Editor’s Note: Zondervan Author Philip Yancey recently returned from India where he received an insider’s view of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Indian caste system, and more. What follows is his account.
Dec. 6, 2008
We are home! I must admit, it seemed surreal to drive in from the airport and see all the cars proceeding in an orderly fashion in their respective lanes, with no cows, goats, or water buffaloes wandering through traffic and no 3-wheel auto rickshaws and 2-wheel motorbikes darting in and out among vehicles constantly jockeying for position. The air is so clean! And the atmosphere so quiet: many trucks in India have a notice, “OK Honk Horn Please,” painted on the back, the one traffic rule all Indian drivers unfailingly obey.
As we left New Delhi, new terror threats had been made against three major airports, and we have never experienced such tight security. Soldiers swarmed the airport, some manning machine guns mounted on the backs of pickup trucks. We went through numerous searches of clothing and luggage, as well as several verbal interviews. A few hours later gunfire broke out in the Delhi airport, but by that time we were 40,000 feet in the air.
Last time I wrote from Mumbai just as the terror drama was unfolding. I don’t know how this played out in the western media, though I imagine it got major coverage. Most terror events hit suddenly and end just as suddenly; this one dragged on for sixty hours. Indian television gave it non-stop coverage, and it seems the terrorists themselves were following media reports of police strategy, adjusting their positions as they watched real-time images of commandos dropping from helicopters onto rooftops of the buildings they were holding.
Life virtually ground to a halt in Mumbai, just as it did in the US after 9/11. In restaurants and airports all over India, everyone sat glued to the television, with poignant banners running across the bottom carrying messages like “Veneeta, we are praying for you...Vijay, please call home—we are so worried.”
Each day the Indian papers recounted stories of the ongoing drama. A well-known female journalist text-messaged a half-page article about being held hostage in her hotel room, describing the gunshots and grenade blasts from battles fought in hotel corridors, and the smoke licking under the doors. Her last message was “Terrorist is in the bathroom, I’m under the bed...”; commandos found her body there hours later. Rumors spread like weeds, of scores of bodies floating in the hotel swimming pool, of explosives set to destroy entire buildings. (And, indeed, five days after the drama ended police found a huge unexploded bomb smack in the middle of the attacked train station.)
The 12-year-old son of a British couple dining in the Taj Mahal Hotel restaurant went to the bathroom just before terrorists attacked. For 36 hours his parents were held hostage, not knowing if their son had made it. All survived, and were reunited. A man who had just made a champagne toast in celebration of a business deal spent the next two days lying in shattered glass feigning death, his arm covering his face so they wouldn’t notice he was a foreigner. A Muslim couple heard a noise that sounded like firecrackers. They went to the window overlooking a popular café and were killed in a hail of bullets as their young son watched.
Just as in 9/11, tales of luck and heroism also surfaced. A dance troupe scheduled to be in the Taj restaurant left an hour early to perform at a wedding, just missing the horror. The manager of the Taj Hotel was helping hide guests in a basement food locker even as his wife and two children burned to death in their executive suite several floors above. One British lawyer, barricaded in his room and hiding under the bed, set up a kind of impromptu network with other hostages who had Blackberries. The Indian nanny caring for the 2-year-old son of a rabbi smuggled him out of the Jewish center, saving him from the torture and death that awaited his parents. (Israel has named her a “righteous Gentile” and offered her citizenship.)
An alert railroad employee announced over the loudspeaker of the main railway station, “The stairway from platform 1 is closed, please do not use it,” thus diverting crowds of passengers and saving hundreds of lives. At least 56 people died in the station, which got little international coverage because few foreigners were involved. Local policemen charged into the invaded hotels with 9mm. automatic pistols, only to meet terrorists wielding grenades and AK-47s. It took almost a day for well-equipped federal commandos to arrive.
As for the Taj Hotel, one Indian told me, “You cannot imagine what the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel means to the Indian people. It’s a great source of national pride, an icon, like the Statute of Liberty is to you.” No doubt you’ve seen photos of the magnificent building, constructed in 1903 by a wealthy Indian who had been refused entrance to a “whites only” British hotel. Similarly, the railway station dates from the Victorian era, was once called Victoria Station, and is listed as a World Heritage Site.
We were scheduled to hold a meeting that night in an auditorium not far away from the action, but of course that got canceled. I felt bad for the organizers who had worked for months planning a program, designing banners, and stocking books. Instead, we held an impromptu meeting in Thane, the city 20 miles away where we were staying in a private home. With only a few hours notice, more than 200 people showed up. I began by telling them what happened in the emergency room the day I broke my neck in an automobile accident. The doctor poked me with a straight pin here and there, asking me, “Does this hurt?” Each time I responded, “Yes!” and he smiled and said “Good!” A physical body is only healthy when it feels pain from all its parts. The barrage of emails I had received during the day showed that people all over the world were deeply concerned about what was transpiring in India, sharing in its pain.
We spent the next day visiting a remarkable hospital founded by Stephen Alfred, an Indian doctor who gave up his lucrative practice in England to return to serve poor people who have no access to medical care. Currently he is building an eight-story hospital, with most of the funds coming from within India. The old 80-bed hospital will be used by the AIDS/HIV branch, now operating out of a small clinic. India has no shortage of people, and we accompanied two social workers on their visits to clients in a slum area. The government provides free drugs for those with AIDS, and when a person is first diagnosed with the disease, these social workers visit the family every day, counseling other family members on safe practices and checking on the medication. They continue these visits weekly.
One family of five that we visited lives in a single concrete-block room no larger than 8x10. They keep it neat and clean, and follow the regimen meticulously. The social workers told us that when they first contacted the family, the 3-year-old was lying in fetal position on the bed, unable to walk, mere skin and bones. Now she’s a healthy 8-year-old, playing outdoors, posing for photos. The mother, learning of another pregnancy, tried three times to abort the baby, and failed. Learning of this, the clinic doctors monitored the pregnancy and adjusted medication, and she delivered a healthy baby girl, now a rambunctious 3-year-old.
A first-time visitor to India is usually shocked by the seeming chaos of a billion people, many of whom live in poverty unimaginable to the West. Yet under the surface you find many signs of compassion, and come away amazed by their endurance, graciousness, and boundless hospitality.
I wrote previously of some of our contacts who are working to educate and liberate the Dalits (untouchables). On our last day, in New Delhi, we also met with some remarkable people working among the 500 million members of “Other Backward Castes.” (Imagine growing up with that identity.) Sunil Sardar, who has lived in the U.S. and is married to an American woman, spearheads this effort with an organization known as Truthseekers. He provides a home and center for various leaders of these castes from all faiths. We shared lunch with the leader of the Shepherds’ Caste, leader of 60 million, as well as the head of the two-million strong Farmer’s Union, a renowned author, and other leaders in the struggle. Amazingly, these leaders of millions would find it difficult to pay for a hotel room, and Sunil provides a place for them to stay as they lobby the government and plan strategy. One scholar told us, “You Americans are celebrating the election of a black man only 250 years after slavery. We are still waiting for liberation after 4000 years of living under caste.”
Besides these stimulating meetings and tense days in Mumbai, we also managed to have some fun on this trip. On a trip to Toronto earlier this year, I met a young man who generously volunteered to show us around Kerala, a state in the far south of India, a place where the Apostle Thomas reportedly planted the first church and where, bizarrely, the Syrian Orthodox Church still has a major presence. (Our friend now attends Fuller Seminary, where he met language specialists who translated for him the Syriac prayers he had learned as a child and never understood!) We spent one day and night on a bamboo-sided houseboat cruising the backwaters, which gave us the experience of floating through everyday village life. We drank fresh coconut milk, saw bright blue kingfishers darting for food and white egrets standing like sentinels in emerald-green rice paddies. Women in brightly colored saris stood in the shallow water to do laundry by beating their clothes on rocks—it looks for all the world as if they’re trying to break the rocks—and bathing naked babies.
We also made a trip to a tiger preserve where we saw few animals but got to ride an elephant. This park, too, we toured by boat. Whenever a passenger spotted a wild pig or bison, all the Indian tourists jumped up and yelled, which explains why we saw few animals. On the way, we also passed through tea and rubber and plantations, as well as spice gardens that cultivate pepper, cardamom, and other spices. (Remember, Columbus discovered America by accident, seeking a route to India to acquire these spices, thus misnaming the Native Americans he found.)
You hear about “the new India,” and indeed India has changed much in the two decades since I last visited. But in India nothing goes away, the layers simply accumulate. So electric wires crisscross the major cities, and monkeys now use them as highways. Exotic cars now crowd the highways, but they too have to share them with the animals, including an occasional elephant or camel. Every conqueror has left a mark: the Aryans brought the Hindu caste system; the Moghuls brought Islam (India is the second largest Muslim nation, next to Indonesia); the Syrians, Portuguese, then British introduced Christianity. There are also millions of Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains (who cover their mouths with a cloth to avoid inadvertently killing any living thing such as an insect.) As my Toronto friend said, “India is so diverse, with so many subcultures and more than 1500 languages, that I have more in common with you than with many people from other parts of India.”
We also toured a few publishing companies. Kerala claims to be the first place to achieve 100 percent literacy, and indeed bookstores and newsstands proliferate. Even here the old and the new exist side by side. I saw four men walking in circles round and round a table to assemble the 32-page signatures that make up a book, which were then pressed by hand into a binder. Meanwhile women sat yoga-style on the floor “gumming” the backs of paper scraps in the absence of adhesive labels.
Ah, India. Longsuffering, magical, baffling, mysterious, chaotic—any adjective you can think of applies. We are glad we went on this trip, and come away inspired by the dedicated people we met doing important and wonderful work. And we’re very glad to be home, safe and healthy. Thank you all for your prayers and concern.
Philip and Janet
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