This isn’t an ideal first post for the blog. But then, we don’t live in ideal times, do we? It’s already been more than a week since the Mumbai terror attacks and even now I think of some of my friends and family members in Mumbai who could’ve been dining at the Taj or Oberoi and even died in a matter of few seconds. I still wake up in the middle of nights, thinking of how it must feel to hide under a bed, with a fire raging around you knowing damn well that there can be no escape. I wonder how the last seconds of anyone’s life tick off knowing that a random bullet can just be the end of everything. I think of the plans these individuals may have had; meetings and dinners and movies… or even plans of snuggling in a blanket with a hot cup of coffee and calling it a day, sitting and chatting with family members or playing with their children. 

Imagine life for a young bride-to-be coming to an end just because her fiancé decided to treat his friends at Café Leopold and just because he couldn’t survive the stray bullet at that moment. Imagine, children waiting for their parents to come home from a dinner at Taj to help them prepare for the next day’s Math paper in school. Imagine, a four-year-old girl, incidentally names Abhilasha, whose mother died at the CST railway station because… well, because she was there at a wrong time. Imagine the fate of so many people, rich and poor, young and old, for once, being the same. Imagine so many jawans, so many policemen, so many officers, so many people, dead… 

The truth is, our imagination can die out but the stark reality of the Mumbai carnage will haunt us every single minute, every single day. 

Oh, of course, work never stopped and we are back to being in editorial meetings where we discuss lifestyle stories, we are back to calling up PR guys in Mumbai who are promising us to give us the best possible stories. But some of them, I know are still very, very shaken. In fact, I was chatting with a PR person when he admitted that he’d never been so scared to say his name out loud: Adnaan Sheikh. This young PR person decided to forgo dinner at Taj because his shoe was biting him. He left his client Andreas Liveras, shook his hand and pardoned himself and headed home only to be told that his client was trapped in the hotel and died second later. Adnaan wakes up in the middle of the nights each time his dog barks and invariably ends up thinking that there’s a terrorist watching him from the bedroom window. He doesn’t see films (“too scared to go to PVRs ya”), but what shakes me is how insecure he suddenly is about his name, his identity, his religion. “I’m sure of myself and how angry I feel about the Mumbai attacks but I’m also very insecure in a way that I’ve never been before,” he told me. I really didn’t know how to comfort him or say to him… 

And to be frank, I personally don’t know how to deal with the Mumbai episode either. As someone whose biological clock is ticking away (and mind you, relatives are like Duracell batteries who make sure you keep hearing the ticking sound), and as someone who loves children immensely, it shakes me completely that my own set of beliefs are witnessing a drastic change. Having undergone depression and felt pangs of jealously every time friends have announced the stork’s arrival, for the first time, after the attacks, I thanked my stars for not being a mother. Because, for the first time, I was sure that all we have in this world is fear (lots of it) and plenty of jingoism (distributed free after so many casualties). 

Will my children enjoy picnics; will they know that yes, firecrackers are different from AK 47s and grenades; will they enjoy that evening in the park; will they know that a strange uncle with cargo pants and a rucksack isn’t necessarily a terrorist with lots of ammunition; will they feel safe? Forget them, will we feel safe ever?