Bombay: Resilient or complacent?

The laundrywallah handed me my ironed clothes the other day and said, "I don't see you around much." "Only on Sundays," I said, "that is the haalat (situation) of working people." He agreed, and remarked, "Achchha hai, kaam karne waalon ka dimaag khaali nahiin rehta. Yeh blast karne waale - khaali dimaag waale hain." ("It's good, a job keeps the mind occupied. The people behind the blast - they're idle minds.")

It has been over ten days since Bombay saw its most recent series of blasts, at Opera House and Dadar Kabutarkhana. I was in Bandra when it happened but I could so easily have been at Dadar. Friends from outside Bombay sent anxious queries by phone, email and Facebook, asking whether I and everyone I knew was all right. No one I know was hurt, but that doesn't detract from the rage and frustration one feels at being so assaulted, repeatedly.

Twenty-four hours after the blasts, Bombay was back on track. It would have been back 100% except for the heavy rain which hobbled some of the train services and hampered road traffic a bit. A day later, however, everything was as before. We went to work, we held meetings, conducted programmes, made appointments... Bombay is a city that does not stop. It can't afford to, and the people who live in it can't afford to either.

The fact is, we may not want to. I speak as one who was born in Bombay (Andheri East, to be precise) but grew up and grew into my twenties in Goa. So when I came to live and work in Bombay it was a conscious choice. The city's energy drew me; its acceptance of anyone and everyone, on one condition only - that they work their way in and up. Bombay is a city that gives you as much as you give it.

If I wanted to kick back and relax, I'd go to, say, Goa. Bombay is a city for those who move, and where you have to keep moving. Stand still and you may get trampled. It sounds cut-throat but it's reality for countless residents of the city. These are the people who "bounce back". Mainly because they don't have a choice, they can't afford to give up a day's salary or lose a day's worth of customers.

I live next to, work with, and see these people every day.

A single mother who struggles to stay on her feet but does it, with nary a wobble. Her kids adore her and her friends love her smile. Only she knows how hard it is to manage.

A boy carrying a load definitely more than his own weight, and so big that he can barely see the road ahead. But he has to deliver it somewhere, and he'll do it without falling, no matter how many privileged teenagers lost in their cellphone screens get in his way.

A young man in a railway carriage, late at night, selling small plastic items - not particularly extraordinary, except that he is toting his baby son on one arm. Did someone say "working father"?

A young woman whose husband works in the Gulf, who has bought a house of her own, and works three jobs as a domestic so that she can earn enough to contribute to the monthly instalments on the house.

An old woman who sells vegetables and earns her self-respect in the family where she lives with her son and daughter-in-law.

An old man who carries loads on a handcart though he barely has the strength to push it.

The securityman, the breadwallah, the cleaners, drivers, peons, secretaries who keep the wheels of working life going.

And us. People like us who say "Bombay is complacent" although if you stop to ask any of these people I've mentioned, not one will say they "accept" the situation. It's true that they may be inured to it. After the first shock of the initial attacks wears off, and one gets almost accustomed to being a target of terrorism, one does learn to live around these incidents. Life, after all, has to go on. But give each of them a weapon, literal or figurative, and you will have an army that can defeat the terrorists. The trouble is that no weapon is proof against the enemy within - our own elected representatives who fail their constituents, repeatedly and miserably.

It's not complacency, it's a lack of options. Give us a viable choice and I guarantee you, we will exercise it. Till then, our only option is to fight back by carrying on with life. They call it resilience. And that is what it is, until something stronger is available to us.