Living like life matters

The tears come when the kachra-wala rings the bell. It is the son of the lady who usually comes. A boy in his late teens, hair plastered down, he says the usual morning word — “Kachra!”

For the first time ever, I speak to him. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

For the first time, he smiles at me. There’s three feet of water outside our building. The rain hasn’t stopped. And this impossible city has just suffered a fresh round of terror.

All night, I have been stubbornly, wearily silent. I snapped at my mother when she called after hearing about the blasts. I didn’t want to say a word at the time — not on Twitter, not on Facebook, not on blogs. Anything I said would seem platitudinous, insignificant. This is not a time for words. It is a time for… for what?

The question is on television, on twitter, on people’s minds. This can’t keep happening; why can’t it be stopped? Why can’t we… But what do we do?

Someone suggests: Hit back, like the USA. But the first image that floats into my mind then is that of a distraught father carrying the body of a little child.

Hit back at whom? Whose children? Bomb which bazaar so that we might have the satisfaction of saying: We killed as we were killed. And once our blind rage has found a target, what will we be full of? Peace?

As I write this, I am grateful for electricity. Grateful the paper-wala waded through three feet of water to deliver the paper though I didn’t expect it. At times like these, we expect chaos. But the paper-wala came. The kachra-wala came. A neighbour rang the bell because she knows I sleep late and was afraid that I’d just sleep through the flooding. Already the toilet is full, and there’s an inch of sewage in the house. And I am suddenly teary-eyed because they felt the need to ring the bell.

The Spirit of Mumbai is being evoked, as usual. There’s an equal lashing out against the emptiness of the phrase — does anyone in Mumbai have a choice but to act as if it was just another morning after just another bad night?

To them I say, yes. We have choices. We could lie in bed, paralysed with fear, eyes dilating at the ugliness on TV, or perhaps clicking our tongues at the media’s appetite for grief. We could also cause more destruction (whose children?) and condemn ourselves to become the people we loathe. We could also demonstrate for more draconian legislation or intrusive surveillance by state forces.

But today, we are not exercising those choices. Not so far. The Spirit of Mumbai is the choice of life over loathing, life over lament, life over loss. Our own lives, yes, but also others’ lives.

Perhaps we can do something about terror attacks. I don’t know, though. Two weeks ago, I was returning home in a local train. Someone noticed two plastic bags and asked if they were mine. I said, no. Everyone looked at each other. Someone mumbled that the bags look dirty. We were all nervous. But nobody pulled the chain.

Should we have? I don’t know. There are a lot of plastic bags, a lot of umbrellas, a lot of tiffin boxes in this city. We cannot clutch every single item we possess to our own person all the time. We have lives to live and life is children or mothers or boyfriends waiting for us. Life is work! And we live like life matters more than the fear of losing our lives.  

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)