Mumbai

I woke up to "At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks," the headline of the New York Times online. It was 4 AM, and I was up early to get a headstart on coffee before driving the six hours to Nasik for a field trip.

There was so little news at that point -- the attacks had only happened several hours earlier -- that I assumed the best (it's funny when "the best"=a few small bombs going off in popular locations, less than ten dead and a couple more wounded) and groggily let my eyes skim over the article. Pune is three hours out of Mumbai, and there are rarely even bomb scares here, so there was no doubt I was safe. I did, however, notice that I had been to two of the attacked places that the article mentioned -- simply while traveling through Mumbai for a few hours. It gives some sense of the scale of the (what I then thought were relatively small) attacks.

And so we drove through the night, speeding through Pune's empty streets and watching the sun rise over the gentle red hills of the Maharashtrian countryside. Devotional Sanskrit songs streamed out of the sound system. Driving through this beautiful country -- roadside tea stalls filled with early morning crowds of men, makeshift huts on spare strips of land, wandering turbaned men clutching their walking sticks on the side of the highway -- I felt so far away from the morning's news. There was no question in my mind that India was the place for me to me.

I'm thankful to have had that drive this morning. A few hours later, when we had turned around and driven back to Pune (the school didn't want to risk its students traveling today), I read any reports I could find on the scene in Mumbai. The Taj in flames. Hostages. Seeking out American and British passport holders. Leopold's. Blood on the floor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria Terminus and Mumbai's largest railway station. Roads leading to the airport. The Chabad house. Hospitals, a movie theater. Machine guns, guns, guns, gunmen.

I'm scared -- everybody's scared. I know that I have no real right to be, since I'm sitting eons away from where fear rightfully lies. Perhaps my particular brand of fear comes from love of this country, and according disbelief (or naivete) that anything of this scale could happen here, now, today. India's past is full of violence; in smaller pockets, its present is, too. Bombs in Delhi have punctuated the last few months. Jaipur in May. Ongoing crimes -- violent or systematic -- against women, the poor, the socially exiled. I wonder if current events will provoke a violent backlash against India's large and peaceful Muslim population. But my India has never experienced something like what happened last night; the images painted by the words of the New York Times seem to me a new and bewildering modern art form.

I know it's all over the world, these beautiful countries speckled with (or drowned in) violence. For me, it only makes me want to stay on, so that I can ride through that countryside many, many more times and remember how perfect it is here. Hey, it's Thanksgiving, after all.