There is such a thing as an exhaustion of witnessing. Glued to the television for long snatches of time over the last forty eight hours, while I watched gun battles and firestorms in Bombay, the first thing that i found failing was reason, the second thing that failed was speech, the third thing that failed was the capacity to do anything meaninful in the face of such disproportionate horror. I did nothing. I was parched, I drank a lot of tea, and water. I nursed insomnia to fitful, erratic snatches of sleep, populated by lucid dreams that smelt of cordite.

Now, as the paramedics go in to retrieve bodies and body parts, as the calculus of loss and damage is ascertained, as the smoke lifts, as the ashes cool in crematoria and hotels, and  as the hoarse voices of the television impresarios of the carnage begins to lower an octave or two, can come the necessary task of making amends for silence. Let’s talk.

We can begin a conversation. Terror calls for speeches and statements, communiques and condemnations, the one thing it kills is conversation. We must mumble, if necessary, because even that is preferable to the ludicrous platitudes that emanate from the tube that pours news into my veins Today, I prefer a stammer to a statement. I dddddarrre nnnnnoooottt sssayy a thh-thh-thhousand things that run through my wakefulness, my dreaming.

In the video of a song that Aman posted here earlier, I see a woman driving a taxi in the city that they used to call Bombay. The song that runs through her silent head says ‘don’t hold my hand longer than you need to’. I want to stay with that line. I want to hear it again and again and again. I don’t want to commiserate or to condemn, more than is necessary. Yes, I condemn. But no, I won’t have the condemnation wrested out of me like a confession. The mathematics of tragedy does not follow the laws of simple arithmetic. A rising body count is neither more, nor less tragic than a single gratuitous, meaningless death. ‘Don’t look at me longer than you need to’.

You might say, commiseration is necessary. I’ll say “lets not hold hands longer than we need to”. Let’s not light candles tonight as we have been taught to do by television, lets not make a spectacle out of grief, let us not make mourning a telegenic, slow motion filler between the smug, loose talk of war and retribution on prime time where everyone gets to make a cameo grab at patriotic grandeur. Let us not disrespect the dead and the bereaved by even pretending that we can share in what they feel. I feel all sorts of things, I cannot say ‘martyr’, ‘coward’, ‘hero’, ‘villain’ as easily as many can. I feel that all these words are like the decorations on a coffin. I want to see the body. The naked, injured, dead, body that asks for no decoration, for nothing other than the dignity of a decent burial or the comfort of a well stoked pyre. I want to speak of and to that body. Those hundreds of bodies.

In the strange and paradoxical solidarity of death in conflict, the bodies of deceased assailants and their victims, become just that, bodies. They were terrorists or hostages or rescuers, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Indians, Americans, British, Turks or Israelis till they died, in death, their inertia brooks no name, no qualification, their distinctions, barely meaningful while alive, died with them. Now, they are gone. That is why, when someone dies, we say, “they are no more”.

But we are. We are still claiming for ourselves a piece of the action. Still bursting with pride and thirsting for grief. These are our worms and ashes. These are the signs of our rigour mortis, the stench of our daily, hourly decomposition. Some of us are calling for war. Some of us are saluting. Some of us are speculating on the realignments in international relations. Some of us are wondering what this means for the investment climate. Some of us are mulling which quotation from which scripture to hurl in which direction in order to prove which religion teaches you to kill with greater ferocity. I have no comforts to offer, none to hold on to. I have no war to fight, no stocks to worry about, no holy or unholy books to throw.

The truth is, all abstractions, all attempts to tell us that there is something more valuable than life itself in the end, demand their prices in blood. The difference between a terror attack and an act of war is ultimately a question of degree. A man who kills another is a murderer. A man who kills ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, hundred is a terrorist. A man who sends thousands or millions to their deaths is usually called a president or a prime minister or at least ‘great leader’. We hang one, shoot the second and build memorials to the third. “Terrorism” is actually only a name for the dull mediocrity of organized violence. In lesser or greater degrees it comes with less or more honourable appellations. Homicide, Terrorism, War, Genocide. No one sings songs to terrorism, but our brass bands do blare the music of war. In the end its just a question of how many bodies there are in the morgue.

When you value a book, a map, a flag, a code, a memory of an injury or a vision of heaven or hell more than you value the eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, working, dreaming, shitting, pissing, fucking, tired, old, young, wrinkled, bare, naked body of just another human being you will in the end, pick up, or genuflect to those who pick a gun, walk into a city, and begin a few days of mayhem.

Ask the little terrorist in your own head, the next time you curse one you see on TV, “what will it take for you to admit, that there is really nothing more important than the ungainly, misshapen bag of water that is a human body”. Now ask the same question to the little policeman in your head, and try and divine the difference between their answers. I have tried all my life and I have failed to understand the difference. Both say they shoot to avenge injustice, to fight wrongs, to bring hope and peace into the world. I understand the voice of the assassin, the bank robber, the psychopath and the injured lover, for they shoot for no reason other than to do with the concrete circumstances of their lives. They shoot for money, madness, love or revenge – all human reasons. I am not condoning the murderer and the assassin, but I can see that they take responsibility fo what they do, and there is a strange honour in that, a perverse, twisted honour perhaps, but honour nevertheless. But the terrorist and the counter-terrorist shoot for supposedly altruistic reasons. They shoot at you and me, for the sake of other yous and mes, sometimes even for just ourselves. The voice of the terrorist and the voice of the policeman sing the same song. “I will shoot you for a higher cause. A higher cause, a higher cause.” The cause varies, the bullets stay the same. And I am always told, ‘I am the cause, and that higher cause is you’. No terrorist ever says that they shoot to perpetuate injustice. In their eyes, they are the just. They say that they are the only ones who are. Such certitude is the privilege only of those who shoot in the name of things loftier than themselves, it could be a state or a wannabe state, it could be a dream or a nightmare. Something, I don’t know what, tells me that I could be better friends with the madman, the bank robber, the assasin and the jealous lover, push comes to shove, I could even share their prison cell. But the terrorist and his mirror leave me cold.

All flags are shrouds. Every holy book is a sheaf of death certificates. And the priest who sometimes wears the robes of a politician is the undertaker. The terrorist is only the shadow of the hangman.

Take your comforts while you can. Do not let the drought of the real make an arid desert out of your soul where the flags of many states and insurgencies can flutter their shadows. Switch off the television. Blow out the candles. Turn out the light. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a beaker of water. Drink. Stay awake through the long night ahead. Squeezed as we are, between terrorists and hangmen, there is lots to do, and not much time. Or, as the song that Aman posted (the one that I talked about earlier said)  –  ‘Lets do the things that we normally do’.