Last week, I took a train from North Podunksburg (where I live and work) to Metropolis (the nearest large conurbation) to attend several days of business meetings there. I was riding with some of my colleagues, and after the conversation had died down and people were looking out the windows, I turned on my mp3 player and zoned out.

You know that moment when you wake from a reverie and you remember where you are, when you realize that you are in one place and not in another? Well, I had a post 9/11 moment, a quick reminder that I wear a turban, “sport” a beard, am graced by almond skin … and that these things mean something different now than they once used to.

I was humming along under my breath, then mouthing the lyrics, then singing along quietly. A Billy Bragg song was on, and these were the words I heard in my ears:

Revenge will bring cold comfort in this darkest hour
As the juke box says ‘It’s All Over Now’
And he stands and he screams
What have I done wrong
I’ve fallen in love with a little time bomb [Link] [Audio: wmv, real]

I had sung, softly and under my breath, but perhaps audible “I’ve fallen in love with a little …” and then I tried hard to swallow the next few words, but I ended up mouthing “… time bomb.” It was my own personal Clash moment, except that the song I was singing had lyrics far worse than “…war is declared and battle come down…”

You see, I don’t give people an excuse. I don’t say “that play bombed” or “she was so bombed the other day” or “that was an explosive allegation” or “he completely hijacked that meeting.” I don’t use such words in public where they might be overheard and misunderstood by others. I don’t speak to my parents in Punjabi on the phone while I’m at an airport. I call or send text messages to my friends “Patriot Act Check-ins” at each leg of my flight schedule to avoid the possibility that I might ever ever be detained incommunicado somewhere by some official who didn’t “like the way I looked.” But that day, seduced by the false feeling of privacy that comes when you’ve got those little white earbuds in and your own music rocking around you … that day, I forgot. And I’m not allowed to forget because, in many ways, the terrorists have won. This is not the country that I was born into, and I can only pray that one day, it will be again.

Look, I’m not crying boo hoo hoo over my inability to sing the lyrics I want. Big deal, right? I mean, it’s inconsiderate to sing along while on a public carriage. No, this is just about the little reminders you get, like the whiff of an exes perfume, of what you’ve lost. And some days I really miss America.

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UPDATE: Play along at home or at work! Click this link and tell me that the song isn’t catchy, even if you don’t like Billy Bragg …

Also, here’s a desi connection to Billy Bragg - he got his big break by using desi food to get air-play:

The album was widely received as a demonstration of a promising new talent. Hearing DJ John Peel mention on-air that he was hungry, Bragg rushed to the BBC with a mushroom biryani, and was rewarded when Peel played a track from Life’s a Riot, albeit at the wrong speed. Peel insisted he would have played the tape even without the biryani and later played it at the correct speed. [Link]