The spectator

On that train there was a mother carrying a box of colouring pencils to give to her five-year-old daughter, so that she could complete a school assignment the next day.

The mother had nipped out of office on her lunch break, gone across the road, bought the best box she could afford and placed it at the bottom of her plastic bag, the one in which she carried her lunch box, all the while looking forward to her train ride home, to her daughter’s smile when she gave it to her to her.

But that girl’s pictures will never be in colour again.

On that train there was a young man returning home to his aged father, returning early because he had promised he would take him to see a movie in a multiplex for the first time. The son had recently been promoted, and this was his way of showing his father that he had arrived. But that father’s movie has just ended.

At that station there was a bunch of giggly secretaries. Secretaries who had left home early that morning, put in a day’s hard work, and were about to catch the usual train home to husbands and boyfriends. Secretaries from the same office who had caught the same train home for the last three years, at the same time, enjoying the commute, their easy camaraderie and the evening shop-talk that generally evoked laughter.

But that laughter was silenced forever and will never echo off the station walls.

But even as dreams die, laughter stops suddenly and hopes eat dust; even as cell phones are jammed, traffic snarls to a halt and the queues of the dead and dying multiply, the spirit of Mumbai will not die.

Because they can take away our life lines, our loved ones, our peace and our security.  But they can’t take away one thing — our spirit. It takes more than bombs to make Mumbai’s spirit die.

s_malavika@dnaindia.net