In the bar, joints came out again and conversations continued with hardly a pause. I left and ran into a young girl and boy outside the entrance, cherub-faced Danes no more than six or seven years old. They"d rebuilt a snow barricade meant to slow police patrols. I smiled and waved. After ten days in Christiania, I was starting to feel like a local myself. They stared back, and the girl told me it would cost one hundred kroner to pa.s.s.
"I don"t have one hundred kroner," I said, grinning.
"Eighty," she answered.
"Twenty?" I asked.
"Sixty"
"Thirty?"
The girl scratched her head, glanced at the boy. I gave her a pleading look and she said, "One hundred." I laughed and flipped her a twenty-kroner piece. She and the boy inspected it as I scaled the wall. When I got one leg over the top, they pelted me with two s...o...b..a.l.l.s, square in the back.
Stuck.
Keith Gessen.
FROM The New Yorker.
MOSCOW"S TERRIBLE TRAFFIC has been infamous for a while now, but in the past year it has come to feel like an existential threat. The first snowfall of last winter, in early December, paralyzed the city. Andrey Kolesnikov, the Kremlin correspondent for Kommersant and probably the best-known print journalist in the country, was unable to reach the airport in time to leave with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for Nizhny Tagil. Instead of detailing Putin"s manly adventures in the metallurgical capital of the Urals, Kolesnikov"s column the next day described his own epic, failed journey to the airport. The traffic a.n.a.lysis center at Yandex, the country"s leading on-line search engine, reported a record-breaking worst-possible rating of 10 for six straight hours. That night, a popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making his way along the river in the center of town, encountered an ambulance driver standing outside his vehicle throwing s...o...b..a.l.l.s lazily off the embankment; he"d been in traffic so long, he explained, that his patient was now dead.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who takes everything that happens in the city very personally, perhaps because over the years he and his wife have come personally to own a good chunk of the city, reacted decisively: he blamed the meteorologists. They had underestimated the snowfall. If they didn"t start forecasting better, there would be trouble. In the following months, though, snow wreaked havoc on the city whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice president of Lukoil, the country"s largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroen. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroen crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law-both doctors-were killed.
The accident exploded into scandal. The police claimed that the Citroen was at fault, but automobile activists quickly found witnesses who said that the Mercedes had crossed over into the central emergency lane reserved for ambulances and police cars, and then into oncoming traffic. Especially infuriating was the Mercedes itself, a black S500 with a siren: for years, these besirened black Mercedeses had been running red lights, using the emergency lane, and otherwise tyrannizing other drivers. Some of them technically had the right to do all this, since they belonged to one of the federal security agencies in Moscow, or to Duma deputies, or to Putin; but a large number simply belonged to wealthy and well-connected individuals. Now they were killing people. Within days of the accident, the young rapper Noize MC recorded a furious song, "Mercedes S666," in which he ventriloquized the innocuous-looking Lukoil vice president as Satan: "All those satanic costumes, that"s just tomfoolery. / Dressing up like that they"ll never look like me ... I"m working here on a whole other level. / I"ve got a suitcase full of cash to get me out of trouble." The song"s chorus expressed the cla.s.s conflict at the heart of the matter: "Get out of my way, filthy peasants. / There"s a patrician on the road."
On a Monday morning a month later, two young women from the Caucasus set off bombs during rush hour in the center of the city. The first blew herself up at Lubyanka, the metro station just beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, and the other did so at a nearby stop, forty minutes later. Emergency services reacted rapidly, and since there could be no question of ambulances making it through traffic from the site of the bombings to the hospital, the badly wounded were helicoptered out. Given the forty-minute gap between the explosions, however, the press began to wonder why the metro hadn"t been evacuated directly after the first bomb. The response from a metro spokesman was immediate. "You have no idea what would have happened if we"d closed down an entire branch of the system," he said. The city was so crowded, its functioning so tenuous, that it was better to risk another explosion than close off an artery. "The city is on the brink of transportational collapse," Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert, told me. "Moscow will simply cease to function as a city. You and I will be living in different cities. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won"t be able to get from one neighborhood to the other."
I first noticed the extent of the Moscow traffic problem in the spring of 2007, while drinking a coffee at the Coffee Bean, on Sretenka, just up the street from the Lubyanka and around the corner from the Lukoil headquarters. It used to be that you couldn"t get a coffee in Moscow for love or money, so I didn"t mind that it wasn"t good coffee and that it cost four dollars. That is to say, I minded, but what could I do? So there I sat, sipping my four-dollar coffee and looking out the window, when suddenly my sister appeared in front of the coffee shop and stopped, trapped in traffic. She had recently bought a navy-blue Honda Element, which looks like a motorized version of Fred Flintstone"s car, with the driver sitting curiously upright. Farther ahead, Sretenka intersected the giant Garden Ring Road, which runs around the Kremlin at a radius of about a mile and a half and marks the border of the historic city center. For much of its length, it is twelve lanes wide; at certain points, it"s eighteen. Still, it is often clogged. At the Sretenka-Garden Ring intersection, a police officer hand-operates the light to try to ease traffic, to no avail. So there was my sister, just twenty feet away from me, sitting down as I was, almost as if she were at another table. The moment extended in time; I sipped my coffee. When, eventually, the light changed and my sister moved forward a few car lengths, it was as if she had merely moved to another table. If the coffee were cheaper, I would have brought her one.
Several generations, even several centuries, had brought the city to this point. Its early rulers built Moscow as a concentric series of walled forts, with the Kremlin at the center. After the government abandoned Moscow in favor of St. Petersburg, in the early eighteenth century, the old capital developed haphazardly, like an enormous bazaar. In the post-revolutionary age, when the Bolsheviks moved the government back to Moscow to get farther away from the Germans, various fantasies emerged to reverse all this: avantgardists imagined a socialist Moscow of clean right angles; others proposed simply abandoning the city. Many believed that the Kremlin, a church-laden symbol of medieval tyranny at the heart of the city, should be de-emphasized, or worse. By the time the Soviets were ready to do anything about it, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and under him the medieval character of Moscow was not fundamentally altered. Instead, the Stalinists built gigantic avenues that ran in all directions from the Kremlin like rays from the sun. There were few cars around to fill these avenues, but they provided a fine, broad line of sight for Soviet leaders during military parades.
Then came capitalism. The registration laws that had made it almost impossible to move to Moscow during Soviet times ceased to be enforced, and meanwhile chaos, deindustrialization, and ethnic violence roamed the peripheries of the empire. Very soon it became clear that what Moscow had lost in political authority it had gained, and then some, in economic authority. By the end of the 1990s, there were more people in Moscow from all over the former Soviet Union than there had been when the Soviet Union was a single state. People from rural Russia, the Central Asian states, and Ukraine came to escape poverty; people from the Caucasus came to escape the war.
All of them wanted cars. The city"s plan with regard to this was not to have a plan at all. Planning was for socialists; under capitalism, the market would figure things out. In the post-Soviet years, Moscow filled up, first with kiosks, and flimsy freestanding grocery stores, and little old ladies selling socks. Eventually, these were replaced by office buildings and megastores and even luxury condominiums; the s.p.a.ces once reserved for new roads or metro stations were given over to construction. Blinkin recalls a commission that he received from the Soviet government, only months before its collapse, to project the rate of automobile growth over the next twenty-five years. "We knew the trajectory of automobilization in many countries of the world, and so we predicted exactly what happened," he says. What happened was that the number of cars in Moscow went from 60 per thousand residents in 1991 to 350 in 2009. "And we were very proud of ourselves for being so smart. Then, a while later, I met some guys who sold foreign cars, who"d done a marketing prognosis, and without any of our international a.n.a.logues or models they just thought, Well, restrictions are down, you can buy foreign cars as well as Russian ones, and they predicted the same rate of growth as we had! These car dealers predicted it." Blinkin was dismissive of the car dealers, but in the early 1990s they included some of the most brilliant minds in the country. The first great post-Soviet fortune, after all, was made not from oil or gas or nickel: that came later. It was made when Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and game theorist, started selling cars.
Last spring, Mayor Luzhkov fired the head of the city"s transportation department. Weeks earlier, the deposed chief had, like the three men who preceded him over the previous seven years, been harshly criticized for his failure to solve the traffic crisis. There are many problems that Luzhkov pretends not to know about, but traffic is not among them. In fact, it sometimes seems as if the mayor thinks of nothing else. Whenever he goes abroad, he returns with a magical fix for the problem; whenever he has money to spare, he builds roads and digs tunnels. He has waged a relentless war against traffic lights-"He has a childlike notion that if he could just get rid of all the traffic lights everything would be fine," Blinkin says-and on one central stretch running from the Kremlin almost all the way, but not quite, to Sheremetyevo Airport, outside town, he has just about eliminated them. He has turned numerous two-way streets into one-way streets and even proposed that the monstrous Garden Ring become one-way. Nothing helps. Muscovites continue to buy (and steal, and salvage, and order on eBay in North America, and ship to Finland) more cars than Luzhkov can build roads to drive them on.
The wise move would have been to invest in public transportation, to build up the city"s justly famous but spa.r.s.e metro network and bring back the trams that killed the literary editor at the start of "The Master and Margarita"; instead, Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro and actively hostile to the trams. Public transportation is for losers. Instead, he spent billions to widen the Moscow Ring Road (a beltway around the city) and complete the construction of the fabled Third Ring Road, a freeway between the Garden Ring and the Moscow Ring, of which Muscovites had been talking since the 1960s. According to the traffic a.n.a.lysis center at Yandex, the Third Ring is now the most clogged artery in the city. Luzhkov is unbowed: he has begun work on a Fourth Ring!
"No city has ever constructed itself out of congestion," the transportation expert Vukan Vuchic, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me. "It"s impossible." Vuchic visited Moscow in October and was depressed by what he saw, though also in a way impressed. "There are streets in the center that are four, five lanes wide in each direction," he said. "You"d think it"d be impossible for them to be congested, but they are congested."
In the past few years, visitors have often come to Russia to try to help. Last fall, I had lunch with Kiichiro Hatoyama, a traffic expert from j.a.pan. As I learned later, Hatoyama is the son of Yukio Hatoyama, until recently the prime minister of j.a.pan, but he was in Moscow in his capacity as a traffic engineer, to teach at Moscow State University. We ate at the Starlite Diner, a 1990s pro-American relic tucked into a small park, just off the Garden Ring. I wanted to know how a city with such vast avenues could have such awful traffic. Hatoyama raised three fingers.
"There are three main factors that determine a city"s traffic," he said.
Finger 1: "Driver behavior." Do drivers care that if they enter an intersection before a light turns red there"s a chance they"ll get stuck and create gridlock? Russian drivers do not. Impatient, angry, they will seize whatever inch of road is offered them. Russian drivers are jerks. Hatoyama put this differently. "Russian drivers lack foresight," he said.
Finger 2: The traffic system itself, that is to say the organization of the roads. Moscow"s radial character puts it at a slight disadvantage compared with cities laid out on a grid, like New York, but the disadvantage need not be decisive: Tokyo is also a radial city. Hatoyama"s main criticism of Moscow is the lack of left-turn possibilities.
Finger 3: The social system, which is always reflected on the roads. One night last summer, I was out late and took a cab home. The streets at that hour were empty. As the cabdriver and I made our way past Pushkin Square, we noticed a policeman sprinting ahead of us and then mounting a traffic booth at the corner. The light turned red. He emerged from the booth and sprinted to a booth at the next corner. "Someone"s coming," my driver announced. We sat before the red light for several minutes. Everything was quiet. Then a motorcade of black Mercedeses and SUVs appeared from the direction of the Kremlin, whizzed past us, and disappeared into the night. Ten seconds pa.s.sed, and the light turned green. "It is a feudal structure," Hatoyama said of the privileges accorded Russia"s elite in the traffic system. "It causes many problems." He had put down his three fingers and returned to his sandwich.
"Is there any other place that has that?" I asked. "Different rules for different drivers?"
Hatoyama chewed his sandwich slowly. When he answered, finally, with a single word, there was a certain satisfaction in his tone. "China," he said.
A few years ago, Moscow tried to inst.i.tute paid parking in the city center. It was odd, after all, that one of the most expensive cities in the world should let you park for free. The authorities deployed men in orange vests to accept payment for parking on the street. Very quickly, fake parking men appeared, also in orange vests, and then the press reported that the real parking men were delivering only a portion of the parking revenues to the city. In the end, Mayor Luzhkov gave in to public pressure and canceled paid parking on the city"s streets.
Moscow is now a riot of parking. Cars park in crosswalks, on traffic islands, in many of the quiet courtyards of the city center, in historic squares. Vuchic, of the University of Pennsylvania, compares it to Austria in the 1970s. "You would go to Salzburg to look at the Mozart statue," he said. "But you couldn"t see it, because Salzburg was a big parking lot." The Austrians have since taken care of the problem, with zoning, signage, enforcement. In Moscow, things are getting worse. Throughout the city are signs indicating no-parking zones, but the rules are only occasionally enforced, and the fines are paltry. As a result, the Moscow pedestrian spends a lot of time scrambling over cars, or around them, sometimes being forced out into the street, even, because the cars have climbed onto the sidewalk.
Blinkin sees the parking troubles as a symbol of the city"s general lack of a legal and planning culture. "Try that in Munich or Boston!" he says of parking on the sidewalk. For Blinkin, the author of a legendary paper t.i.tled "The Etiology and Pathogenesis of Moscow Traffic," there are profound social and structural issues preventing Moscow cars from moving. The broad avenues, for example, are good only for military parades. In New York, by contrast, there is an elegant two-tiered road system: street tier, on which pedestrians are primary and cars secondary, and freeway tier (the FDR Drive, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), where cars rule and there are no pedestrians at all. According to Blinkin, there isn"t a single proper freeway in Moscow. Even the outermost ring, which should serve as a beltway for cars trying to bypa.s.s the city entirely, has, since its expansion a decade ago, sprouted dozens of shopping centers, each with several exits and entrances onto the highway. The proposed Fourth Ring is not going to solve any of this. "You can"t just keep sending people in circles!" Blinkin exclaims. "They need to get off eventually, and then what?" The deeper problem-or, rather, the only way that the many deep problems can begin to be solved-is political: Luzhkov, who has been the ruler of Moscow for nearly twenty years now, needs to go.
Blinkin is a slim, energetic man in his early sixties with a bristly gray mustache. He was trained in the prestigious math department of Moscow State University, but then, after underperforming on the final exam on the history of the Communist Party, could find work only at a research inst.i.tute on traffic. "At first, I was disappointed," he told me. "But then I read some more and realized, Some very smart, respectable people have worked on this stuff." He spent nearly twenty years at two Soviet research inst.i.tutes devoted to "urban planning," and in 1990 started a private think tank on traffic. Blinkin loves driving, and, when we first got in touch, owned a silver 1999 E-series Mercedes. But I could never get him to take me for a drive in it. "I"m taking the metro today," he"d say when I called. "You"d have to be an idiot to drive in these conditions."
In the past few years, as he has spoken out more and more, Blinkin has come to resemble a cla.s.sic dissident-the Sakharov of traffic. Yet in a country where opposition figures are systematically shut out of the media, Blinkin has more exposure than he can handle. "During the past week, I"ve been on TV four times," he told me when we first met, "and I"ve lost count of how many print interviews." In the current political climate, traffic is a problem everyone is willing to discuss: the Kremlin-controlled media because it makes Luzhkov look bad; Luzhkov because he"s obsessed with it. Vuchic, who was born in Belgrade, was amused to note that he"d been interviewed by the old Party mouthpiece Izvestia. "Never in my life did I think I"d be printed in Izvestia!" he said.
Like other major cities, Moscow has a traffic center, with banks of large monitors showing many of the city"s intersections. Several dozen traffic officers keep an eye on the situation, calling their men in the traffic booths to let them know what they should do. I got a short tour of the facility earlier this year, and it was impressive. The huge monitors; the policemen in uniform before them; the traffic moving, or sitting still, as the policemen watched-it gave a measure of the megalopolis, made it seem a manageable thing. But this was in some sense an illusion: although the police can watch, they are helpless. My guide pointed out the monitor banks for the poorer southern and eastern areas of the city, which are said to have the heaviest traffic. "Are those the worst parts?" I asked him.
He considered this, not wanting, perhaps, to offend the southern and eastern routes. "It"s all the worst part," he said at last.
The police"s main compet.i.tor in the realm of traffic information is Yandex, which began monitoring traffic on its website in 2006 and in 2008 set up a separate "a.n.a.lytical center," Yandex Probki (probka means traffic jam). Yandex Probki issues periodic white papers on the state of traffic, and maintains a blog with interesting traffic highlights, but its main task is to keep perpetually updated a now iconic three-color street map of the city, showing real-time traffic flow on a number of routes. Above the map is a rating of the overall traffic at that moment, from 1 ("The streets are clear") to 9 ("The city has stopped") and 10 ("You"re better off on the metro"). Probki now has around half a million daily visitors in Moscow, putting it neck and neck with News and Images, with Weather just around the bend.
When I visited this past winter, Yandex occupied a low- slung modern office building behind the Kursk train station. Though in the center of town, it was too far to walk from the metro, and a white Yandex shuttle took me there. The tricolor Yandex Probki map played on a large plasma screen above the receptionist. Upstairs, one small room was given over to three men who represented the old guard of traffic-watching: as if in a miniature version of the traffic police center, they sat before computer monitors and kept track of nearly a hundred camera feeds from the streets of the city, swiveling the cameras where necessary to keep up with events, and checked what they saw against the big map. But the center has more sophisticated tools at its disposal. As Maria Laufer, the head of Yandex Maps, explained, setting up cameras all over the megalopolis would be prohibitively expensive. Other cities use sensors embedded in the pavement to measure traffic flow; in Moscow these have a hard time surviving both the weather and the road repairs the weather necessitates. So Yandex, Laufer said, came up with "something like communism-in the good sense of the word." Her colleague Leonid Mednikov updated the formulation: "It"s a Wiki." At first, drivers had sent information by phone or by text. As more and more drivers started using GPS-enabled smart-phones, Yandex asked them to download Yandex software onto their devices, so that information about their movements could be sent automatically to the Yandex servers. As the program grows, it is able to give an increasingly accurate and encompa.s.sing picture of the traffic situation at any given moment. While I was touring the office, it began to snow. Some time later, Mednikov entered the conference room, carrying his laptop before him like a lantern. "It"s at 10!" he announced of the traffic index. "It went from 5 to 10 in an hour and a half!" And so it was that the Yandex shuttle, making its way back to the metro with me as its only pa.s.senger, got stuck in traffic as it approached the Garden Ring.
In more poetic moments, Blinkin will invoke Julio Cortazar"s "Highway of the South," a 1964 story about people stuck in a ma.s.sive traffic jam on their way back into Paris after the weekend, stuck in it for so long that they begin to live in it. ("At first the girl in the Dauphine had insisted on keeping track of time," the story begins, "though for the engineer in the Peugeot 404 it no longer held any importance.") Hearing this, I recalled Vladimir Sorokin"s novella "The Queue," from the era of the Brezhnev stagnation, which is also about a line-a line of people waiting to buy something (it"s never clear what, and they themselves do not know), the line so long, so complex, that they, too, begin to live in it.
We"ve been here before. The cars standing in endless lines on the crowded Moscow streets: they resemble nothing so much as the people who used to wait in endless lines outside the Moscow stores for Polish coats, Czech shoes, and, famously, toilet paper. Now, more comfortably, they wait for the light. They are willing to endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving. Recently, my friend Lyonya, a corporate lawyer, was stopped by the police and accused of drunk driving, even though he hadn"t had a drop of alcohol in fifteen years. Another time, Lyonya found his car trapped in a courtyard where he"d parked, because its residents had put up a gate while he was gone; unable to find anyone to ask about it, Lyonya finally dismantled the gate with some tools he always keeps in his car.
Yet he continues to drive, and, driving with him in his long black Mercedes CL ("Comfort Leicht"), you can see why. The car is so intelligent, so solicitous, that it will not let you slam the doors entirely closed, for fear that you"ll hurt your fingers. It waits a little, letting you get to safety, and only then does it shut the door. You get a different perspective on things from Lyonya"s Mercedes. Outside, the city is filthy, muddy, filled with exhaust; the Mercedes rides smoothly, swaddling you in leather. The city is violent and chaotic and antidemocratic; in the Mercedes, you can listen to the liberals arguing, subtly, intelligently, on the last redoubt of independent Russian ma.s.s media, Ekho Moskvy. In Moscow, there are far worse places to be trapped.
Over the past few years, Moscow drivers have become one of the city"s most active social groups, organizing to eliminate the corrupt meter maids and lobbying for more roads. After the death of the two doctors in the collision with the Lukoil Mercedes, a group of drivers began attaching blue sandbox buckets to the roofs of their cars, in imitation of sirens, as a protest against the abuse of the siren by the city"s bankers and oil executives. It"s been one of the most successful civic actions in years. And it makes sense: "car owner" is the one social category that has actually been created in the past twenty years, as opposed to all the social categories that have been destroyed. Perhaps this is the emergence, finally, of a propertied, stakeholding-and frustrated, selfish, neurotic-middle cla.s.s.
On the morning of the subway bombings in Moscow, the city was thrown into disarray; only the emergency services managed to get anywhere. Photographs of the subway platform taken just minutes after the explosion showed medics among the debris, crouching over the wounded. When Blinkin, writing on an anti-Kremlin website, praised the emergency response, the commenters turned on him. "I was also impressed by the speed," one said, raising the old oppositionist dogma about a Kremlin conspiracy. "It seems they knew in advance what was going to happen, and where."
I asked my friends at Yandex what the traffic was like that day. They answered in a detailed e-mail. "After the first explosion, at Lubyanka (7:56), traffic jams began to form gradually at the adjacent streets," they wrote. "After the second explosion (8:36), congestion continued to increase and remained at a high level until 11 o"clock. By contrast, on a regular weekday congestion reaches its peak at 9 A.M. and then begins to drain off."
The next two days were more congested than usual, as many people who usually took the metro decided to drive to work instead. But Moscow could not function this way forever. "By Thursday," the Yandex a.n.a.lysts concluded, "the city had returned to normal."
It was true. Before long, the papers were reporting that the sons of two Moscow bureaucrats had been involved in an altercation. The son of a city prefect was stuck in traffic in his Lexus; the son of a munic.i.p.al notary officer was riding his bicycle, weaving through the traffic, when he accidentally nicked the Lexus. The son of the prefect got out of his car and pushed the notary"s son (a poli-sci student) to the ground. Humiliated, the notary"s son went off and found a baseball bat somewhere-whether at home or at a sporting goods store the reports hadn"t yet determined-and returned to find the prefect"s son still stuck in traffic. He began smashing the windows of the Lexus with the baseball bat. When the prefect"s son got out of the car again, the notary"s son hit him, too, breaking his hand. Moscow"s leading tabloid, LifeNews, posted a photograph of the prefect"s son sporting a cast. A nice-looking young man, he was wearing a pink T-shirt that said " Dolce & Gabbana."
Famous.
Tom Ireland.
FROM The Missouri Review.
ON THE NIGHT of November 26, 2008, two men walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, and started shooting and throwing grenades into the crowds of travelers "indiscriminately," as reported in the official Indian account of the attack. In a railway station that accommodates 2 million pa.s.sengers every day, a place where one can hardly stand during peak hours without being swept into a river of people, they couldn"t very well have missed. In minutes the dead and dying lay throughout the concourse, their limbs splayed in grotesque postures, and blood pooled on the station"s concrete floor.
The younger of the two, twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a native of the Punjab region of Pakistan, became famous when pictures of him taken during and after the attack circulated in the media. Sebastian D"Souza, a photographer with the Mumbai Mirror, was in the office that night when he heard gunfire from the train station and ran across the street with a camera. He ducked into a train standing at one of the platforms while the two gunmen stalked the concourse, taking turns shooting and reloading as they went.
"They were like angels of death," said D"Souza. "When they hit someone they didn"t even look back. They were so sure."
To get a better angle, D"Souza moved across the platform into another waiting train and, trying to keep his hands from shaking, took a few frames with a telephoto lens as the two men crossed his line of vision. They probably saw him taking pictures, he said, but "didn"t seem to care," or else they saw him as an opportunity to gain some cheap celebrity as young jihadists. People who never would have paid any attention to them otherwise would come to know and say their names.
In D"Souza"s photograph, Ajmal Kasab is seen in profile walking through the station, an AK-47 a.s.sault rifle held in his right hand, a duffel slung over his left shoulder-everything he needed to stay alive and keep on fighting "to the last breath," as he characterized his mission later under questioning. His commanders in Pakistan had ordered him and the other nine to kill as many people as they could before being killed themselves. Although escape routes had been entered into a GPS unit later recovered by police, escape was not an acceptable outcome according to the terms of his contract, and capture was unthinkable.
The young man in the photograph is more attractive than he has any right to be: the boyish bangs, the proud chin, the jaunty stride, the expression intensely alert but not discernibly fearful or malicious. His evident excitement might be that of an exchange student on his own in a foreign country for the first time-in fact it was the first time he had left his native country-carrying everything he needs for a year abroad (replace the Kalashnikov with a cricket bat and you get an entirely different picture). He wears running shoes, gray cargo pants, a dark blue Versace T-shirt. There"s a waterproof watch on his left wrist, and on his right wrist, the hand holding the rifle, he wears a red and yellow mauli, the yarn bracelet offered at Hindu temples in exchange for alms, meant to keep the wearer safe from harm.
At least three other photographs of Kasab circulated in the media soon after the attacks, though none as widely as D"Souza"s-two stills from closed-circuit television cameras and one of Kasab in the hospital after he was captured; he was the only one of the ten terrorists who survived battles with police and security forces. One of the television images, very unlike D"Souza"s photo, is of a young man with an expression of exaggerated malice, as if meant to conform to a popular idea of how a terrorist might look in the act of killing-a comic-book villain.
Then there was the photo taken in the hospital, in which Kasab is lying down, looking up at the camera. His face is scabby and bloated. He"s too tired to summon any large emotion at this point, and his face betrays only weak contempt for the person holding the camera. It"s the face of a man who knows he"s going to hang.
I didn"t yet know the name Ajmal Kasab when, two nights after the ma.s.sacre in the railway station, I arrived in Mumbai for a month"s vacation on the west coast of India. Neither I nor my partner, Anne, had ever visited India before, and we were anxious about finding our way in an unfamiliar city, still under armed attack when we landed. Gunmen of unknown affiliation had gone on a rampage, shooting civilians in a railway station, a movie theater, a restaurant, a Jewish center, and two luxury hotels in the Mumbai tourist district, the part of town where we would be staying for a few days before taking a train from that station en route to the rest of our vacation. Before leaving home I"d seen Internet photos of Indian security forces huddled behind emergency vehicles near the Gateway of India on the Mumbai waterfront, the shattered window gla.s.s at the Leopold Cafe, the dead bodies in the railway station. But it would be another month, after we left India safely behind, before I saw pictures of the one surviving terrorist and learned his name.
By the time we woke in Mumbai on the morning of November 29, all of the terrorists except Ajmal Kasab had been killed. Police were in the process of "sanitising" the Taj Mahal Palace-presumably, removing the dead from the building. A television camera had recorded the body of one terrorist being dumped from a ground-floor window at the Taj, and in the ancient tradition of desecrating the body of one"s enemy, local channels showed the charred corpse falling from the window again and again.
There wasn"t much else to see on TV: the soot-stained hotel facade, where fires set by the gunmen had burned and been put out: past-tense video of commando forces known as the Black Cats roping down from a helicopter to the roof of Nariman House, the Jewish center where a Brooklyn rabbi and his wife had been tortured and executed. We went for breakfast at a dosa joint on the corner and agreed, at least for one day, to keep away from the Gateway of India and the crowds that were sure to gather at the Taj.
After breakfast we looked quickly at a map and walked south in the direction of the Prince of Wales Museum, but it was closed because of the emergency. With no other destination in mind, we kept walking south and in fifteen minutes found ourselves staring at the damaged Taj Mahal Palace along with thousands of Indians who lined the seawall and strolled among the parked emergency vehicles.
We were doing the one thing we had agreed not to do, but faced with the spectacle, we found it impossible not to look. Tired firefighters sat on top of their fire truck, smoking, drinking c.o.kes, checking out the crowds of sightseers. Black Cats in their commando getups stared sleepily at us through the steel-grill windows of buses. There was grief but also a spirit of subdued celebration among many of the onlookers: our guys had killed all but one of their guys, and he would die, too.
One group of angry men stood out from the rest, bearing signs and flags and crying out together, presumably for vengeance. We kept well away from them and, stepping over exhausted fire hoses and tangled television cables, walked back to the hotel, stopping on the way to look at kurtas in Fabindia, a clothing store popular with tourists.
Three policemen were camped in the corridor outside our room at the Residency Hotel the next morning when I went out to get a paper. The Residency was at the low end of hotels in the tourist district, hardly the sort of place to be targeted by terrorists. Nevertheless, we had been placed under armed protection. Squeezed together at the head of the stairwell, the three men stood up quickly and wished me good morning. For a moment I thought they were going to salute.
We walked north that day, a route that took us past Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and stepped inside to look at the scene of the ma.s.sacre. Most people who live in Mumbai still call it VT, for Victoria Terminus, but during the 1990s, under pressure from a radical Hindu group, Shiv Sena, the station was renamed after Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the Marathi hero who established an independent state in western India in the seventeenth century. Shivaji is famous in India for the same kind of bold guerrilla tactics that allowed the Mumbai terrorists to enter Indian territorial waters and Mumbai harbor without being apprehended. A devout Hindu (his war cry was "Hail, Lord Shiva!"), he was succeeded by Mohandas Gandhi in his advocacy of an independent, secular Indian state in which Hindus and Muslims could live peaceably together.
We"d first seen the station from the taxi the night we arrived in Mumbai-the monstrous Victorian Gothic stone facade, like something conceived in special effects, absurdly bathed in amber floodlight at two in the morning. Outside it was extravagant and dingy, the bas-reliefs of dignitaries and wildlife, British lion and Indian tiger, colonized with mold. Inside it was merely dingy. Even on a Sunday the place was mobbed. Railway police and a few National Security Guards were scattered near the entrances, but n.o.body was checking luggage. n.o.body asked to see my pa.s.sport.
Victoria has been compared to St. Pancras Station in London, the nineteenth-century "cathedral" of railway stations, which predated it by twenty years: a European building in every respect except the ground it was built on. Its choice as one of the targets of the attacks must have been determined by more than the most practical consideration-its density of human life. A monument both to India"s colonial subjugation and to its independence, Victoria celebrates the country"s initiation into the echelon of progressive, industrialized nations and the birth of its middle cla.s.s. By including it in the list of targets, those who planned the VT attack evidently meant to add ideological insult to physical injury.
It wouldn"t have done to stand there very long among the hurrying pa.s.sengers and look up into the station"s cathedral heights, as I would have liked. It would have been even less appropriate to look down and search for traces of blood on the floor, although it did occur to me to do just that.
There was a good deal of confusion surrounding Kasab"s "ident.i.ty," as his captors put it, immediately after the attacks. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group that has been accused of planning and carrying out the operation, gave its recruits false names while they were in training and changed those names on a regular basis. The ten eventually chosen for the a.s.sault trained for months, first together, finally in pairs, but they didn"t learn each other"s real names until after they had boarded the boat in Karachi on their way to Mumbai to carry out their mission.
Kasab means "butcher" in Urdu. The name of one"s profession or caste is commonly used as a surname in India (Gandhi, for example, means "grocer"), and Kasab"s captors may have taken his caste name for his family name. It was reported that he spoke English, then not, then that in addition to his native Punjabi he knew a few words of a Hindi dialect. In the absence of any more reliable information, his interrogators may have decided that "Butcher" was an appropriate label.
Whatever his name, Kasab was evidently n.o.body, one of thousands of poorly educated, unemployed young men who are continually being recruited by militant groups like Lashkar. In the days immediately following the attacks, there was speculation that he and the others represented a new cla.s.s of terrorists-young, educated, middle-cla.s.s Muslims acting out of political or religious conviction, angered by the persecution of Muslim populations in India, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Such speculation was based largely on how the terrorists were dressed and on statements by eyewitnesses that they seemed well-off. But Kasab"s confession to Indian police indicated that his family was poor, that he had gone to a Pakistani government primary school for only four years before dropping out to find work, and that he was largely ignorant of political causes or religious beliefs. Asked to define jihad during questioning, he said, "It means killing and being killed and becoming famous."
Kasab"s native village, Faridkot, didn"t have much to offer. His father sold dahi wada (fried dal paste with yogurt) from a street cart. The family often went hungry. Ajmal lived with his brother, Afzal, in Lah.o.r.e and occasionally found work as a laborer. Between jobs he went home. Tired of dressing like a villager, on one such visit he argued with his father, who refused when Ajmal asked him for money to buy clothes.
Back in Lah.o.r.e, he stayed at a home for runaways until going to work for a "decorator" for 120 rupees (about $2.50) a day in the town of Jhelum, a job he hated. Later he was raised to 200 rupees, but it wasn"t enough to live on, so he teamed up with an older boy, Muzaffar Khan, and started robbing houses. Hoping to make better money, the two moved to Rawalpindi, rented an apartment, and began casing the city"s wealthy houses.
In the version of his story that Kasab told police right after he was arrested, he and Khan decided that to succeed as professional thieves, they had to have guns. While searching for them in the bazaar during the festival of Bakrid (from the Urdu bakr, "goat"), the Festival of Sacrifice, they found a Lashkar-e-Taiba field office and made inquiries. Realizing that even if they managed to buy some guns, they wouldn"t know how to use them, they followed directions to another Lashkar office. When the man who answered the door asked what they wanted, they said, "Jihad."
Traditional Muslims butcher a goat during Bakrid to commemorate Ibrahim"s faithful offering of Ismail, his only son, as a blood sacrifice to G.o.d and G.o.d"s compa.s.sionate answer, a butchered goat in Ismail"s place. At the time he signed up with Lashkar, Kasab was more interested in advancing his career as a petty thief than in sacrificing himself to a cause that he wouldn"t have adopted on principle. In so doing he joined the ranks of young men worldwide who, without anything resembling a livelihood, leave their village to find work in the city. Unemployed, faced with a choice between becoming a thief or a soldier, he chose what must have seemed the easier way and joined the mercenaries. At least he had enough to eat in his new job, decent clothes to wear, the ident.i.ty that goes along with having an inst.i.tutional sponsor, and, best of all, the opportunity to play with guns.
For six and a half months he was sent to one camp after another and put through a series of courses, first in physical exercise and weaponry-AK-47, SKS, Uzi, pistol, revolver, hand grenades, rocket launchers, mortars, bombs-later in swimming, marine navigation, the rudiments of urban warfare, and the workings of Indian security forces. Kasab did well and earned the approval of his handlers, who noted that he was a good shot. He and Ismail Khan were eventually a.s.signed to the "VTS team"-Victoria Terminus station-and isolated from the other four teams in the final weeks of training.
They studied a map of Mumbai on Google Earth, learned how to get from Azad Maidan on the city waterfront to Victoria Terminus, and watched a video of commuters during rush hour at the station, morning and night, when the number of people in the station would be highest. After killing as many as possible, they were supposed to kidnap some others, take them to the roof of a nearby building, contact the local media by cell phone, and make demands in exchange for their release.
A little more than halfway through this period of training, Kasab was permitted to visit his parents for a month in Faridkot before the final and most intense stage of preparation for the attack on Mumbai-the first and only time he went home after the falling-out with his father. He still had no idea what he was being trained for, exactly, and even if he had been inclined to betray Lashkar, he probably couldn"t have told his family where and when the attack was going to take place. They must have been curious to know what he"d been doing, why he seemed so fit and well fed, who his friends were, where he"d come by the new shoes he was wearing. One can only guess the extent to which he was able to confide in them before leaving home for good.
The official Indian dossier on the attacks is a brief constabulary account of the terrorists" journey from Pakistan by sea; their hijacking of an Indian fishing vessel; the murder of its crew and, later, after he had piloted them to their destination, its captain; their landing in an inflatable dinghy; and the various a.s.signments undertaken by the five pairs of terrorists. Appended to the dossier is a list of foreigners killed in the attacks (the names of Indian citizens who died are not given) and a list of supplies the terrorists left behind on the hijacked boat, with photographs, presented as evidence that the men were in fact Pakistani nationals: "Made in Pakistan milk powder packets (Nestle)...Shaving cream-Touchme, Made in Pakistan ... Pakistan made pickle." Nothing about the pickle conclusively identified it as Pakistani, but the weight of the other evidence was strongly against it.
Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan took a taxi from the waterfront to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The dossier briefly tells how, when "challenged" by police in the station during their shooting spree, the two retreated to the vicinity of Cama Hospital, planning to gather hostages and herd them into some sort of stronghold. At this point their plan jumped the tracks. Confronted by police near the hospital, they shot and killed three officers, took their car, and drove toward the waterfront. There they hijacked another car and drove west along Marine Drive until they were stopped at a police barricade near Chowpatti Beach.
According to some accounts, Kasab sustained a minor wound during the showdown on Marine Drive, in which Tukaram Ombale, a junior police officer armed only with a lathi (metal-tipped cane), managed to grab Kasab"s weapon long enough for others to subdue him. Ombale died later of bullet wounds. Civilian onlookers beat Kasab unconscious before he was taken to a hospital where, exhausted and dehydrated, he asked for a saline injection-possibly a first-aid technique he"d learned during his training.
At first he told his captors that he didn"t want to die. Then he begged them to kill him, if not for his own sake-to escape the ordeals of imprisonment, trial, and execution that certainly awaited him-then for the sake of his family in Pakistan. His actions would not go down well with Lashkar-e-Taiba. Besides his failure to carry out his orders and die fighting, he gave detailed information, including names, to Indian authorities, and at one point, demonstrating how unmotivated he was by anything like conscientious belief, he offered to do for India what he"d done for Lashkar. What the photographer D"Souza had observed in the train station the night of the attack-that the two killers seemed "so sure" of themselves-had disguised Kasab"s fundamental neediness, ignorance, confusion, and fear.
Anne and I took a taxi to Chowpatti on our third day in Mumbai, weeks before I learned of the gun battle that had taken place there, ending in Khan"s death and Kasab"s arrest. Chowpatti Beach was mostly empty that morning, at least by Indian standards. Girls in saris stood knee-deep in the water, wringing out their skirts. A boy was trying to fly a kite in a fitful breeze. Somebody had drawn a heart with a love message in the sand.
We crossed a footbridge over Marine Drive, the street where Khan and Kasab had run into the police barricade, and asked directions to Mohandas Gandhi"s former residence in Mumbai, now a museum called Mani Bhavan. A simple two-story wood-frame building on a shady street, it might be put on exhibit in a museum of museums. The books in the downstairs library, cloistered in their gla.s.s-doored cabinets, seemed too precious to read, and a churchlike hush pervaded the place. The brittle, water-stained photographs; the caption informing us that Gandhi rode a bicycle to the temple, shaved without a mirror, and scavenged in the street; the sophisticated naivete of his letter to Hitler, calling him "friend" (he addressed Roosevelt the same way) and urging him to please reconsider the destruction of Europe; Gandhi"s sandals, drinking cup, spindle, and fountain pen enshrined in a case on the wall-all possessed an eerie, sanctimonious aura. An Indian man later told us that every city in India has its own collection of the Mahatma"s domestic tools, just as in every religion the bones of saints proliferate over time.
Upstairs we looked at miniature three-dimensional tableaux of significant events in Gandhi"s life, among them a doll-sized Gandhi and his followers gathering salt on the sh.o.r.e of the Arabian Sea in 1933 to protest the British salt tax, the original target of his satyagraha (truth-force) campaign. The "force" of that philosophy helped free India from foreign domination, but it didn"t prevent the violence that took place before and after Part.i.tion. Both Gandhi, the martial pacifist, and Chhatrapati Shivaji, the martial conqueror, are loved, praised, and extravagantly idealized throughout India, though these days the Gandhian philosophy tends to be seen as a venerable but irrelevant remnant of the past, worthy in principle but not in practice, and it"s the man of violent means whose name is more commonly invoked by public inst.i.tutions like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.
Famous Gandhi quotations had been framed and hung throughout the house. "The cry of blood for blood is barbarous," he said during the riots of 194647, when Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other en ma.s.se leading up to and following the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan. We"d heard that cry at the demonstration outside the Taj Mahal Palace the day we arrived in Mumbai, and while those who cried for blood cried the loudest, other Indians, among them the novelist Amitav Ghosh, were calling for restraint. What the terrorists mainly hoped to achieve by the attacks, he pointed out in the Hindustan Times, was the panic-stricken response of the Indian government-the sort of response that the government of the United States had been gulled into after 9/11.
The upstairs room that Gandhi stayed in at Mani Bhavan is much as it was when he stayed in Mumbai. Central to its few deliberately simple furnishings is a spinning wheel, the symbol of Indian independence. That work as hard and monotonous as spinning came to represent freedom from oppression remains one of the compelling paradoxes of the Gandhi legend. It wasn"t machinery itself he objected to, he said, but the "craze" for it. Another Gandhian precept, the idea that one can gain real power through nonviolent means, seems equally dated in an age of terrorism.
I started following Ajmal Kasab"s story after returning from India, on the basis of what others wrote about him and his translated statements, first to the police, later to the trial judge. The cunning, spectacular nature of the attacks guaranteed wide and detailed news coverage-a side effect of terrorism that its architects depend on to advertise their cause. These days such attacks are more like publicity stunts than acts of war, and it may have been the lure of publicity, as much as needing a job or righteous hatred of the infidels, that convinced Kasab to enlist. To someone faced with the prospect of becoming a beggar or a thief, the alternative of worldly fame and a glorious martyrdom might look like a much better deal.
Back home I studied the photo of the trigger-happy kid from provincial Pakistan striding through the railway station and wondered what need was great enough, or what principle important enough, to make him want to kill innocent people. For all the effort and expense devoted on the official level to protecting us from terrorists in recent years, relatively little has gone toward understanding what motivates them. It"s not just that we can"t know but that we don"t want to know. To do so is to risk seeing ourselves less than favorably, for example, as monopolists of wealth, the people living in the big house behind a locked gate in Rawalpindi that Kasab and Muzaffar Khan dreamed of pillaging: another cla.s.s of untouchables at the opposite end of the social scale.
Months after his arrest, a video of Kasab"s interrogation in the hospital was published on the Internet with a captioned translation. There"s a bandage on his neck, and he"s obviously in pain. When they asked him why he"d done it, he said that his father had first encouraged him to seek work with the mujahideen: "[My father] said, "These people make loads of money, and so will you. You don"t have to do anything difficult. We"ll have money; we won"t be poor anymore. Your brothers and sisters can get married. Look at these guys living the good life. You can be like them.""
Asked how much money they"d given him and if it had been placed in an account, he said, "There"s no account. They gave it to my dad." Some terrorist organizations are known to pay the families of volunteers for suicide missions or those, like Mumbai, in which the recruits are sworn to die fighting. But in Kasab"s case, it"s not clear who paid what to whom. Shortly after he was imprisoned, before Pakistani officials cut his family off from further contacts with the press, a reporter tracked down Ajmal"s father in Faridkot and asked him if he had received or been promised money in exchange for his son"s partic.i.p.ation. He replied, "I don"t sell my children."
Kasab first appeared before a judge without leaving his cell, on closed-circuit TV, to minimize the chances of a Jack Ruby-style execution. A "bomb-proof, chemical-proof" corridor was built especially for him so that he can walk safely between his cell and the judge"s chamber. When not in court, he speaks to no one and has nothing to do in his fetid cell but read the Koran, a book that it had never occurred to him to read before becoming a terrorist. At the start of the legal proceedings he asked for a Pakistani lawyer and was denied. His first lawyer was attacked in her home by rock-throwing Hindu activists. When she was replaced because of a conflict of interest (she was also representing the family of one of the people killed in the attacks), the court a.s.signed Abbas Kasmi as Kasab"s defense lawyer.
Kasmi doesn"t go anywhere without bodyguards. The social club he belonged to has blackballed him. He believes in the righteousness of the Indian judicial system, saying, "We want to prove to the world that we are a civilized nation and we give a fair trial even to a so-called terrorist." When he complained that Kasab"s cell had "no fresh air or ray of light" and relayed his client"s request for some perfume to mask the stink, the press made a deafening mockery of it.
Kasab"s initial confession to police, in the hospital, was ruled inadmissible during the trial because it had been given under duress. His lawyer entered a plea of innocent for him, and India was preparing itself for months of contentious legal proceedings when Kasab surprised everyone, his lawyer included, by standing up and saying in Hindi that he was not, in fact, innocent. He just wanted to be sentenced and have the trial end. The last I heard, he wasn"t so sure.