Spot the difference: Paramilitary soldiers in action in Kashmir; (above) Army jawans run to take position outside the Taj hotel in Mumbai on Friday

Mumbai, Nov. 28: Terror is a very special adversary; it forever has the advantage of surprise. It can trip you where you least expected it, it can traipse far away from where you did. Kupwara is a fairly perilous place even by Kashmir’s para-normal standards, home to a fair bit of mayhem these past decades, even today a besieged garrison crawling with troops and guns.

But yesterday, terror had, rather typically, deceived us and become a rage rippling on television from a faraway dateline: Mumbai. Sitting in the crummy Kupwara hotel room watching the blaze lifting off the majestic Taj hotel domes was a surreal transposition of place and circumstance. But such are the tricks terror can play.

Terror isn’t terror if you knew its latest address. The German couple flying out of Srinagar after a week in Kashmir yesterday chuckled amusedly at the pictures they saw leaping off the sets in the airport waiting hall. “And we thought we had taken all the risks in the world in coming to Kashmir! Surprise, surprise….”

And now it has equipped with more than just surprise — it is able to pervert technology with a never-before brilliance, it is able to raise the bar of hazard without notice, it is able to choose the rules and arena of engagement.

Look at how it’s ravaged the party at the Taj, a shoreline icon to Mumbai what the Twin Towers were to New York; look at how it’s shut the lights at the Oberoi, glittering pearl of Mumbai’s necklace; look at how it has chilled the life out of the city that never sleeps — at four this afternoon, you could have driven Hummers side by side at top speed through Fort and you wouldn’t have so much as overrun an ant.

“It’s not like a bomb has gone off and the worst is over,” said a lone pedestrian where thousands would have been milling at this hour, “It is that nobody knows where it could happen next, it is everywhere, everywhere, nobody knows where it will come next….”

Today was worse than arriving in Bombay through the communal carnage of 1992. We still don’t know how many were killed in the madness of that week. What we do know is that Bombay had rendered itself beyond recognition by its own diabolical energy.

We’ve all had a chance to see flashes of what happened in Bombay that week, if nowhere else, in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay. It captured some of that palpitating horror that seared through the city’s veins like they had been pumped with high octane and lit. But Ratnam’s Bombay had at least the consolation of being unreal. It had the relief of the then beauteous Manisha Koirala; it had time for A.R. Rahman’s song.

The Bombay of 1992 had no moment even for a dirge. The horror seemed too extended to afford anyone time to grieve. The streets were full of the dead; the mortuaries were full of the living looking for their dead. Approaching Bombay the morning of January 10, 1992, was much like what it must be to approach helpless death of a dream at the marauding hands of a nightmare. Bhayandar Station: desolate. Parel Station: empty, but for policemen and beggars. Dadar station: not even porters. Bombay Central was a panic station. Everybody rushing about, nobody getting anywhere.

The wide-angle view from atop the railway bridge was a cameraman’s delight — five tracks curling in from east Bombay and plumes of smoke rising behind each. The local from Churchgate was lumbering in early and empty. Marine Drive, even with the sea and sunset and the seductions they together make for, was a daylight ghost of itself. Bombay was burning all over.

It couldn’t get worse for the city, you thought.

But that day probably had its compensations — Bombay knew what was happening, what it was doing to itself, it was a mayhem it could control and eventually come to terms with because it was of its own making.

Today’s Mumbai is city aghast because it does not know where trouble will erupt from, it does not know who to turn to when it does. This is, as the Fort bystander said, not even a series of bombs that swept through the city in 1993; the bombs went off, the city ducked and recovered quickly to its feet. This is a whole city taken hostage, at least that is what the absence on the streets and the shuttered avenues would tell you. It is not just the Taj and the Oberoi and the horrific hostage drama of Nariman House, this is an entire idea called Mumbai in the grip of siege.

Kashmir’s been allowed a festive election this season, Mumbai’s soul lies in a brutal grab. Such are the tricks terror can play.