Koi Lauta De...

That evening in Hyderabad, a baby gurgled somewhere. A woman painted her eyes carefully with kajal, looking into the mirror. She must’ve gazed into the eyes of her absent lover, somewhere in the city, and awaited him with longing. A jasmine gajra bloomed in the seller’s basket on the street corner. A birthday cake glowed in its candlelight. A dog woofed for his master. A song came and went in waves in the slow breeze. And the moon waited. They had time. Before they knew.

A man, a woman, a child. Men, women and children. It is a tragic irony that they were trying to have fun. They probably rebelled mutely against the daily humdrum and tried to have fun. They laughed and chatted. They teased and mused. They watched and wandered. Until they died. They had no time. They never knew.

Getting shocked at bomb blasts is passé. It is just news. Until one steps on the first sticky patch of someone else’s blood. Until one sees gory figures lying prone in undignified heaps. And, masses of flesh, shapeless, bloody and anonymous.

It is not the violence that strikes me most about the bomb blasts. It is the suddenness. The abrupt way in which it snuffs out lives. The swiftness with which it seals our lips, our minds and our fates.

Shouldn’t we have a right to know when we are going to end? After all, there would be goodbyes to be said. There is the warmth of the flesh that we want to leave behind, in the closed fists of our loved ones. There are the apologies we want to make, for the small and the big hurts we caused…since there is no time to make amends. There is the little sweet nothing we wanted to whisper before both sound and sweetness were snatched from us.

For us news folks, bomb blasts are just about the toll, the blood and the destruction. They are about terrorists and police. About conspiracies and security failures. But that is not what goes missing in the melee.

It is about life shattered. It is about the candles on the cake blown out. It is about the jasmines that are reduced to dry, bitter crumbles. It is about the child’s cry in the middle of the night for its missing father. It is about the headless, lifeless body that lies alone, orphaned, anonymous in the hospital lobby. Until, a shell-shocked someone turns it into a person. It is about individual lives, changed forever.

I stood in the hospital lobby where shock made the scene a bizarre stilllife. Even as hundreds milled around, there was some kind of stillness, muffled like there is cotton wool all around and people struggled to move through it. I looked at the stricken faces all around and the bloodied bodies lying around. And I knew.

That bomb blasts are not about terror. We can live with terror. We did. We do. We will, too. We get used to taking the shadow of fear with us, wherever we went and not mind it. We can tuck fear into the folds of our mind and cover it with layers of colourful gaiety and everyday life.

Bomb blasts are about moments lost between people, separated brutally at that split second. Bomb blasts are about what cannot be avenged. What cannot be grown back. And what cannot be explained.

How does one find retribution for the dark kaajal that melts with tears and leaves behind the waiting in those young eyes? For a lifetime to come!