"Maybe it is out of necessity. Maybe it is what we know," explains my friend Neha, who went to sleep on Wednesday to the sound of bullets five yards from her window, "but the city always keeps moving."
Even when terror strikes, she says, there is the hope that, if we keep moving, these events will cease to be a nightmare, but instead become part of the fabric of this life. I keep moving to try to speed up time past last week. And because I, too, cannot afford to pause the chasing of a dream.
This time, though, it is not the same for Mumbai. "This is different," the TV announcers said through bleary eyes on the third sleepless night of violence. "This is war."
Unlike previous terror attacks — small by comparison, unorganized, and often the result of regional or religious tensions brought to boiling point — these 48 hours of violence were far removed from any familiar pattern.
An attack so indiscriminate — killing both the wealthiest man at the Taj and the poorest street sweeper at Victoria Terminus train station, killing both Bombayite dream-chasers and visitors from the West who have come to marvel at this new, modern India — an attack so calculated and so audacious, this cannot be ignored.
You can feel the change on the streets. Shopkeepers opened their shops only to close them again a few hours later — that day's earnings, gone. Many of the rickshaws that usually crowd the street are still missing. In the three months I have been in Mumbai prior to the attacks, I never heard the water of the Arabian Sea crash against the shore. Now it roars over the stillness. Daily life has resumed, but with a numbness, and in slow motion.
"How much more can we take?" has become the anthem on these arid tongues.
The people are crying for their government to do something, their government which has failed them in infrastructure, in sincerity, and ultimately, in safety. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finally addressed his people after 18 hours, but the people rejected his expressionlessness, his platitudes. On every TV station, on every radio, and on every street, they are demanding more.
This time, Mumbai has slowed, at least for a day, a week, long enough to insist on something better than just the promise of dreams.
My heart has been ripped out, I hear an Indian man tell his wife. I want to leave, he says. I want to leave too, I think. But he won't. And I won't. Mumbai, which has given me everything, I cannot leave you, my heart, oh my heart.
Kathryn Gearhart is a former Phoenix intern currently living and working as a journalist in Mumbai.
