The following was written as a sense-making post of my own experiences of the civil war and not as a commentary on the attacks themselves. This is not a "moving on" post:
After the initial disbelief and paralysis, learning to live in a war zone again felt as easy as slipping into a pair of hated but comfortable boots.
I didn't have any conception of what it would be like to live without the threat of bombs and attacks and assassinations until I was 22, and even then for years I didn't trust it. My younger co-workers were baffled and scared, which is when I realized they had been little kids when the war had stopped.
The senior journalists, however, merely strapped their work boots on. "It didn't occur to me that you lot would get scared," my editor laughed. "The war has been my entire career as a journo. The minute the call came in, I put on my deck shoes. Because I used to have to wade around dead bodies and the blood would get encrusted around my jeans."
We spent the rest of the day breaking the acute boredom of the lulls between news bulletins by joking around and cracking up with the familiar gallows humour. I can't quite describe what it feels like to know and accept that there is a chance I might die on the way home. It had always been a background hum of stress and fatalism that was so deep in my blood, a part of life growing up in this country as embedded and shared unspoken as a love of Watalappan pudding and cheese kottu, that I didn't even realize it had been there until it was gone. It had been normal for us to accept that there was no guarantee our parents would come back home when they stepped out for work. That the next bus we took or this one might have the bus bomb in it. I grew up playing hop scotch on Russian roulette, and didn't know there was a problem with that because it was all I knew.
Feeling the fear actually birthing itself again in the fluttering behind my ribs and the light-headedness that detached me from my hands and feet for a minute was very unexpected. This then, was what it felt like to fear death. A thing that had sat in a corner of the house, clunky, overbearing and taking up space under a dust sheet but never looked at, now seen with adult eyes. It felt like greeting an old friend I had forgotten about till now.
I think why the senior staff were so composed, and why even my friends kept our heads on, is because we’ve been through this enough to know the world doesn’t stop turning. People cry and grieve, make runs to the grocery store, to the vet’s, clean and bury our dead, go to the bank, to the dry cleaners, and make memes and jokes at the resulting political circus. People go to work and find small reasons to enjoy life, watch sports and movies, even while the city teems with army checkpoints and police busting down doors.
It's not callousness. It's adaptation and survival. We do not forget. God knows we can never forget, and sometimes I wish we did, rather than demand the inevitable blood price from innocents. But disaster and laughter, misery and mundanity live side by side in war and we blame no one for falling back into the patterns normalcy. Its not really something you can explain, that fear is not just one colour and hue but a palette of them, where each bleeds into the other so much that they make whole new shades.
