Bozen/Bolzano, the city closest to me, looks like South Mumbai on my last visit early last year, mostly dug up and under construction. It is not a metro but a mall and some other gratuitous structures that are being built. Since there’s so much excavation in order to build foundations, ever so often a bomb from World War II is discovered. An elaborate routine is then enforced by which people in surrounding areas must temporarily be evacuated and a squad is brought in to remove the bomb and take it someplace where it can be diffused, if it is still live. It is a periodic reminder of the violent past.

The bomb is also a metaphor for the nature of patriarchal forms of conflict that have historically failed, like war. When can a war be said to have ended? The recurrence of these bombs tells me that long after the peace treaties are signed, the traces of war still remain, except we mostly repress it into the underground domains of our own consciousness and hope against hope that it won’t implode.