These terror attacks have rendered me speechless. I ask myself why. Some reasons will remain forever unfathomable in the crevices of the mind....

Their crater of impact is vast and difficult to comprehend; their global fallout – political, social, cultural, economic – are manifold and complex.
Yet, each bloody strand must be picked out with the deliberateness of a surgeon, not the swiftness of a butcher.
I am simultaneously seized by emotions that are contradictory – grief and loathing, tenderness and anger, despair and bafflement, indignation and pity.... This cauldron of mixed emotions is not conducive to reflection.
I wonder: does caution, not horror, make me mute?
Yet I’ve written on war, violence and even terror attacks before. These poems – from my recent collection, Not Springtime Yet * – were conceived as a conversation between stray dogs after the London underground bombings.

Salma, pi-dog of Baghdad, says:
Americans are kind.
They leave blood on the streets
for us to lick,
and morsels of human flesh
stuck
to charred clothing.
They return us to our ancestors:
Wolves.

Salma’s friend, pi-dog Imrana replies:
You don’t hear and see so well
ever since the bomb went off in the neighborhood
dump where you had littered
six pups,
one-eyed, one-eared, scar-faced Salma.

Listen:
I’ve heard
the scene of feasting is shifting
overseas
and underground,
in tunnels long and deep.
And that the bombers talk in a language
we can understand, so to speak.
I’d trot there myself for the spread
if it weren’t that I lack
front feet.
* courtesy HarperCollins Publishers (India)

Terror attacks are, in a sense, ‘completed’ by our reactions: the gaze and the voices of the world reacting to their effect, or final ‘triumph’.
The electronic media’s coverage of the carnage at five-star hotels gave the terrorists the attention they sought.
Yet these same channels neglected to sufficiently cover the attacks on the ‘aam aadmi’; the non-wealthy victims. The railway porter who dropped dead, his blood splattering suitcases; the cab driver who lost his children....
Thus, these dead and their families were denied their dignity and humanity.
This was insult added to trauma and tragedy.

My Inbox is flooded with opinions and positions to adopt on the terror attacks that range from the rabid to the reasoned.
Excerpt from a mail by the son of a wounded hostage who lay beneath a pile of bodies:
“After approximately twelve hours, the terrorists returned with a camera and flashlight and joked and laughed as they filmed what they thought was a pile of dead bodies. Then they moved to the landing below where they set up explosives.”
This is monstrous behaviour.
But we are the most outraged because it flies in the face of what we consider our ‘true nature’ or our ‘true self’.
It makes us confront the ghastly truth: as a species, though we wish to be different or ‘higher’, such evil is also an intrinsic part of human nature.
Debates will continue about how best to tackle terrorism worldwide and nationally, how we should protect ourselves in the future....
It is then important to remember that terrorists do not respect the religion they purport to belong to, or the community in whose name they carry out these attacks – who may be left to face possible retaliatory attacks.
Their wagers are calculated, and cruel.

Seeking clarity, I came across this important definition of jihad: it is not ‘holy war’ as Islamic fundamentalists and Islamophobes would have us believe, but ‘struggle’. True, the struggle could be against others – when attacked – but the most significant and continuous jihad is against one’s self: a struggle against one’s baser instincts and unethical tendencies; it is a process of spiritual cleansing.
We should ponder on this if we are to achieve a more harmonious way of living with each other and with ourselves in our lifetimes.

Express yourself: leave a comment on the article telling us what you think.
Write to us at edit@verveonline.com

Join us at our Facebook group

Subscribe to Verve Magazine or buy the Verve issue on stands now!