The waiting

They say we’re “back to normal” in this city. And sure, I can hear the interminable drilling from next door, I can see the waves rolling in, I can smell the building’s accumulated trash as the woman who takes it away comes to my front door. The buses are running, the little corner shop is open.

Normal as can be. And as one journalist just told me, the blasts here are already no kind of news any more: after all, there’s new violence in the Middle East, kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, Israel attacking Lebanon.

Normal as can be too?

Yet I have the same feeling I’ve had after every act of terror in this country. Consider a random sample of these acts of terror:

the massacres in Delhi, 1984

the massacres in Bombay, 1992-93

the bomb blasts across Bombay, March 1993

the various bomb blasts in trains and buses in Bombay in 1993, 2002, 2003

the massacre in Laxmanpur Bathe (that report itself is a telling one), 1997

the massacre in Rukhsagar Bigha, 1999

the massacre in Senari, 1999

the massacre in the train at Godhra, 2002

the massacres across Gujarat, 2002

the continuing horror in Kashmir right from the massacre and persecution of Pandits over 15 years ago to the Srinagar attacks on July 11

now the blasts in Bombay’s trains on July 11.

So right, after each of these, I have had the same feeling. Because a while after they happen, someone will pronounce sagely that we are “back to normal.” Yet by now I’m beginning to wonder, exactly what is “normal”?

Is it “normal” to live from one horrible atrocity to the next, from one attack on ordinary fellow-citizens to the next? (From one newsworthy outbreak of violence to the next?) Is it “normal” that we now live our lives knowing that the killers from most of those terror attacks live their lives in our midst too? Is “normalcy” just the period of waiting for another great outrage? In fact, is it that very fact of waiting?

My answer: yes.

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