"Those stupid zealots are at it again," I thought to myself and went back to sleep, fully confident that the bombs had gone off somewhere in the impoverished, overcrowded northern part of India. The literate, industrial south was immune to these things.
When I was finally awake, I called my father. "What bombing?," I asked him non-chalantly. He said that the bombs had been set in three trains departing from Madras. "In the south?," I asked astonished, "There were bombs in Madras trains?". One of the trains was one that my father takes occassionally, when he has to arrive back home earlier in the day. The bombs hit pretty close to home.
I had always known that bombs and violence were a part of life in the north, but believed that the south was immune. These things wouldn't happen, I believed, in the south. Well, apparently, they do. We are, this bombing has taught us, one interconnected fabric and all those nasty things that happen in the north will one day reach us too. Eventually, at the very moment we are least expecting them to strike us, they will.
