MUMBAI, Monday, December 8, 2008

I was shaken out of two hours of deep slumber by the incessant telephone ring. The call was from my sister Leena in Los Angeles: Ravi, get out of bed quick and switch on your TV. CNN says Mumbai has been hit by a major terrorist attack. What followed was 62 hours of horrifying happenings just 2 miles south of where I had lived in south Mumbai for over 25 years. It has put me out of action for 10 days. And even today, when newspapers, radio and television are all blaring out about the bravehearts of Mumbai, about the resilience of the Mumbaikars who always bounce back, my eyes fall on the sullen faces of the idle street-corner vegetable vendor and the blank looks of the aging man behind the box office window at the neighbourhood cinema house. Millions who commute to work everyday are back on the local trains, I guess because they have no option but to work for a living. But the office canteen is quiet, few have something to tell each other. Few footfalls at shopping malls, fewer at the savings bank counters. My effervescent brother Raj is quiet today: For the seventh consecutive night his 21-room hotel in midtown Mumbai has just one room occupied. For seven days now, Narsi, the sprightly 82-year old neighbour has not stepped out of his home. My wife doesn't want to be left alone, he explains. He, too, was woken up in the middle of the night on November 26, by a frantic call from his son in Philadelphia. The agony continues.....

Like many others this couple remain deeply affected by what we lived through here in Mumbai. Thousands of our city police constables are in need of counseling like the multitude of media men and women who will take long to recover. It has not only shaken us, many like your own editor, are scared. Scared that mankind is degenerating, afraid that even the most positive-thinking among us, - and I have always counted myself among them, - ask where this will take us.

Never ever in my eventful 72 years have I been so sick as these past few days. Except perhaps, during three days in the late Sixties, following my visit to Auschweitz.