Completing 1 yr of 7/11

A year ago today, seven bombs detonated on Mumbai’s suburban rail network during the evening rush. The attacks killed nearly 200 people and injured hundreds more. The trains were packed, the way Mumbai trains always are—standing room only, doors open, the city moving.

The day after, normal life resumed at the stations. That fact alone says something significant about the city, though people have argued about what it means ever since.

The immediate response was extraordinary in the way that only unorganized human decency can be. Taxi drivers carried the injured without being asked. Residents of nearby neighborhoods opened their homes. Strangers helped strangers locate families. The informal network of ordinary people doing the obvious humane thing assembled faster than any emergency protocol could have directed it. This is what Mumbai means to the people who live there—not the skyline, not the film industry, but the functional solidarity that emerges without instruction in a crisis.

The harder question is what normalcy the next morning represents. One reading is resilience: the city is too large, too dense, and too economically vital to be stopped. The trains must run. Life continues. Grief does not preclude motion. Another reading is more uncomfortable: that the return to normal is also an acceptance of conditions that should not be normal—that a city absorbing a terrorist attack and resuming commute schedules the next morning has made its peace with a level of risk that should be intolerable.

Both things can be true simultaneously. The resilience is real and the criticism is fair.

This post is for the people who were injured and did not recover fully, and for the people who did not come home that evening at all. The city kept moving. The debt to them has not been discharged.