Dispatch From London

By Sandip Roy, Pacific News Service. Posted July 7, 2005.

It was only last night that I watched Kofi Annan as he stood framed against the magnificent stained glass of St. Paul's Cathedral speaking about global poverty.

"If it is bliss at such times to be alive, to be here in St. Paul's tonight is very heavenly," the U.N. Secretary General told the packed audience filling the pews, many of them wearing the white band that was the emblem of the Make Poverty History campaign. London had just won its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Heaven was indeed in the air.

"You are here at a historic time," said my friend Pratap. He was more prophetic than he knew.

Instead of waking up to the hangover of too much Olympic partying, London woke to a daisy chain of bomb blasts. Today, everyone is talking about the Blitz. The geographic spread of attacks means everyone is somehow touched by them. My uncle passed through King's Cross Station moments before the blasts there. A friend says his university classes are near Russell Square, where another attack took place. I passed through Liverpool Street station, a third target, last night myself.

The little Internet cafe I am writing from is in the heart of Brick Lane. This is where much of England's Bangladeshi community, mostly Muslim, lives. Shops sell burkhas and prayer mats. The supermarket sells stacks of gleaming silvery rui and boal fish flown in from Bangladesh. Restaurants have names like Monsoon and Nazrul and Naz Café. After Sept. 11, 2001, police were posted outside the Jamie Masjid here to keep the peace. This time they are not there.

"Perhaps we don't really need them," says Zahid, a law student from Bangladesh who has lived here since 2002. "After all, we are the majority here now."

The areas around Brick Lane are 70 percent Muslim. Indeed, Brick Lane seems open for business, though the Sonali Bank, which sends remittances home to Bangladesh, has closed early. Restaurants are open, and Bollywood songs mix in the air with Islamic prayers -- though the owner of a sweets shop worries business will plummet in the next few days if people stay at home. The only jarring reminder of the events of the day is the constant shriek of ambulances and the whirr of helicopters and the police tape at the end of the street.

Only a few blocks from Brick Lane, along Whitechapel Avenue is Aldgate Tube station, where two people were killed in one of the first attacks. Throngs of policemen in fluorescent yellow emergency jackets turn around cars and pedestrians.

Palash, a young visitor from Bangladesh, is standing at the barricade looking at the chaos. "It's all about creating panic," he says knowledgably. "We are used to this in Bangladesh. I remember when they would set off bombs in a whole series of movie theaters at once."

But here, far from Central London, the panic is muted. A few puzzled tourists stand around, scouring their London A to Z's for alternative routes to their destinations. London is a city ruled by the Tube. With the Underground shut, it's as if blood is not flowing in London's arteries.

Sandip Roy (sandip@pacificnews.org) is host of "Upfront," the Pacific News Service weekly radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco.

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