Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Guilty until proven innocent” reads the reversed text of placard in London’s red double-Decker bus. Photographs of unattended baggage crossed with red felt-tipped pen invites your attention. But like fast moving and resilient Londoners, you ignore it. That’s what I had done, forgotten no place is safe in the world torn by terror and war...

In south Asia, we had grown used to them over the decades, these terror signs/symbols, the violence in the streets, bodies hanging out of bombed out buses and railway bogies, smell of houses burning, stench of charred human flesh in the air… it had all been part of our contemporary history. Once in Europe, I’d ignored the warning. Presumably I’d left all that behind. I had full faith in the Western world, in their security systems-CCTV, watchdogs, the vigilance. Once in Europe I thought I’d left all that behind. How could it happen here, in the very first world? We roamed day and night in underground trains and Double Decker buses. They had become our new mules in the bustling landscape of Europe’s largest capital. Besides, since my early childhood I had known London as an Elysium for asylum seekers. Why

would they attack the place of their own refuge? The Edgware Road where the Thursday bus bombing took place remains close to the place we stay. We’d crossed it the night before, without a clue it would be on the world map the next day. We were asleep from last night’s hangover from the revelry of a summer festival at Motcomb Street. The first day we came to London we’d known - it could happen here easily. That this melting pot boiling from the rush of hundreds of nationalities could spill over, without a warning. In these very buses and trams we had found the white British to be in minority. “There comes a tourist,” Sreejana had often joked on seeing a white British enter a bus packed with people from various ethnicities in the major areas of London. There are ghettos belonging to populations from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Latin America. They all had their share of the empire, a morsel, a crumb from the rulers of the Raj. Someone had befriended a native, adopted a child, grown emotional. Or a loyal servant to the empire had won a laurel. Or they had come at some Macmillan’s call as menial labor to build railroads for the expansion of the Empire in the remote far-flung colonies. Now over the decades these midnight’s children and grandchildren possess major portions of the Empire’s capital. Over the years it has become impossible to sweep them away.

Having traveled through Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, as we returned to London we found, in a strange way, a homecoming. First night when we came out of Hilton Hotel we were stunned to see Edgware Road a replica of Middle East, the little Arabia in the heart of London. Kebab houses, Donar shops, ethnic restaurants, hooka smoking gentlemen with the embroidered caps, women in the burka and people gossiping as along the street as I imagine colonial India might have been. “It’s like Delhi,” Sreejana had remarked. That’s precisely why it became easy for the infiltrators of Thursday bombing to merge in the crowd milling on the busy pavements and crack open melting pot with a lethal insult, spitting into the pot from which people from the world over come to taste the recipe of true democracy and multiculturalism with delight.

This writer can be reached at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com