BY ALI NAQVI
Leeds, England – Last week the bombers came to the places
where I used to live. This week the police came to the places where I live.
In the solid yellow stare of a July sun, blue and white tape
sealed off roads and black helmets watched my every move. Noses wrinkled at the
car I was driving as if the exhaust was pumping out skunk air.
I was lying in bed, shuddering from a chest infection, when the
red band broke across the screen telling me about the bombs in London. Names
that were part of my daily routine, stairs I had shuffled up to get to lectures
that were always too early, the wheel rattle of old red and blue carriages and
the suffocating heat of too many people pressed too close together. The level
crossing I had dragged my bag across to get to the bank now had bits of roof and
bits of people across it. I always sat on the top deck, where the plexiglas at
the front curved up and had the top support struts ripped off. My seat wasn’t
there.
There were always the guilty moments, the heart skip when the
tube failed to rumble on time. When it smacked the sides of the tunnel and
sparked. When it ground down some Coke can under its wheels. I would stand in
the first carriage of the Piccadilly line train waiting to jump off quickly at
Russell Square next to the exit, but there was always the thought that if "they"
wanted to – this would be a ready-made mausoleum. So we stared blankly into the
walls while letting the peripheral vision scan those around us. On that day
someone got under the vision, and left a rucksack set for 8.50 a.m.
Today they came in their white vans, jumped out the back and
laid down the law over a block square of street. It was stealthy. Bleary eyes
met with the high-vis jackets in the dawn and people shuffling out of the front
door looking at what was going on. They were searching for "them". Like the
guilty moments on the tube, the possibility of this had flitted into our minds
every time we walked out of the door.
It was like the possibility of the strip-search and the missed
flight. The possibility of the wrong name and the wrong face being met with
sweaty interviews in closed off rooms while you failed to exist outside the
room.
Such is our life now. Wrongness permeated with other wrongness.
There is no real innocence except maybe for those who live under the age of
reason and those who live beyond it. Those of us who live in the shelters of the
West, surrounded by the concrete and civility of our societies, can no longer
ignore the meat grinder that spins outside our havens. Those of us who would
like to carry on as if the currents of life only feature our own needs can no
longer live with that luxury as the images of headless children reach out to
drag us into the non-stop whirl of it all.
There are men and some women who made it so. There are men and
some women that suspended souls somewhere and denied the whispers of conscience
that were built into them. They do this in boardrooms and caves, in mosques, in
air-conditioned hotel rooms or the backs of Teutonic chariots.
Thus I draw moral equivalence. That taking a life is taking a
life. Suspending a life, curtailing the right to live, holding up the right to
be as a crime and preventing all of us to be able to strive for safety are
morally corrupt. A GPS-guided bomb that drops on the sleeping child has the same
effect as the rucksack on the back seat. That those who make the policy, those
of our race who sit over death toll figures and collateral damage estimates, are
complicit in setting up the teeth of the Grinder. That there can be no prayer
with the smell of blood in the nostrils; there can be no humanity with the
thoughts of obliteration of others foremost on your mind. Injustice cannot be
cured with more injustice.
When Cain killed Abel, the ground betrayed him. When asked, the
ground will tell its tales. From Srebenica to the wall behind Rami al-Durra,
from the splattered front of the BMA to the hulks of metal in Madrid, the ground
will speak. It will not say Muslim killed Jew because of this or that, it will
not say that Arab was massacred here by Christian. It will say man killed man,
and I know not why. n
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