A New Coming of Age

Leopold Café has a row of wide arched doors that open to the busiest tourist street in Mumbai. There are a cluster of clubs around the corner; outside you can buy 10 different T-shirts that feature elephants or camels or many-armed gods.

But all I can think of now are the archways. The café is wide open, not even walls between the tables and the sidewalk. There would be no place to hide.

I spent the summer in Mumbai. The sites targeted in last week’s terrorist attack read like a checklist of the places where you could have found me this August. The railway station across from my newspaper office. Metro Cinema. Colaba Causeway. The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower—better known simply as the Taj—and the Oberoi Hotel.

Tourists gravitate to these places, but so do locals. I spent the weekend reading the headlines and fitting this new information to my memories.

At rush hour, Mumbaikers pour in and out of the train station in tidal waves. Bodies press against each other so closely that you could almost be borne along by the force of the crowd. There are metal detectors in the doorways, clumsy things made out of boards. No one seems to be watching them. Inside, bored police officers wait behind folding tables.

Last Wednesday night, gunmen pushed their way into the train station and started firing “indiscriminately,” as the newspapers wrote. Envisioning it, I remind myself that the shooting started after 9:20 at night. The crowd would have thinned by then, I tell myself. The crush in the moments after the firing would have been less terrifying than at six or five.

I think of the Oberoi Hotel, which lords over the Marine Drive skyline, its windows glittering. I think about the polished marble lobby of the Taj, watched over by doormen who swing open the hotel entrance with gloved hands.

But imagining the attack on Leopold Café is the worst. I tried not to eat there this summer. The food was terrible: five kinds of sizzlers and “chilly chicken.” But Leopold’s was a convenient meeting place, full of dreadlocked backpackers and girls tan from the beaches of Goa. I kept finding myself at a table in the corner.

I remember, toward the end of the summer, edging between tables with a big bag and apologizing as I bumped into one group after another.

Who was it who looked at a map of downtown Mumbai and circled Leopold Café? It was a savvy choice. Crowded, even late at night, and no room inside to maneuver.

When my friends, remembering that I’d traveled to India, asked about the attacks, I tried to explain about Leopold’s.

“They shot up the place with AK-47s. There are bullet holes in the walls.”

I expected sympathy. How horrifying, to have terrorists attack a place that’s so familiar.

Instead, my friends already had stories of their own, some more recent than others. One had spent a year in Israel. His favorite Sbarro’s had been completely bombed out two weeks after he left. In New York, the Twin Towers had been obliterated; the Taj Hotel, after all, was still standing.

I realized it wasn’t shocking anymore to have part of your personal geography become a target. It happened to everyone. My first terrorist attack: a new kind of coming of age.

It was only surprising that it hadn’t happened to me sooner. What I was feeling, the strangeness—most of my classmates had been through this a long time ago.

I’ve e-mailed my friends and co-workers in Mumbai. Everyone’s OK. I didn’t ask them too many questions. It was their home that has been attacked; I was only a visitor.

President Bush has assured Indians that Mumbai’s prosperity will continue unchecked. I believe it. Some tour groups may cancel their visits to Mumbai. Businesspeople may be a little more leery about checking into the Taj. But it’s hard to imagine that Mumbai’s roaring engine of global capitalism will be held up for long, no matter how much destruction was wreaked by the latest group of terrorists.

In a New York Times op-ed this weekend, Suketu Mehta, the author of an award-winning chronicle about life in Mumbai, wrote that he was already booking plane flights to his childhood city. He was going to have a drink at Leopold Café, which has reopened for business. It was his way of fighting back.

His op-ed spent several days near the top of the Times’s “most e-mailed” list. Keep living your life, or the terrorists will win—the same message we heard after Sept. 11.

It’s not like we have much of a choice, I want to protest. But this isn’t the right response. I’m too old to wish, like a child, that a broken thing could be made whole.

I know I’ll be back in Mumbai sometime soon, and I’ll have my drink at Leopold’s. I won’t be able to do it with any sense of victory. I’ll fidget and spend too much time watching the people passing by. But I will sit at that corner table for a few minutes. Deep breath, I’ll tell myself. This is how things are.



Lois E. Beckett ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House. She spent last summer in Mumbai working for a magazine affiliated with The Times of India.