No.
It was not a 9/11.
We did not have a bone-chilling 3,500 deaths over those three days. Nor did two of the world's largest buildings fall. And Mumbai was not wrecked like the World Trade Centres and its surrounding areas were in September 2001.
But Mumbai's 62 hours of terror had aspects that have been as dreadful as 9/11. Aspects that makes overcoming the horror of these terrible strikes rough and daunting.
I have lived through the bloodshed, butchery and tears of the city's previous attacks in trains, buses and at city landmarks. And Mumbai's riots. I have seen people, who were alive moments ago, be carted off to the hospital and then to the morgue. I have seen a leg come out of a bomb site minus its owner. I have seen what hate does to human beings.
But I have not experienced the fear of having terrorists enter your home. That has now become real. The building in which Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg lived is known to the world as a Jewish centre. But do people understand it was also their home? It was a simple residential building deep inside a crowded neighbourhood full of other residential buildings, some of them a few feet away from Nariman House. And when the Holtzbergs moved to this friendly Indian city they must have felt quite safe; attacks on Jews on Indian soil are pretty much unheard of.
These two men from hell entered the home of an ordinary, closely-knit family, one dark November evening, and killed them. They or their fellow conspirators must have scouted around beforehand and discovered this oddly-located home, that I never knew existed, which had foreigners living it and then cold-bloodedly targeted it.
That is extremely traumatising. I wonder tomorrow if they will enter the home of any foreigner. I have foreigners living in my building. Can they enter my building? Is that really an exaggerated thought? Children in Mumbai are asking their parents, "What will you do, Mom, do if a terrorist enters our home?"
Three nightmarish days of sustained grenade attacks, explosions and gunfire inflicted by unknown terrorists -- no one had any idea in those three days how many of them there were and if they were loose elsewhere in the city -- became three days etched on your soul. More, you will remember platoons of soldiers marching in your city to take control of a situation that the city's local forces could not solve and helicopters rumbling overhead dropping commandos from the sky. Those were enduring images and haunting sounds.
Now every remotely comparable noise/sight -- a firecracker, a burst tyre, a fire truck parked in a strange place, a policeman wandering with riot gear, an ambulance's urgent siren, a strange-looking car/driver moving fast, a late-night phone call, navy exercises at sea -- has new meaning. My children still have nightmares. I am too. And so is my neighbour.
Unfortunately, thanks to the carelessness of the city's caretakers, Mumbai is one of the most attacked cities in the world. I have sifted through the statistics available on the Internet and I cannot find any other city that has faced so many terrorist attacks except certain cities in Israel and Colombo.
In this ordinary city -- that hums with the cycles of everyday life -- one cannot help but now live with the grim belief that another attack could be around the corner. Mumbai, today like Baghdad, sits in the middle of a battlefield of a war without frontiers.
How do you put gruesome, terrifying strikes that happened three weeks ago behind you when you are worried that there could be fresh attacks just months hence?
Or that RDX left somewhere may go off -- like maybe in the taxi you plan to take to go home?
The police insist there were just 10 terrorists. But where are the other 300 they trained with?
Where are the people who discovered Nariman House for Imran Babar and his partner?
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