Hey There, Neighbor

This weekend was Independence Day Weekend. It's not the biggest state holiday in India, but it's probably second after Republic Day in January. Of course the state holidays are nothing compared to religious festivals like Diwali, which is in November this year and promises to be a blast. But Independence Day is a different kind of occasion. Much celebrating, like our 4th of July, but with a bit more solemn of an air. Independence Day holds a maddening irony to it for the residents of Kashmir, the disputed region in India's north. India, Pakistan and China all claim parts of Kashmir for themselves. The big contention is the Indo-Pak section of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought four wars over it. It's a touchy subject. India calls the part that Pakistan controls "Pakistani-occupied Kashmir," while the Pakistanis call their part "Azad Kashmir," or "Free Kashmir," and the Indian-controlled part "Occupied Kashmir." In terms of international law and respected boundaries, it's still an unsettled question. Independence from anything is rather an abstract concept to those living in Kashmir. Although things have been moving in the right direction since the massive military buildup in 2001-2002, they've been heating up again. Islamist Kashmiri seperatists, who want India to give up control of its territorial claims, have run murderous raids all throughout the great Kashmir valley and into parts of India proper. Rob, my roommate, had been planning to go there until we saw on the news one night that ten people had been slaughtered in their sleep in a small village in Jammu. "There goes that idea," he said. "Dammit." I give this history lesson because a few weeks ago, a few known Kashmiri seperatists dropped off the map and reportedly crossed into India. The plan, it was reported in Indian newspapers, was to bomb the Indian Independence Day ceremony in New Delhi. The Indian military was on high alert. The police, usually the most useless, lazy, power-abusing people on the planet, from all accounts actually got off their uniformly fat asses and paid attention to things. (I have a seperate rant against the Delhi police that I'll post here later.) The kicker was that Indian intelligence was concentrating their search for these terrorists in Northern and Western Delhi. As the days went on the papers (The Times of India, notably, and the Asian Age) starting mentioning neighborhoods. Azadpur. Model Town. Kamla Nagar. North Campus. Timarpur. Civil Lines. My neighborhood. This new tidbit of information, that real-live terrorists might be living in a flat around the block from my house, brought a new level of edginess to my already awkward mini-relationships with passersby on the street. The vast majority of Indians on the street will smile and/or do this tilted head-shake that can either mean "Yes," or "No," or "Oh god, you're stupid," or "Pleased to meet you," or "I recognize your existence," or "Absolutely," depending on the axis of the tilt and accompanying facial expression. If I can get a movie of it being properly done, I'll definitely upload it somewhere and post a link. Anyway, this weekend, maybe I was just imagining it, maybe my back was just hurting again and blinding me to reality a bit, but people seemed more on edge, more skeptical. As possible terrorists go, at least outside of Belfast, I pass the racial profiling test pretty easily. So I still got the head tilt from those I passed on a walk around the neighborhood saturday night, but it was different. People were in a hurry. No one hurries in Delhi unless they are driving somewhere, in which case God is waiting impatiently at their arrival location (he always leaves before they arrive). It's just odd how this black cloud of fear just descends on an area when the threat of random violence is announced. That's the ultimate leverage of terrorists, I guess: the ability to get people to change their actions out of fear of attack. All you need to do is provide some credibility and hint at what you might do further down the road. Fear of the unknown is so powerful. You can feel it when all the lights go out and you start hearing noises in the room. It's an old fear, maye the oldest. It's the fear that propelled our ancestors into the trees. It's the fear that keeps imaginative kids awake for hours looking at shadows. It's the fear that changes the entire character of a city for a weekend at a time. Everything seems to have worked out, in the end. No one was caught, but no one was blown up, either. I heard a tidbit on the news about a bombing about 50 miles northwest of here, with 10 people killed, but this is India and 10 people blown to bits by a bomb is apparently not enough to make the news, so I haven't heard anything since. This morning everything was the same as usual. No reserve. Certainly no rushing. Endless bargaining with rickshaw drivers, a process I can now do pretty convincingly in Hindi. Normal. Honestly, if I were a terrorist I would have waited till today. It seems everyone made the calculation that because nothing happened at the Red Fort celebrations yesterday, then nothing was going to happen. Life goes on. That's not a terrible way to think about it.