Mumbai to all that

I haven’t been able write for the last week in part because of a visitation of family and in-laws but also because the news from India was so appalling that I felt incapable of responding. Disasters are supposed to make us feel better during the holidays; it’s one more thing to feel grateful for, that our homes were not burned or blown away, that we didn’t watch our loved ones swept away in a tsunami. But there was something about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that felt strangely personal, as if none of us had escaped. 

I have no relationship to India. Outside of books and movies I have never laid eyes on its cities. I’ve come to know a lot more Indians since moving to New York but I think that has a lot more to do with the influx of immigrants from that country than the circles I move in. But as the reports dribbled in — via Twitter and cell phone, it turned out — from folks who got away I felt like I was in a horror movie with them. The one where people come to your door with guns and shoot you (if you’re the wrong nationality, race, religion or, in some cases, occupation) or not. It’s a sort of universal Columbine of the mind, except the Nazi nerds in this case happen to be Kashmir separatists. Muslims to you. 

I won’t pretend to understand the complications of that disputed region; everything I know I read in the newspapers, or watch on television, or hear on the radio. And I certainly don’t have a dog, or a cow, in that fight. But I do appreciate terror and the unfortunate observation that, while all Muslims are certainly not terrorists, nearly every terrorist is a Muslim. 

But consider the movie Slumdog Millionaire, which I went to see on the big Thanksgiving movie weekend with my wife and sister-in-law. That kinetic fantasy — Oliver Twist via the Usual Suspects, with a sprinkling of Bollywood at the end — includes scenes of Hindu mobs rioting and killing Muslims. Okay, you might argue that rioting mobs are different than cold-blooded, calculating terrorists (in one of the images left from last week’s massacre a young shooter seems to be smiling) but the cycle is the same. More blood for blood. More lambs for slaughter. With the beast and the man exchanging roles, becoming finally indistinguishable. 

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