and were, presumably, absent when the blasts took so many lives. Which is why the subsequent investigations could never really satisfactorily discover who were the masterminds and who were the follower-hands who carried out the plans of ‘maximum destruction with the minimum means’.

But this time it is different. Here the fidayeen (which word has a truly spiritual meaning twisted horribly – as terrorism inevitably destroys whatever it touches) have faces which are being flashed on our TV screens. Snarling baby-faced youths roaming the streets and storming crowded places with guns and grenades, disguising their deadly purpose under jeans-tees-haversacks, the ordinary uniform of young people.

Unmasked and unafraid, after causing carnage in CST (the terminal raiway station) and Leopold Café and Cama Hospital, some of them are dead, and some of them are holed up in two hotels and a highrise, armed with guns and low-intensity explosives, taking hostages and opening fire. This is war – there is no escape but certain death. The only victory for the terrorists will be the number of lives they take and the extent of property they damage.

We might feel that the earlier modus operandi (of placing explosives on the sly) is a dastardly one, where the face of terror remains masked in anonymity. But this is not cowardly, this kind of out-in-the-open attacks exhibit a degree of desperation and dementedness which is so scary because there are no boundaries anymore. The crazy courage of this handful of terrorists is testing the efforts of the best of our security forces – the police, the army, the elite commandos of the NSG. And we are all watching, fascinated, as the forces of order try to fight out the insane insurgents.

Mumbai has been in a state of suspension for the past 40 or so hours. I have a cousin who stays in Colaba, the battlefield of terror, and she has told me of the continuous gunfire, the noise of explosions and of the helicopters flying low.

Her vulnerability is symptomatic of India’s defencelessness under the onslaught of repeated terror attacks. In the USA, 9/11 remains a one-off, here, every year there are various repetitions of the terror-trauma, changing venues, changing faces, changing ways and means and methods, but all succeeding in bleeding the nation and destroying so so many innocent lives, every single time.

The terrorist (who may reside next-door, or who may come across the sea) and the terrorized (always caught unawares) – that seems to be the great divide in India today.

TERROR OMNIPRESENT

Today we woke up to newspapers screaming that terror has struck again. In Jaipur, the beautiful Pink City in the dry Rajasthan deserts now reddened with blood and wet with tears. 7 blasts in 20 minutes – another planned-down-to-the-last-detail attack on the unarmed, unaware and innocent. The city, country, names may change, but the shock, grief, the horror are the same.

Beyond pity for the victims, beyond rage at the perpetrators, I feel a sense of bewilderment: WHY? What warped ideology, what shadowy idealism, what perverted religiosity, what greed for power and gore-tainted-glory can make a man train thousands to kill millions? When does that respect for another’s life go away? How does humanity end and terrorism begin?

The terrorist’s mind is as terrifying as his acts. It is an alien space, where the values and limits we hold so dear have no meaning. His actions are so well-planned by him, but are so unpredictable-to-us (who live for LIFE, not DEATH). And because we can’t understand his laws or his logic, we live in fear. Fearing for our selves, our family, for our children, for people-we-know, and people-we-don't-yet-know, for everybody living under the shadow of hate and death. Nothing, no place seems safe anymore. WHERE NEXT?