At precisely 10:30 on the morning of September 18, my family and I stood for a moment of silence. It had been announced some days before, and a full page ad. in that morning's newspaper told us to do so. In case we had missed it altogether, there was even a soft recording on the phone, in place of a dial tone, to remind us. On a Solidarity Day against Terrorism, this was a moment of prayer, a time to remember all those who have lost their lives to terrorists.
Moment done, I looked at the full page again. There's a picture of our prime minister, and a quote from him that says `Every Indian has to be a part of this global war on terrorism ... We must, and we will, stamp out this evil from our land and from the world.' Below, there are four more pictures, of major terrorist incidents: the Bombay bomb blasts of March 1993, the Indian Airlines hijacking of December 1999, the Anantnag massacre of March 2001 and the WTC attacks of September 11.

Horrors all. `Ugly face of Terrorism,' says the collective caption below the four photographs.

And yet, and yet... why do I feel a certain unease? When I look at this ad, when I read all the columns about terrorism that have appeared in our papers since September 11, when I stand quiet and think of the victims of these outrages _ I also say a few silent words for Raju. Because I knew his father, and through his terrible despair I understood: this 14-year-old boy, his only son, was also a victim of terror.
Raju died on January 11, 1993. In the heart of Bombay, during some of the worst rioting our country has ever known, he was butchered by some of his fellow Indians. He was one of some-where around a thousand Indians who were mur-dered by other Indians in the two months of Decem-ber 1992 and January 1993. I ask you: as he watched the men who surrounded him that night raise their long knives and slash at him, as he understood he had arrived at the last few moments of his life, do you think Raju did not feel terror?
Go ahead, pick any of those thousand Indians who died like Raju died _ as they saw death coming for them, did those men and women not feel terror?

Forget the deaths if you like. Did the man in the famous photograph from that time, a scrawny man in rags and a moustache, running for his life with blood streaming from his face, not feel terror? Did the man in that other famous photograph from that time, the sturdy jawan home from serving his country at the border, looking around at his smashed and looted house, not feel terror?
Did anyone who lived through those weeks not feel terror? What about those crazed few minutes near the Bandra railway station, when some men suddenly stabbed some other men and people ran screaming and a few alert photographers caught their headlong fright on film? What about the people who were panicked for a whole night by a rumour that an armed horde was about to come ashore on the Dadar beach? What about the one hundred or so residents of Pedder and Carmichael Roads who gathered one afternoon to meet then defence minister Sharad Pawar, pleaded with him to use the army to quell the riots?

What were all these people feeling?

And what was it that I felt as I realised that I would be nuts to try to make my way from my office to my suburban home? When several surly yahoos advanced menacingly on me as I asked questions about a burned and looted shop in Girgaum for a report on the riots that I was working on? When I finally did take the train home and it crawled past an enormous crowd near Mahalaxmi railway station, the men carrying swords that glinted in the evening sun, glinting forever in my mind?
I know it and I feel not the slightest shame admitting it: I was in terror. As was all of Bombay.

And if terrorism means the spreading of terror, which is the only thing it seems to me it can mean, then all of us in Bombay experienced terrorism in those weeks. Yes indeed, Raju and the rest of the thousand dead died at the hands of terrorism.

Which is why I wondered as I stood for my moment of silence on September 18: In this full page ad that tells me about the `Ugly face of Terrorism,' that urges Indians to fight terrorism, why is there no picture, nor even mention, of the riots in Bombay? I don't for a moment mean to overlook the horror of the four events that do appear in the ad. Each of them was a crime against humanity itself, whose perpetrators must pay fully for it. <P ALI