andamu

I was a student (the first time around) in the late '80s in South Africa, before the death of apartheid during a very turbulent political period. In Pretoria where I studied, several bombs had cost many lives over the preceding years.

For a while I lived in a high-rise block atop a midtown shopping mall. This was very convenient for doing groceries or going to late night movies - just get in the elevator, and when next the doors slide open you have arrived. It had other obvious and not-so obvious drawbacks too, though.

At the height of the unrest, I would hear the police megaphones blaring, and look out my window to see an entire street block frozen in place. All pedestrian immobile on the sidewalk, all drivers and passengers out of their vehicles and standing next to them, the police conducting searches for goodness knows what.

Sometimes at night there would be a loud bang! and I would freeze, heart thumping, wondering whether it had been a bomb. It never was; instead it would be one of the famous Highveld thunderstorms, the flashes and rumbling interspersed by thunderclaps that followed showing me how paranoid I had become.

One evening, sitting up in bed, reading, I heard a whump! - really loud, and different somehow. By now my thoughts were first "Bomb!" then "bomb?" then "Naah, probably just a thunderclap."
Less than a minute later, a second whump!
"Aah, now I know it must be thunder, because there won't be two bombs so close to one another." And so I finished the chapter, turned off the light and went to sleep, anxious heart comforted.

Only to wake in the morning to headlines screaming about "Double Bomb Blast Rocks Midtown" or some such. Two blocks from me.

I don't take anything for granted anymore.