What The Ground Said

By Ali Naqvi

LEEDS, England - Last week the bombers came to the places where I used to live. This week the police came to the places where I live.

In the solid yellow stare of a July sun, blue and white tape sealed off roads and black helmets watched my every move. Noses wrinkled at the car I was driving as if the exhaust was pumping out skunk air.

I was lying in bed, shuddering from a chest infection, when the red band broke across the screen telling me about the bombs in London. Names that were part of my daily routine, stairs I had shuffled up to get to lectures that were always too early, the wheel rattle of old red and blue carriages and the suffocating heat of too many people pressed too close together. The level crossing I had dragged my bag across to get to the bank now had bits of roof and bits of people across it. I always sat on the top deck, where the Plexiglas at the front curved up and had the top support struts ripped off. My seat wasn’t there.

There were always the guilty moments, the heart skip when the tube failed to rumble on time. When it smacked the sides of the tunnel and sparked. When it ground down some coke can under its wheels. I would stand in the first carriage of the Piccadilly line train waiting to jump off quickly at Russell Square next to the exit, but there was always the thought that if “they” wanted to – this would be a readymade mausoleum. So we stared blankly into the walls while letting the peripheral vision scan those around us. On that day someone got under the vision, and left a rucksack set for 8:50 am.

Today, they came in their white vans, jumped out the back and laid down the law over a block square of street. It was stealthy. Bleary eyes met with the high-vis jackets in the dawn and people shuffling out of the front door looking at what was going on. They were searching for “them.” Like the guilty moments on the tube, the possibility of this had flitted into our minds every time we walked out of the door.

It was like the possibility of the strip search and the missed flight. The possibility of the wrong name and the wrong face being met with sweaty interviews in closed off rooms while you failed to exist outside the room.

Such is our life now. Wrongness permeated with other wrongness. There is no real innocence except maybe for those who live under the age of reason and those who live beyond it. Those of us who live in the shelters of the west, surrounded by the concrete and civility of our societies can no longer ignore the meat grinder that spins outside our havens. Those of us who would like to carry on as if the currents of life only feature our own needs can no longer live with that luxury as the images of headless children reach out to drag us in to the nonstop whirl of it all.

There are men and some women who made it so. There are men and some women that suspended souls somewhere and denied the whispers of conscience that were built into them. They do this in boardrooms and caves, in mosques, in air conditioned hotel rooms or the backs of Teutonic chariots.

Thus I draw moral equivalence. That taking a life is taking a life. Suspending a life, curtailing the right to live, holding up the right to be as a crime and preventing all of us to be able to strive for safety are morally corrupt. A GPS guided bomb that drops on the sleeping child has the same affect as the rucksack on the backseat. That those who make the policy, those of our race who sit over death toll figures and collateral damage estimates, are complicit in setting up the teeth of the Grinder. That there can be no prayer with the smell of blood in the nostrils; there can be no humanity with the thoughts of obliteration of others foremost on your mind. Injustice cannot be cured with more injustice.

When Cain killed Able, the ground betrayed him. When asked, the ground will tell its tales. From Srebinica to the wall behind Rami Al Durra, from the splattered front of the BMA to the hulks of metal in Madrid, the ground will speak. It will not say Muslim killed Jew because of this or that, it will not say that Arab was massacred here by Christian. It will say man killed man, and I know not why.