Bombay Rhapsody

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You know some of what I am going to tell you – but not all, or that would be boring and obvious, and is there any sin more cardinal in a writer?

More than two weeks ago, seven bombs went off.

Khar, Bandra, Jogeshwari, Mahim, Matunga, Mira Road, Borivili - in the space of eleven minutes, seven bombs.

There was another bomb at Borivili - found and defused by policemen - forcing the architects of the carnage to content themselves with a nice prime number's worth of shrapnel and death.

When I heard - or rather read the news - my heart caught in my throat.

A small digression – an overactive imagination can completely spoil one's appreciation of certain metaphors. Heart in throat, heart in mouth – I know what these phrases are meant to invoke, but instead the dominant image is the ridiculous, macabre, obvious one – a heart, beating & muscular, tangled in the gristle and tubes of the human neck; or even worse, that same heart in someone's mouth, monstrous and disgusting.

Now that I've put you off your food, let's continue.

I was – let's dispense with the flowery language – worried. I have family in Bombay. My mother was born and brought up there, and two of her siblings still live there with their families, as do my grandparents. Many members of my family take the train to work or school. Given the timing of the blasts, it was entirely possible that they might have been on one of the doomed trains. It was only after I got the text message from my uncle telling me everything was alright, the entire pultun was safe and sound, that I realized that none of the stations targeted were on the rail route we travel by. I remember thinking - and my thoughts were treacly slow and obvious as my brain slowed down from impending-heart-attack mode – fear is so fucking irrational.

The thing is, though, I'm just not attached to Bombay because some of my family's there. No, for the longest time, Bombay was my hometown; my point of reference.

Waitaminute, you say. Aren't you malayalee?

Um, yes. Both my parents are malayalee, born to malayalee parents themselves the offspring of malayalees. My mum, however, was born in Bombay, and grew up there, a mumbaikar to the bone. She and her siblings spoke more marathi than malayalam at home - it allowed them to talk right under their parents' nose and not be understood - and to this day, whenever they get together they speak this patois of english, malayalam and hindi with sprinklings of marathi on the side. My parents were married in Bombay, my brother and I were born in Bombay, and had things gone a little differently, I'd probably still be there now.

You're thinking that birth and maternal attachment are tenuous links to an entire city –

and you would be right. I was pushed into loving Bombay; if not for that, it would be just another city where my relatives lived, with nothing else to bind me to it.

Ironic that the ones who pushed me to it were those who loudly professed their distaste for the city, no?

Children are rude, mean, thoughtless - and me and my peers were no different. It was only my malayalee classmates, though - when I told them I was malayalee, but my mother's family was settled in Bombay - who replied with, " Bombay? Chee! Bombay's so diiirty!" That cemented my attachment to Bombay like nothing else could have. How dared they insult my city? Clearly they were insulting half my family by association! Family loyalty - which I understood to mean that as bad as it was for me to call my brother names, for someone else to do so was beyond the pale - was one of the cardinal virtues of our family philosophy, and so my reply to them was to show my total disdain for their disdain and indentify even more completely with Bombay. After that, I was "from Bombay" - not, "from Kerala, but settled in Bombay", not "Bombay Malayalee" - but just from Bombay.

In the years since, I've come to realize that I can't escape being malayalee (translation - I can't outrun my relatives) and so I've made peace with the different aspects of my identity. But Bombay was and always will be special to me, though I know now it doesn't need me to defend it or protect it. It's strong enough to take the taunting of brats who've never stepped outside Sahar International, and it's strong enough to survive whatever the terroristes-du-jour decide to throw at it. Nevertheless - I feel I need to say something to the bastards behind the blasts: You're a bunch of fucks. I hope you die painful, horrible deaths and spend the rest of your cursed, god-forsaken existences in the most sisyphean of all hells.

Sorry, what were you saying?