Watched from another country, the news of the Mumbai attacks had the quality of a protracted scream, an ear-splitting medley that Doppler-shifted from emergency sirens to the cries of victims to the unbreathing shriek of television commentary. The scream went on and on, hour after hour, fading out and in; by the time the attackers were neutralised, I was still hearing it, but it had receded toward the back of my mind, like the sounds of a man hitting his wife in an adjacent room, with the door occasionally slamming back open.

As terrorist strategy it was inspired. Terror attacks never become less cruel, but they do become banalised. In 2008, bombings had become an almost regular experience; particularly after we realised that some were executed by organisations on the Hindutva fringe, the pattern of bombings that lit up the country had begun to drift into a natural role in the drama of politics; along with bandhs, communal riots, inter-party street fighting and other regrettable idiosyncrasies of Indian political expression. After two VHP corporators went Easter-egg hunting for bombs in Surat and miraculously found 25 unexploded tickers tied up in trees and behind billboard advertisements, the news-feed began reading like a badly-scripted TV series that was tilting out of drama into farce.

When an attack was successful, it meant a sudden explosion, ripping apart space and life, but creating a hole which the state and the media could quickly fill with reassuring symbols and chatter. That’s how it went down with the bomb attacks in Delhi earlier this year.

This, of course, was something else: it was a great, sucking hole, a surreal typhoon in the middle of Mumbai, sucking into oblivion every attempt to explain or respond to it, belching out fire, not moving. We were forced to watch, and watch; to listen to the hideous urgency of the present continuous, that the hotel is burning, that shots are being fired, that faceless weapons are stalking through Mumbai, killing someone you might know or love. It revived our terror of terrorism. Before our minds were invaded by marching ranks and columns of practical ‘hows’ (How was it executed? How could it have been prevented? How should the country respond?), for at least a few moments they were flooded with a primeval ‘why’?

Quite quickly, of course, the ‘hows’ would re-group, order-ing our reactions and disciplining the uncomfortably real feelings of grief, fear and outrage. We begin to receive an official version of events, an official action plan, a few official acts of penance. Conspiracy theories snarl at the heels of the official narrative, we weigh them against each other; an experience that enveloped us totally will be shaped and focussed into a pragmatic script.

Nowhere is this more possible than in Mumbai, a city that projects great sentimental spectacles against the sky, but has little time for its own sentimental pause. At Shivaji Terminus, within hours of the dead being carried out, the trains resumed coming in. As much as that says about Mumbai’s spirit, it says more about the gritty desperation that keeps the city always moving. I like the cliché that Mumbai is like the heart of this country, but not because it works as the pump of our romantic dreams, or anything of that sort. No, the heart is a muscle, a tough, heroic muscle; from the hour that we are born until the hour that we die, a muscle that works continuously and never pauses.

It will never be discussed as much, or at all, but for those of us not plotting India’s political response, the cold, strangled question, ‘why’, seems more important. Remember it? Why have men with guns entered my world and begun killing the people around me? Why is no one stopping them? They weren’t questions that sought answers; they were questions as a combined form of panic, prayer and protest. Focussing on the ‘hows’, the attacks were an eerie and exceptional experience; Mumbai is a place of unique value and a target of unprecedented designs. But focus on the ‘why’ and a full country rises into view where the questions have been asked before and are being asked right now. In Dantewada, their minds are flooded with, why have men with guns entered my world? In Manipur, they protest, why are they killing the people around me? In Kandmahal, they prayed, why is no one stopping them?

The terrorism that pierced Mumbai was exceptional, but the terror was not. When guns were fired into Leos, fired across the lobby of the Taj, fired on live TV for three days straight, our distracted nation collectively remembered the feeling of terror. Now that we remember it, that feeling cannot be reserved for when guns stalk through South Mumbai. The feeling reconnects us to provinces all over this vast, violent republic, provinces whose names we forget, where men with guns shoot whom they choose. I doubt that the feeling is complicated by whether the men carrying the guns are jihadis or jawans, Muslim terrorists or Hindu riot squads. Some security has been restored in Mumbai and its terror has lifted. Perhaps it will not turn its back on the places where Indians are still hiding under tables, still identifying their children in morgues and still strangled by the question why.

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