I returned home on a November night in 2008 to find my then-partner watching the news. Since the TV in our home was usually reserved for sports or films, this was worrying. What was on the screen confirmed my fears. It seemed like some kind of gang war had broken out in Colaba, the South Mumbai locality that had always seemed immune to disaster. Within a few hours, the fears solidified and multiplied. The Taj Mahal hotel at the Gateway of India had been infiltrated by armed terrorists who were holding guests and staff hostage. Terror was simultaneously unfolding at other locations like CST railway station and the iconic Leopold restaurant. And this gruesome list kept growing through the night and the next day.

In the days after the siege had ended, I, like so many residents of the city, felt an eerie silence descend around me, marking the transition from unquestioned safety to shaky vulnerability. The wounds of '92 and '93 had been reopened. Terrorists had occupied our homes, our brains, our lives. I was, at the time, a 26-year-old cynic given to bouts of depression but otherwise in command of a fairly regular life. "How does it matter what I do or say?" was the refrain in my head in reply to all the important questions about personal responsibility towards the larger community. In the conversation between my inner sceptic and believer, the former had won so many times that the dialogue itself had been silenced. But when there was a call for citizens to show up at the Gateway to participate in a candlelight vigil, I set out with a bunch of friends, propelled by some instinct that was older and stronger than cynicism.