This poem is really a response to the Partition of 1947, but I think it has bearing on the questions people are asking a day after a particularly horrifying terrorist attack.

Jussawalla describes a rootless island city that is in some sense cut off from the “mainland’s histories” — that is on its own. But that sense of detachment has its limits, as Bombay has also been the destination point for waves of migrants and refugees from the subcontinent’s recurring troubles. These immigrant Bombayites (or now, Mumbaikars) bring new life and energy to the city (“restore us to fire”), and also tie the city tightly to the mainland’s darker episodes (the other meaning of “restore us to fire”). Some elite Bombayites have historically been ambivalent about their connection to the mainland, and even today, there are people who talk about instituting a kind of Hong Kong-esque autonomy to Mumbai, to prevent its being held back by the mainland’s elephant slowness.

The idea of Bombay paying for traumas occurring elsewhere was probably true in the case of bombing and riots of 1993, which were triggered by the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, though it’s undeniable that local Muslim-led gangs and homegrown Shiv Sena thugs exploited that event for their own purposes. Something similar may be afoot now, if we assume that the bombers in yesterday’s Western Line attacks were associated with Kashmiri separatist militants.

And yet, through it all, though the trauma of the tearing and re-forming of communities, and the chaos of life in Bombay even without terrorism, there is, as Jussawalla says, the reassuring constancy of a cooling sea-breeze, which “uncovers no root,/ And settles no one adrift of the mainland’s histories.” Rootless, and yet yet never detached — that’s Jussawalla’s Bombay.