Weeks later, Mumbai still endures the aftershocks of the country’s worst terror attacks. Perhaps the looming fear has evaporated into the cloud of smog that consistently plagues the horizons of Indian cities, but it has left in its wake a dismal stratum. Many of us recall the gloomy film that traipsed through New York and seemingly settled for good in aftermath of 9/11. Even today, eight years and some-odd months later the Financial District is still void of its once usual hustle, and the abyss created by the towers’ destruction is still little more than a glorified hole in the ground.
While the body count was far fewer (188 to be exact), Indians (and foreigners living here like myself) quickly began to think of the Mumbai attacks as their own 9/11, wondering whether the aftermath will cast the same dismal shadow over their own financial capital.
But as the newspapers reported on the eerie significance of the date (2+7/11 equals 9/11), in many ways the magnitude of the impact was far greater than even America’s worst terrorist attacks. India may be far more populous than the US, but it is also more closely-knit. Nearly everyone in the influential upper and middle classes of India “" not just in Mumbai “" knew someone who had been injured or died in the attacks. Indians mourn not just the deaths of their fellow countrymen, policemen, and soldiers; they mourn the deaths of their brothers, cousins, and co-workers. Unlike 9/11, most everybody in the country weeps for someone they knew personally.
Writing on the aftermath of the attacks for the New York Daily News I spoke to over a dozen people by phone from New Delhi. All of them had a least one horror story to share; some of them had several. One person had stayed up all night, trapped in his office across from the Oberoi, text messaging a co-worker who was trapped in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant with his wife and one year old daughter. Another was just leaving Cafƒ© Leopold when the attacks began “" he escaped but his dinner partner took a bullet to the leg. Over 24 hours after the attacks first began, a friend of a friend was on the phone with his aunt and uncle, still trapped inside The Taj. Initially I had imagined that finding first hand accounts of the attacks from my office in Delhi would be difficult, but everyone I called could give me at least one phone number of someone who had been there.
But Mumbai is resilient. On day two, Shrivastava, trapped inside his house where he could still hear firing even as we spoke, related that the next day he would nonetheless go to work. “Bombay is too strong to miss two days of work,” he explained. During the entire crisis, only three flights were cancelled. The trains were running on schedule the entire time. And on day three, even as the gunfire went on, Shrivastava did indeed go back to work, along with the rest of the city.
Nonetheless, it is a city forever changed. India has suffered probably what adds up to hundreds of terror attacks in the last 15 years. Anonymous bombs showing up in market places are no longer a surprise to any Indian, no matter how close to home. A few days ago, my co-worker related that he often thinks about the fact that the bus he takes home from work, crowded and packed full of upper-middle class white collar workers, would be a particularly good target for terrorists. This was not a comment he made in fear; it was just a thought, and everyday he gets on the bus just the same. Here, attacks could happen anywhere, at any time. The difference, as one young finance professional related to me, was that this time it was “an on the ground assault. A literal siege.”
Rhys Blakely, the Mumbai correspondent for the Times of London, explained that for many the city would just never be the same. “The Taj Gateway was the Fifth Avenue of Bombay. It’s where everyone meets” he said. “To see it in flames overnight “¦ Bombay just won’t be the same.”
He paused for a moment, and continued on: “I think a lot of people’s faith in humanity has been shaken.”
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