Dead wrong

It’s been a rather nasty month all over the world. Personally, it has been painful, not just physically, but spiritually as well. Reading about and watching children dead, ill or suffering in any way is always sapping. Most recently is the murder of a 14-year-old in Delhi. All the police theories have been debunked and now, even as I write this, her father has been arrested for her killing – a matter of honour, investigators say. It must be terrible to have to face the fact that you have killed your own child; it must be even more horrible to have to hide it, even for a moment, leave alone many days.

Not too long ago, there was mass murder in Jaipur, perhaps the best known destination in India for tourists. Seven bombs blasted into the peace of the Pink City, killing more innocent people than could be counted – children, women, young men, old people…no one who was in any way deserving of such a violent death. The investigators are slowly unravelling all the tangled webs that have been woven around terrorist activity in this country. That the bad guys would plot, plan, shop, then walk in, plant the bombs and leave, all without any qualms or shiverings of conscience is frightening.

Then nature played its own part. The earth shook in China, houses and public buildings came tumbling down. And lives tumbled, crumbled, shattered into death and dust. Most of the dead were young, some of them just starting school. Instead of a great adventure that is life, they were sent to a world that no one knows about. It was not the dying that mattered as much as the fear, I believe. Those last few moments before they were killed must have been about the most frightening they have ever faced in their tiny lives. And those who lived will always remember the horror of being almost-dead, of waiting until they were brought back into the light.

But with all this, there have been small joys that have delighted the world too. David Cook (I rooted for him) won American Idol, beating favourite David Archuleta, the boy-child with a wonderful voice. One of the main roads in the city that I drive in to work and back home on has been concretised, becoming a smooth, safe, seamless path that is a pleasure to coast over. And all is more or less well in my small world and that of the people around me who matter. Touch wood.

Does it all balance out? In a tiny, selfish, almost callous way, it does. Tragedy is usually someone else’s to cry about. That we all are moved and battered by it is the cost of being a good human being with that conscience I spoke about earlier. That it matters to me and you and so many others that a young woman, one who has not yet started her life, has been murdered is a matter of being a decent person. That it matters to us all that so many people died in an earthquake in a part of the world that most of us will not ever visit is also part of being human. And the fact that we will remember with horror how bombs planted on bicycles splashed red blood on pink stucco makes us people with heart.