This is one of the longish posts I have written for the list, multiplicity (http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/multiplicity_listcultures.org), which Jinna, Sean and I run together.
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11 July 2006: a rather inconsequential day. Another day in another month of another year. However, in one city, for the extended families of ‘146’ deceased, this day will be marked as history. It will also make the histories for the concerned to come. For the city of ‘mumbai’ or ‘bombay’, depending on which nomenclature one prefers, this ‘date’ will set marker for being under, yet another, ‘siege’ and coming out of it heroically.
What does it do to a ‘city’ when it is ‘bombed’? When lives, connections and intersections are put at temporary halt? Jo Tacchi’s evocation of talking about ‘as though the city itself was attacked’ is an interesting entry to try and understand what happens to the ‘city’, the ‘cities within the cities’, the ‘lives in the city’ when something as such happens. It also refers to the problematic of dealing with the ‘city’ as a monolithic, sonorous entity; as a fog horn on whose back we all ride our destines. The images, cut-copied-pasted, of a ‘monolithic’ city do not go far from representing the city in it’s hyperbolic imagination as a giant which will wake up one of these days to claim all our dreams. Maybe the nightmares. Neil Gaman in one of the Sandman series dealt with the issue, ‘if the city-dwellers can dream about the city, then it is possible that the city can dream as well’. The journeys a protagonist caught in the web of city-dreams jolted me out of my senses like no other ‘horror’ or ‘science-flick’ had done. And that was because, it all seemed real. It was a possibility that the depilated buildings that I sought for my illicit sojourns could be one of the mazes to move in (or out) of the city-dreams. Or the city dreaming.
While most of the people engaged with the ‘city’ discourse attempt at finding the ‘multiplicities’ and ‘polarities’ of the cities within the cities, consciously or subconsciously, everyone gives into the imagination of the cities within the cities as a City. I am struggling to develop vocabularies through which this binary of City vs. cities within city can be dealt with it all its polarities and possibilities. The media reportage and representations of the bombings in a city, whether it be London, Delhi or Bombay (Mumbai) open still further contours in this discussion. I will use a personal anecdote to explore these contours further.
Last year in October (29th), Delhi was bombed at several places. I was recently married and desperately trying to settle the familial abode. Acquainting myself with the ‘obligations and duties’ that come with the social-cultural construct of marriage. Part of this obligation was to have one of my husband’s distant cousin stay with us. I can’t say I liked him. I can’t even say I didn’t. He was one of the nicer guests one could wish for. Quiet. Reserved. Undemanding. Accommodating. He worked in one of the factories as the labour managers. Owing to the lack of interest and conversations, when he informed me about where he worked he set very vague directional references. I think I said almost arrogantly that I had never been to that side of the city. He did not offer any more information. I did not seek any. With the initial jolt of a guest coming and staying with you settling into a pattern, we conveniently continued in our silenced acquaintance. However. On the day (actually evening) of the blast, I was sitting reading something or lamenting on my ‘married’ status, when my husband rather frantically called me to switch on the television. At that time I was making very strong pleas to have the television banished from our familiar abode so this request raised a few frowns. The frantic plea in his voice, however, made me wait till later to subject him of my wrath. I asked, ‘what is the issue?’. ‘Delhi has been bombed’. Quite ashamedly, I have to admit that even this did not bring me out of my reverie. In today’s age of saturated, blown images and ideas, I thought it was yet another ploy by the various media agencies to increase their TRP’s; that the situation was not as critical as the frantic plea in my husband’s voice. I informed me about the places where the bombings had taken place, this, that, and yes, that one too. He then said, X, his cousin, works in this place and his colleagues have informed him that he has boarded the bus (one of the blasts took place on a bus) minutes before the blast took place. This did shake me out of my reverie. The place, Govindpuri, is well known to me or at least I thought. The images on the various new channels referring to Govindpuri did not seem familiar to me at all. As hard as I tried, I could conjure up references to the ‘site’. For the next few hours, my husband and I sat glued to television, reaching out to the phones to get any information about X. We called up as many people we knew to get any information about the coordinates of the ‘place’. From where, where to, etc. Nearest police station, hospital? Acquaintances who lived in the area, friends who would have friends in ‘influential’ positions in this area. We were populating our knowledge about this ‘new found’ place. It’s importance heightened because we were looking for something, probably, gone missing in this new place. In short, we were charting out new geographies into the city, into the cities of the cities, where we both have lived for more than a decade. Along with charting new geographies we were also marking new memories with this new-found place. We were not mere spectators to the ‘sensationalized’ news items about the bombings; we were active participants and producers of new associations, histories, memories based on the probable loss of X to this calamity. Fortunately, X strolled into the house and in our lives again unscathed and smiling unable to fathom our anxious looks or anger outbursts.
Through this one brief incident of ‘inactively’ being involved in the calamity brought forth a series of emotions and inquiries. How much of the city do I know of? How does one react in situations of crisis? Never again was I ever able to look at the city or the calamities it goes through with a beatific de-attachment. I was violently thrown out of my comfortable-middle-class-suburban-guarded by ‘private’ watchmen’s existence and this was when I was looking for someone whom I did not ‘feel’ much about. What about the loved one? I could (can) not even think about the possibility.
The point I am driving at using so much of space for personal introspection is that through incidents like this, the City is suddenly desecrated into categories; the site of incident and those that were spared, safe and unsafe places. New geographies are mapped out and newer histories charted. This is not only the case at the ‘local’ city level, even global new geographies of terror are marked out in red. In the case of yesterday’s Bombay blasts, it is linked to the London blasts, the Srinagar massacare (which the international audience may or may not be aware of). I am not a political theorist. I do not understand very well how the economy of terror and repression works. However, I have an idea about how ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ are circulated at an everyday level. Through their constant reiterations, ‘things’, ‘people’, ‘places’ become dangerous. Everyone, till proven otherwise, is a suspect.
However, amidst all of this fear psychosis, there are images and incidents that sustain one’s faith in humanity. In the humanness of everyone. In the goodness. In Bombay, people went out of their ways to help each other. Strangers, the prime suspects, were embraced and offered everything from material to moral support. The media coverage kept repeating in awe and shock, admiration as well, about the good deeds of the Mumbai-wallahs. The tone in which it was said did not hide their disbelief. It almost came across as if in such times of crisis, one is supposed to hole up in their sanctums and wait for the crisis to walk away. It, however, doesn’t happen so.
And while I reach the endings of this post, sitting in Delhi almost 1300 kilometers, a few million cities away, I notice a pretty girl at a distance standing on her balcony, playing a typically melancholic song, smoking her cigarette. Mourning a lost love? On the other end is an old man in a floral printed shirt jumping up and down to the tunes of the rains, which have finally appeared to provide some solace from the persistent heat, to scare away a few untamed dogs. Or is he playing with them? What are their cities? Where do they belong? Where do I?
Till then, to the spirit of the City, the sites of the cities and the new geographies being sustained.
_________________
11 July 2006: a rather inconsequential day. Another day in another month of another year. However, in one city, for the extended families of ‘146’ deceased, this day will be marked as history. It will also make the histories for the concerned to come. For the city of ‘mumbai’ or ‘bombay’, depending on which nomenclature one prefers, this ‘date’ will set marker for being under, yet another, ‘siege’ and coming out of it heroically.
What does it do to a ‘city’ when it is ‘bombed’? When lives, connections and intersections are put at temporary halt? Jo Tacchi’s evocation of talking about ‘as though the city itself was attacked’ is an interesting entry to try and understand what happens to the ‘city’, the ‘cities within the cities’, the ‘lives in the city’ when something as such happens. It also refers to the problematic of dealing with the ‘city’ as a monolithic, sonorous entity; as a fog horn on whose back we all ride our destines. The images, cut-copied-pasted, of a ‘monolithic’ city do not go far from representing the city in it’s hyperbolic imagination as a giant which will wake up one of these days to claim all our dreams. Maybe the nightmares. Neil Gaman in one of the Sandman series dealt with the issue, ‘if the city-dwellers can dream about the city, then it is possible that the city can dream as well’. The journeys a protagonist caught in the web of city-dreams jolted me out of my senses like no other ‘horror’ or ‘science-flick’ had done. And that was because, it all seemed real. It was a possibility that the depilated buildings that I sought for my illicit sojourns could be one of the mazes to move in (or out) of the city-dreams. Or the city dreaming.
While most of the people engaged with the ‘city’ discourse attempt at finding the ‘multiplicities’ and ‘polarities’ of the cities within the cities, consciously or subconsciously, everyone gives into the imagination of the cities within the cities as a City. I am struggling to develop vocabularies through which this binary of City vs. cities within city can be dealt with it all its polarities and possibilities. The media reportage and representations of the bombings in a city, whether it be London, Delhi or Bombay (Mumbai) open still further contours in this discussion. I will use a personal anecdote to explore these contours further.
Last year in October (29th), Delhi was bombed at several places. I was recently married and desperately trying to settle the familial abode. Acquainting myself with the ‘obligations and duties’ that come with the social-cultural construct of marriage. Part of this obligation was to have one of my husband’s distant cousin stay with us. I can’t say I liked him. I can’t even say I didn’t. He was one of the nicer guests one could wish for. Quiet. Reserved. Undemanding. Accommodating. He worked in one of the factories as the labour managers. Owing to the lack of interest and conversations, when he informed me about where he worked he set very vague directional references. I think I said almost arrogantly that I had never been to that side of the city. He did not offer any more information. I did not seek any. With the initial jolt of a guest coming and staying with you settling into a pattern, we conveniently continued in our silenced acquaintance. However. On the day (actually evening) of the blast, I was sitting reading something or lamenting on my ‘married’ status, when my husband rather frantically called me to switch on the television. At that time I was making very strong pleas to have the television banished from our familiar abode so this request raised a few frowns. The frantic plea in his voice, however, made me wait till later to subject him of my wrath. I asked, ‘what is the issue?’. ‘Delhi has been bombed’. Quite ashamedly, I have to admit that even this did not bring me out of my reverie. In today’s age of saturated, blown images and ideas, I thought it was yet another ploy by the various media agencies to increase their TRP’s; that the situation was not as critical as the frantic plea in my husband’s voice. I informed me about the places where the bombings had taken place, this, that, and yes, that one too. He then said, X, his cousin, works in this place and his colleagues have informed him that he has boarded the bus (one of the blasts took place on a bus) minutes before the blast took place. This did shake me out of my reverie. The place, Govindpuri, is well known to me or at least I thought. The images on the various new channels referring to Govindpuri did not seem familiar to me at all. As hard as I tried, I could conjure up references to the ‘site’. For the next few hours, my husband and I sat glued to television, reaching out to the phones to get any information about X. We called up as many people we knew to get any information about the coordinates of the ‘place’. From where, where to, etc. Nearest police station, hospital? Acquaintances who lived in the area, friends who would have friends in ‘influential’ positions in this area. We were populating our knowledge about this ‘new found’ place. It’s importance heightened because we were looking for something, probably, gone missing in this new place. In short, we were charting out new geographies into the city, into the cities of the cities, where we both have lived for more than a decade. Along with charting new geographies we were also marking new memories with this new-found place. We were not mere spectators to the ‘sensationalized’ news items about the bombings; we were active participants and producers of new associations, histories, memories based on the probable loss of X to this calamity. Fortunately, X strolled into the house and in our lives again unscathed and smiling unable to fathom our anxious looks or anger outbursts.
Through this one brief incident of ‘inactively’ being involved in the calamity brought forth a series of emotions and inquiries. How much of the city do I know of? How does one react in situations of crisis? Never again was I ever able to look at the city or the calamities it goes through with a beatific de-attachment. I was violently thrown out of my comfortable-middle-class-suburban-guarded by ‘private’ watchmen’s existence and this was when I was looking for someone whom I did not ‘feel’ much about. What about the loved one? I could (can) not even think about the possibility.
The point I am driving at using so much of space for personal introspection is that through incidents like this, the City is suddenly desecrated into categories; the site of incident and those that were spared, safe and unsafe places. New geographies are mapped out and newer histories charted. This is not only the case at the ‘local’ city level, even global new geographies of terror are marked out in red. In the case of yesterday’s Bombay blasts, it is linked to the London blasts, the Srinagar massacare (which the international audience may or may not be aware of). I am not a political theorist. I do not understand very well how the economy of terror and repression works. However, I have an idea about how ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ are circulated at an everyday level. Through their constant reiterations, ‘things’, ‘people’, ‘places’ become dangerous. Everyone, till proven otherwise, is a suspect.
However, amidst all of this fear psychosis, there are images and incidents that sustain one’s faith in humanity. In the humanness of everyone. In the goodness. In Bombay, people went out of their ways to help each other. Strangers, the prime suspects, were embraced and offered everything from material to moral support. The media coverage kept repeating in awe and shock, admiration as well, about the good deeds of the Mumbai-wallahs. The tone in which it was said did not hide their disbelief. It almost came across as if in such times of crisis, one is supposed to hole up in their sanctums and wait for the crisis to walk away. It, however, doesn’t happen so.
And while I reach the endings of this post, sitting in Delhi almost 1300 kilometers, a few million cities away, I notice a pretty girl at a distance standing on her balcony, playing a typically melancholic song, smoking her cigarette. Mourning a lost love? On the other end is an old man in a floral printed shirt jumping up and down to the tunes of the rains, which have finally appeared to provide some solace from the persistent heat, to scare away a few untamed dogs. Or is he playing with them? What are their cities? Where do they belong? Where do I?
Till then, to the spirit of the City, the sites of the cities and the new geographies being sustained.
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