Two Julys

I've always preferred trains to flying. Perhaps it's time to re-examine that.

At peak evening rush hour, when the bombs went off, Mumbai's suburban rail carries six million passengers. The cell phone network became almost instantly jammed, and still is. All our fancy mobiles are just paperweights right now. Our landline also went out. It often does, but not usually for this long -- it's still dead. We have emergency radios, but none of us really know how to use them ("Um -- oh, here's the charger base! Ok...now, a little red light is supposed to come on...I think. Hello? Hello?"). Yeah, we're all really well-prepared.

I got frustrated being totally incommunicado, so went into work (K insisted on going with me. I told him he'd just be bored as I sent emails to Washington, but he told me, firmly, "where you go, I go." Aw). Some staff members who'd been working late had gotten trapped there -- they're spending the night -- and someone else brought in some homecooked food. Our A/V technician, who seems to have a magically working phone that can slice through the networks like a warm knife through butter, diligently tracked down every single one of our many staff members. Everyone's ok, though some people were on the trains that exploded.

Eyewitness reports say there were eight blasts. The headlines have been all over the place in terms of blast numbers and casualties. There's also been some weirdness in the foreign (I mean, U.S. and the like) press, with some nuggets reappearing verbatim in several papers, such as "the force of the blasts tore off train doors." Uh - Mumbai suburban rail cars don't have doors. I understand: in a city that already looks pretty post-apocalyptic to start with, it can be difficult to make these assessments.

I've heard that LeT, the Kashmiri separatist group, has claimed responsibility, and that the attacks are linked with the grenade attacks in Srinagar this morning. That's bad in the sense that this group is capable of continuing attacks, but better them than for it to be local politics (my first thought was that this was connected with the Shiv Sena nonsense from this past weekend, and that would have been disastrous).

Our driver, who kind of reminds me of Johnny from Police Squad!, has assured us the word on the street is that if there's to be rioting, it'll occur in the next 48 hours. If we get through that, all's likely to be quiet. Fingers crossed.