Terminus: a place where something terminates — usually journeys, but also, in railway terms, the place where sometimes long journeys begin.

Dateline: November 24, 2018, Bombay: As the tenth anniversary of the ’08 Massacre pulls up, I sit writing this column in Bombay, from a bar-café in B.R. Ambedkar Terminus, known in its previous avatars as VT, (as in Victoria Terminus, after the erstwhile Queen of Britain and Empress of India) and CST, (after Shivaji, Chhatrapati Shivaji, the warrior-hero of the Marathas from a few hundred years earlier). Given the speeded up tectonic shift in current politics, I can’t help wondering whom this grand station will be named after next.

I wish I could light up a cigarette, but the smoke I really miss is the proper, sooty smoke from the great, horned mammoths of my childhood, the steam-engines that dragged me from the maelstrom of Howrah Station in Calcutta to the very differing cyclones of VT and Bombay Central. I also gladly miss, as I did on that day when I was very far away, the smoke, or the absence of it, from the AK-47 sub-machineguns as they opened up. TV channels are replaying old CCTV footage from the attack on the Station, stuff that younger people today find extraordinary: waiters behind fast-food counters holding hands to their ears, walking around ramrod straight as the shooting begins. “My god, duck down! Don’t they know it’s a bullet-multiplier?”, “Machine-gun, we called it then, sweetie.”, “Whatever! Don’t they know??”, “No, they thought it was firecrackers.” Till the bullets started to tear into them.

There is a memorial an artist made on the fifth anniversary. A slab of concrete into which she fired 200 AK rounds with the names of each of the identifiable Bombay dead inscribed, one next to each bullet-hole, and it stands not far from the platform where the super-fast trains from Karachi now terminate. It’s one of the many tiny ironies that the trains plying the Pakistan routes are the design-descendants of the legendary Japanese ‘Bullet’ Trains of the 1960s — the eastern and Deccan lines, as we know, having been captured by the spin-offs from the defunct French and Swiss TGV combines. The Pak-side trains are all called ‘Bullet’, as in “Karachi ka Bullet time pey aayela kya?” (Did the Bullet from Karachi reach on time?), “Idhar ka Bullet chalaa gaya?” (Did the Bullet leave from here already?). Yes, it did, my friend, straight through to Ahmedabad and Bhuj and then Karachi , where it will ricochet on northwards to terminate at Lahore Central. Total journey time: ten hours, including stops. Next year, they say, they will shave it to eight and a half, though that’s even worse for the environment, all that fast metal shooting through the fields.

All this was unimaginable on the day they opened fire on the massed, waiting passengers at VT/CST, but the today we have is possible in no small part precisely because of those four days, which we now call by various names, including The Great Bombay Massacre.

It was not strictly ‘Great’, given that only 200 people seemed to have actually died; but, looking back, it was a watershed made of blood. The rivers of red flowed away in several different directions, hooking different tributaries, flooding, and at times almost drying up, but unmistakably changing colour as they dropped from the crags of the high, seemingly immutable rock of fixed positions. To many, it then seemed one of the worst moments, one of the worst human-made tragedies of post-Babri sub-continental history. Indeed, as we know, in terms of human cost, numbers of dead and wounded and damaged, a lot worse was still to come. But today we can say: That was when the tide turned. That was the moment the b******s lost the game. Not because of the Taj Hotel, not because of the Trident Hotel or Nariman House, but when they opened fire on the waiting crowd at the station and on the patients in Cama Hospital. That was the game, and they didn’t quite understand it. That was when they finally became nangaa to everyone, to the public-at-large, to the fast-moving glacier of large-janata, poor and not so poor. People on all sides of all sorts of divides then understood that this was intolerable for all, that if this was in any way accepted, then life would not be worth living, prayers not worth praying. We can also, thankfully, say that they, these trendily-dressed gunmen, tore the fig-leafs off a whole host of others as they went down.

It’s now worth remembering that, in the weeks immediately after the attack, the plaint from many of the so-called intellectuals of the day consisted of lovelorn paeans to the other faux-Gothic building, the Taj Mahal Hotel. which was badly damaged, and the now defunct Trident Hotel. Yes, many were brutally killed in these places as well, but it’s worth remembering that the media, both Indian and international, concentrated only on the sites where Western visitors were caught. That was the ‘drama’, the ‘eyeball-factory’ of the event. But, even in the immediate aftermath, the signs were on the screen. The final disintegration of the already atomized Shiv Sena factions took a while, but Bal Thackeray was still there to witness his Maratha-machismo being finally revealed for the braying bravado of cheap theatre it really was, suddenly stripped naked — ‘Maratha Manoos’ completely missing in action during the fight to stop the gunmen, no cadres of the Shiv Sena rushing forward to fight and die before the machine-guns when the city they claimed as their own was under attack. The other Hindu Right factions lost crucial states to a bleeding, limping Congress in the state elections immediately after the attacks — their attempt to create electoral maal out of the death toll coming to very little. The Congress, too, was centrally damaged, though like a swift and subtle knife-wound, the blood only spurted out much later.

On the multi-hued Left, too, there was damage, fallout from the four-day Party-busting party in South Bombay. Maoists in central India were forced to give a ‘gun salute’ for the dead in Bombay, a hilariously desperate attempt to put clear blue water between themselves and the jihadis. Unfortunately for themselves, the neo-Naxals were in an ideological position that was as land-locked as Madhya Pradesh. It was not that easy to get away from their cousins, the ‘superbly trained’ jihadis. It was suddenly becoming clear to people at large that, for both the Comrades and the bhais, there actually was No God but Kalashni-god. When their ancestors had begun their struggle in ’66, the Maoists had airs, but also graces and erudition, a morality of a certain kind that had evaporated a long time ago. Along with the all-singing, all-dancing troupe of Mullahinettes, these people now stood revealed and naked, envious stage-hands forced to support the upstart rockstars. Along with the trendy guy in the Versace T-shirt and the AK-accessory, the New Model Naxals, too, stood in the dock of public perception.

It seems quite minor now, but I feel obliged to remind readers that it’s a very good thing they didn’t make it, neither Salafist nor Zedongist, that they didn’t actually make their targets, that both groups failed. In those four Mumbai-to-Bombay days, the Allah-Ho-Versace guys didn’t make their aim, not completely, not by a long chalk. At the time, many of us thought they’d scored big-time, but sitting in the bumpy train of time we can see that they were the losers that fell off. We can see now, now that the old blood has dried and evaporated, that both jihadis and Naxals were victims of rape, of mental rape, of social conditions that were extremely unfriendly to a reasonable exchange of generally perceived realities. This may sound like being very kind to them, but now, with the passage of time, surely we can afford to be human?

Maybe not, because it’s not been that long; time hasn’t had the time to cauterize their actions; but the basic message that comes through time, through innovative engineering, through the shifting loyalties of steel, aluminium and money, is that targeted, political violence has had its day, whether it comes from the government or its unsubcribers.