It was about 1.20 pm in India when the first bombs went off. In the next few minutes, they seemed to go off everywhere. Including on my morning train. In my station. Among the people I travelled with everday. And still travel with.
I was too preoccupied, optimistically trying to deny the inevitability of another death, a million miles away. Waiting in a waiting room, on the other side for the first time in my life, eagerly awaiting some news,
any news, from the medics scurrying in and out of a strange ICU in a strange hospital. An uncle, all of eighty two and showing every bit of it that day, came up to me at about 3.00 pm and said, "Did you hear about the bombs?"
" What bombs?"
And so it unfolded. Frantic calls to London, only to find that none were going through. The phone lines were jammed. A million calls, all at once. The mobile phone network had collapsed. For a few hours, I dealt with the possibility that two of the most important people in my life could be dead right then, as I tried to get a connection. Very calmly. I'll probably do my exams and move back to India quickly, I told myself. We were moving flat, and someone had to stay back and do it, unless we wanted to lose a whole lot of money. Since I had to go, she'd flown in from where she was, and stayed. Finally, at about 7.00 pm, which would have been 2.30 GMT, a call came through from Bangalore. She was safe, though she'd actually
heard the bombs.
Over the next few days, as we tried every little trick to cheat that one death in India, we spoke about London. About the deathly quiet, the barricades, our experiences of disasters, the survivors, the flowers, the blood on BMA House...
Somewhere along the way, we figured that this city had become our own.
When I returned, I met them, one by one. The schoolteacher by the window, who had had 4 intestinal sugeries, 2 facial reconstructions, and had lost an eye. She always smiled, somewhat hazily I thought, staring into the middle distance, never making eye contact. The young man who had lost a leg. He wasn't angry, just resigned. The defiant old Guardsman with ghastly soft-tissue injuries who insisted that it had been nothing compared to the Blitz. I'm sure they remembered most of it, each one of them. But they didn't want to talk. So we went around every week for the next few months, until they got discharged, chatting for a few minutes, talking about the future.
I also saw the blood splattered high across BMA house, right in front of the the plinth from where Mahatma Gandhi surveys Tavistock Square.
Among the stories, this was one that stuck with me.
'Nader Mozakka fled Iran as a political activist during the Khomeini regime. Nader, a 50-year-old software manager with two children, is like many of those at the King's Cross United group in this respect - but in no other. Nader is one of the bereaved. He met his wife, Behnaz, while they were at university in Tehran, and together they slipped the net and moved to London, started a new life, raised children and achieved success - she as a charity worker and respected research scientist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. "Nazy was more than a wife to me," he says, "if you can understand what I mean."
It would be impossible to give a full picture of Nader's grief. Nearly a year on, he remains unable to speak about her without weeping. Where some other survivors have two or three triggers that set them off, Nader has hundreds, from seeing someone who looks like Jermaine Lindsay to tiny domestic details. The only place he can go that doesn't remind him of his wife is an Arsenal game - watching football is the one thing Nader did alone - and even there the crowds make him anxious'.
And somehow, it reminded me of e e cummings-
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
