We Can Come Back to Shop

Two young men with rifles walk down Shalimar Estate Drive Road. They stand out because almost no one else is on the street. Twenty at most, badly shaved, green T-shirts and jeans. One of them points his weapon at a shop. "Lots of alcohol here," he says. "So?" the other replies. "I’ve got nothing against alcohol. We can come back to shop." They keep running, toward a hospital where victims of the attacks are being treated. Half an hour later, shooting is reported from inside.

That line stayed with me—the casual mundanity of it, said while holding a gun. I hadn’t watched that much CNN since September 11th. The Mumbai attacks of November 2008 were cold in a way that was hard to process: systematic, deliberate, victims selected more or less by skin color and origin. Eyewitnesses put the attackers at barely past their teens, and there was something about that—the youth, the methodical execution—that made the whole thing even more incomprehensible. I can follow the logic of a lot of things I find repugnant. This I couldn’t follow at all. Fucking terrorists.