To my son,the terrorist

A love letter to a terrorist,one of the most beautiful articles I have come across..

Does a mother have to write a letter to her son through the newspapers? But then, does a mother who hasn’t seen her son in eight years, have to see his photograph splashed on TV? Does her heart leap at first flash, her mind a rush of all the possible causes of claim to such prime-time fame? And where does she hide when the answer follows immediately after? They say, ‘Don’t show pictures of those killed and mutilated in a blast because the family would go into shock to get such terrible news from TV’. Are the parents of the suspect not entitled to such courtesies? In our case, the cruelty is burdened with humiliation. It is as if every man, woman and child in the locality has rushed to the window to stare right through our door and bore holes into our very souls. How terrifying it is to open it to the police. How terrifying it is to open it at all. Answering the bell of the breadman and the milkman, stepping out for the bazaar — suddenly there is no such thing as routine in our lives. And to think we used to complain about our ordinariness. That television screen has become the symbol of our instantly changed life. It was the same one on which we watched our humdrum programmes, the one over which you were punished for sticking to instead of to your books. But not all that often, because you were, all in all, a good boy. We praised you for your quiet, self-contained ways. Should we have worried instead? Yes, the split second of that revelation changed everything. Hindsight is brutal; it stains everything. All that we had considered commendable — from your tech-wizardry to your religious devotion — has become a pointer to the coming doom. Even everything that we had considered innocuous all these years now seems like an ominous mask of what would happen. What has happened? The newspapers tell the world, day after day, that you are a mastermind. ‘Mastermind’ such an apparently admiring word with such a sinister subtext. In a sense, it reflects my own predicament. Outwardly, I stoutly defend your innocence, but my fears creep up as insidiously to confront me with the possibility of your guilt. I try to push these thoughts out of my mental frame. The police are notorious for arresting innocents, and then finding nothing to stick on them, aren’t they? The media is equally trigger-happy, isn’t it? Look at the way they present ‘evidence’, and pronounce judgment only to look even more red-faced than the police when it all falls apart. But that small voice inside me hammers against my head, ‘What if?’ Indeed, ‘What if?’ Zubeida, mother of that other so-called terrorist, Abdul Subhan Qureishi or Tauqir or whatever, appeared boldly on TV some weeks ago, threw back her burqa, and pronounced that if her son was indeed guilty he should be hanged right in front of her. Words, just words. I doubt if I would be able to make such a dramatic statement, and I know for certain that I would not be able to look at such a sight without flinching. Or look at all. Alas, Tikoo, being a mother isn’t only a Bollywood device. I don’t know how to condemn you, and I don’t know how to absolve you. I see you in the gruesome image of the young man with his arm torn off. Sometimes the face is yours. And sometimes the intact arm is yours, in the act of dropping a lethal bag into a dustbin. Or I see the photograph of another alleged terrorist spread-eagled in his own blood. And mine runs cold because I see you in him too. And I don’t know whether to wish you had died instead of killing us with this shame. Or to be thankful that you are alive, that whatever you may have done for whatever skewed crusade, it does not alter the fact that you are still our son. It is both our consolation and our tragedy that we might hate you, but we cannot stop loving you.
Yours, Mom