WHEN I started assembling notes for this article on July 6, I planned to write on developments in Iraq over a six-month period, since the pseudo-elections of January this year. That shall have to be postponed for now, since there has been something of a historic interruption in that plan, in the sense that the very next day, on July 7, four explosions rocked the London transportation system, within seconds of each other, at roughly 8:50 in the morning. At the time of this writing, two days later, more than 50 deaths have been reported, hundreds of the injured are lying in hospitals and many are still missing, in the heat and rubble of the underground tunnels.
I have been in London for just over two weeks, living in a friend's flat on a quiet street, about a mile away from King's Cross where a bus - M30, which I have sometimes taken to go to the British Library - was burnt down to cinders, not too far from the Library, with many but still undetermined number of casualties. I did not know of the attacks and found out when I came out of the flat into the street, and a young woman, scantily clad, with pierced nose and lip, perfectly composed in demeanour, stopped me to ask for directions to walk to Camden Town. I told her that she would have to walk for well over an hour and would be well advised to take a bus or the underground. Well, she had already walked from King's Cross, all London transport was at a standstill, and - then she told me what had happened, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone, assuming that it was the work of Al Qaeda but with none of the unease and suspicion of my skin colour, none of the anti-Muslim hysteria that would have been the case in New York or Los Angeles. She thought I was a fellow-Londoner and she was sharing with me the woes of "our city". I decided to assume this odd identity of a fellow-Londoner that she had bestowed upon me and said, "We should have never invaded Iraq!" She looked sideways, paused and said, "Yes, that was wrong."
I was restless, went roaming on the streets, got further unsettled by the air of utter normalcy - except that there was much less traffic, and no buses. Then, as a shower came down, I took refuge in a large grocery store and was aimlessly looking at vegetables when another woman, older, well groomed, more typically middle class, obviously needing to talk to someone, told me the latest news that she had heard on her radio, advised me not to go beyond the safety of "our" area, said that she remembered the London of the 1980s at the height of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) troubles, as she delicately put it, and wondered if the city was again going to become as unsafe as it was those days; she had left the city then, with her small children, and had moved back to London only recently. Neither my accent nor the colour of my skin had meant anything to her, and she too exuded that sense of fellow-residents of the city worrying about its safety, and I again said, "We should have never invaded Iraq." Her non-stop talking suddenly stopped, and in a hushed, intense, angry voice, she said, "That man!" She was obviously referring to Tony Blair, her Prime Minister.
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