26 November 2008: Terrorists attack Mumbai
28 November 2008: Thanksgiving dinner in Kolkata
As the first people trickled in to the room, we were still cooking – I’m always still cooking, usually forget to change into something nice to host, and use it all as an excuse to add some bustle and activity to the quiet beginnings of an eventually eventful evening. The house smelled like stuffing, successfully recreated sans turkey, with a dash of soy sauce to darken the gravy. Soon the voices were gurgling all around me, and after two days alone in my house – enjoying a spot of winter sunshine sprawled across my queen-sized bed with Sen’s thoughts on gender while the bodies were cleaned out of CST*– the swirl of so many people’s company was exhilarating.
The phone call woke me up, and I registered the 212 area code as foreign without thinking about the fact that it was from New York City, not Seattle. ‘There have been unprecedented attacks on foreigners in Mumbai,’ AJWS informed me. ‘We are requesting all volunteers to stay inside their residences for the next forty-eight hours.’
There was: laughing cow and crackers, dates and nuts, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans in excess garlic, vegetarian chili, Israeli salad, pumpkin pie with ginger cookie crust, and cakes (from Cakes, of course). There were: attacks on a train station, an airport, shipping docks, two luxury hotels, two hospitals, a café, and a guest house. I gathered information – the first numbers I heard were eighty dead and nine hundred injured, the last were that over a hundred had died, and maybe another hundred or two injured – from concerned callers around the world, jotted it down on a notepad and tried not to make it look like notes from an academic lecture.
Behind me, the room kept swirling, but I remembered that it was Friday, and that there were candles, and put those two thoughts together with a friend to say a blessing for Shabbat. The mourner’s kaddish waded knee-deep through the back of my mind, but I didn’t let it out, just thought it as I looked up at the oil painting of the flat-owner’s family guru sitting cross-legged above the candles and smiled, pretending not to pretend that I hadn’t heard that hostages were still being held, that the train had been full of commuting laborers and that although they demanded foreigners they killed indiscriminately.
The first article I read was titled ‘Brooklyn Couple Killed,’ from the New York Times. I remembered the couple – we’d followed a collection of diasporic Jews from Keneseth Eliayahoo to the Nariman house after Friday night services last January, and ended up at my first Chabad experience. The imported and recreated food tasted strange rather than comforting, and although the idea of the community was nice and the Rabbi welcoming, I had been eager to leave. Rivka, his wife, was sweet, and we discussed her wig and adorable baby boy Moishe as we walked quickly down the alleyways towards Colaba Causeway.
Fresh from two days of a media fast when the rest of the world was feasting – and I mean feasting in a carrion sort of way, a morbid fascination with spreading the flames in a misguided attempt to honor the dead and understand the shifting fabric of reality – I read for hours, squinting through salt at the same ten images, and finally forming my own headline for my mental marquee:
Followed quickly, on the same mental marquee, by two of my favorite bumper stickers:
When I woke up on thanksgiving morning, America was eating dinner. I had no desire to run away from India, to escape the momentary mess that had been made out of people’s lives in Mumbai and people’s minds around the world – Kolkata seemed far away from all of that, safe despite the warnings, secured by the value of the open Nepalese and Bangladeshi borders and its own markedly faded glory. But I did want to gather around a chattering dinner table – preferably two or three pushed together, with as many different table cloths and some burnt orange and evergreen decorations – so I opened a book, tucked the people and the horror deep inside, and escaped.
The emails came quickly, of course, and I tried to write properly assuring responses, with a pinch of analysis and a dollop of heartache and an empathetic smile at the end:
It’s the cycle, I think, that makes it all the most maddening, the dehumanizing and dominating and not expecting the exact same treatment in return – the idea that these tactics move a cause forward paired with the equally terrifying idea that the American army has made the world a safer place in the last eight years. The question of the day became the concerned inquiry, became whether you’d lost a friend, but questions of the day fade quickly. There were protests and funerals – there was even an unexploded bomb found two weeks later in the CST baggage room – there were op-eds and accusations, speculation on retaliation and billboards preaching solidarity.
Now the billboards for the ‘Great Indian Shopping Festival’ (Christmas!) are up, and the disturbing radio ads for recommendations on strategies for India’s ‘War on Terror’ (who thought of that brilliant phrasing?) have receded. If we just, well, kill enough of them, they’ll clearly stop killing us. Simple math. As we stacked the low stools we’d used as ground-level tables for thanksgiving and ushered the last guests out the door to the strains of a husky woman’s voice on our new sound system, the violence that had been graphically splattered across the front pages of the world’s newspapers for the last few days felt worlds away – I could even pretend that the children sleeping in the cement pipes at the end of my road were comfortable on their stained cotton t-shirt of a mattress, almost enjoy the glow of feeding people and being thankful for a colorful community without the sucker punch of remembering the cost of my comfort to millions of other people’s lives. Almost.
*Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, formerly Victoria Terminal
Note: I highly recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the attacks, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy
28 November 2008: Thanksgiving dinner in Kolkata
As the first people trickled in to the room, we were still cooking – I’m always still cooking, usually forget to change into something nice to host, and use it all as an excuse to add some bustle and activity to the quiet beginnings of an eventually eventful evening. The house smelled like stuffing, successfully recreated sans turkey, with a dash of soy sauce to darken the gravy. Soon the voices were gurgling all around me, and after two days alone in my house – enjoying a spot of winter sunshine sprawled across my queen-sized bed with Sen’s thoughts on gender while the bodies were cleaned out of CST*– the swirl of so many people’s company was exhilarating.
The phone call woke me up, and I registered the 212 area code as foreign without thinking about the fact that it was from New York City, not Seattle. ‘There have been unprecedented attacks on foreigners in Mumbai,’ AJWS informed me. ‘We are requesting all volunteers to stay inside their residences for the next forty-eight hours.’
There was: laughing cow and crackers, dates and nuts, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans in excess garlic, vegetarian chili, Israeli salad, pumpkin pie with ginger cookie crust, and cakes (from Cakes, of course). There were: attacks on a train station, an airport, shipping docks, two luxury hotels, two hospitals, a café, and a guest house. I gathered information – the first numbers I heard were eighty dead and nine hundred injured, the last were that over a hundred had died, and maybe another hundred or two injured – from concerned callers around the world, jotted it down on a notepad and tried not to make it look like notes from an academic lecture.
Behind me, the room kept swirling, but I remembered that it was Friday, and that there were candles, and put those two thoughts together with a friend to say a blessing for Shabbat. The mourner’s kaddish waded knee-deep through the back of my mind, but I didn’t let it out, just thought it as I looked up at the oil painting of the flat-owner’s family guru sitting cross-legged above the candles and smiled, pretending not to pretend that I hadn’t heard that hostages were still being held, that the train had been full of commuting laborers and that although they demanded foreigners they killed indiscriminately.
The first article I read was titled ‘Brooklyn Couple Killed,’ from the New York Times. I remembered the couple – we’d followed a collection of diasporic Jews from Keneseth Eliayahoo to the Nariman house after Friday night services last January, and ended up at my first Chabad experience. The imported and recreated food tasted strange rather than comforting, and although the idea of the community was nice and the Rabbi welcoming, I had been eager to leave. Rivka, his wife, was sweet, and we discussed her wig and adorable baby boy Moishe as we walked quickly down the alleyways towards Colaba Causeway.
Fresh from two days of a media fast when the rest of the world was feasting – and I mean feasting in a carrion sort of way, a morbid fascination with spreading the flames in a misguided attempt to honor the dead and understand the shifting fabric of reality – I read for hours, squinting through salt at the same ten images, and finally forming my own headline for my mental marquee:
Orphaning other people’s children will not make this world a safer place for anyone’s community.
Followed quickly, on the same mental marquee, by two of my favorite bumper stickers:
When Jesus said love thy neighbor, I’m pretty sure he meant don’t kill them.
When we attack the innocent, we become the enemy.
When I woke up on thanksgiving morning, America was eating dinner. I had no desire to run away from India, to escape the momentary mess that had been made out of people’s lives in Mumbai and people’s minds around the world – Kolkata seemed far away from all of that, safe despite the warnings, secured by the value of the open Nepalese and Bangladeshi borders and its own markedly faded glory. But I did want to gather around a chattering dinner table – preferably two or three pushed together, with as many different table cloths and some burnt orange and evergreen decorations – so I opened a book, tucked the people and the horror deep inside, and escaped.
The emails came quickly, of course, and I tried to write properly assuring responses, with a pinch of analysis and a dollop of heartache and an empathetic smile at the end:
When I heard about the attacks in Mumbai, I thought about the sickening extremes people are driven to in order to try to protect their sense of community, of a home and a place in the world, and the strange double-meanings of thanksgiving, stuck between honest gratitude and blatant colonization...
I've heard the American media is going a little berserk... people here are more mad at politicians for mishandling the situation than they are at supposed Pakistani ties. With one billion in the denominator, and a series of fairly regular bombings in large cities over the last few years, this is a big deal... but not such an affront to people's sense of the world, and how it works.
It’s the cycle, I think, that makes it all the most maddening, the dehumanizing and dominating and not expecting the exact same treatment in return – the idea that these tactics move a cause forward paired with the equally terrifying idea that the American army has made the world a safer place in the last eight years. The question of the day became the concerned inquiry, became whether you’d lost a friend, but questions of the day fade quickly. There were protests and funerals – there was even an unexploded bomb found two weeks later in the CST baggage room – there were op-eds and accusations, speculation on retaliation and billboards preaching solidarity.
Now the billboards for the ‘Great Indian Shopping Festival’ (Christmas!) are up, and the disturbing radio ads for recommendations on strategies for India’s ‘War on Terror’ (who thought of that brilliant phrasing?) have receded. If we just, well, kill enough of them, they’ll clearly stop killing us. Simple math. As we stacked the low stools we’d used as ground-level tables for thanksgiving and ushered the last guests out the door to the strains of a husky woman’s voice on our new sound system, the violence that had been graphically splattered across the front pages of the world’s newspapers for the last few days felt worlds away – I could even pretend that the children sleeping in the cement pipes at the end of my road were comfortable on their stained cotton t-shirt of a mattress, almost enjoy the glow of feeding people and being thankful for a colorful community without the sucker punch of remembering the cost of my comfort to millions of other people’s lives. Almost.
*Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, formerly Victoria Terminal
Note: I highly recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the attacks, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy
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