Many of us are guilty of this when we travel. Whether within the country or abroad, we want to see the places where grisly encounters took place.
Our first encounter with the ‘dark side’ and what is called ‘dark tourism’ came many years ago, when we passed through the town of Panipat in Haryana — until then only a name in our history books. We were thrilled as we imagined the first battle with the armies of Ebrahim Lodhi and Babar facing each other on those plains. The pages of history seemed to come alive and we could almost hear the clash of swords, the fierce battle-cries, the neighing of horses, the trumpeting of elephants — and yes, at last we came to it: The cries of the wounded and dying.
That journey sent us back to our books to read about the other two great battles that took place in the same area and made us more conscious of momentous (and bloody) happenings through the ages. We visited places where many lives had been lost: Koregaon on the Pune-Ahmadnagar road, the site of an Anglo-Maratha war; the Bibighar in Kanpur; Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar ...
We walked around Tiananmen Square, the Tower of London, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; we stood spellbound in front of a guillotine, reading how often it was used and on whom. We viewed implements of torture, amazed at the ingenuity of man; we actually felt a twinge of regret that some of the more famous places — like the Bastille — were no longer in existence.
Closer to the present — and to home — we go in and out of South Mumbai more often than we can keep track of. We arrive and leave by train, we take a walk down the road to the shopping centres we have always frequented — and in doing all those everyday things we tread in the footsteps of the terrorists who targeted Mumbai in November 2008. We can visualise all too clearly how effective a spray of bullets from a carelessly held machine gun would be in the constant sea of human bodies at the railway station. We wander past the reconstructed Taj Mahal Hotel; we look for the bullet holes in Cafe Leopold as we pass — and some of the horror of those long hours comes to mind.
But often, it does not. Mere pillars and plaques and our unreliable memories do not jar us into remembering.
The Choeung Ek Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh in Cambodia, however, brought back the past to us starkly. We entered the verdant surroundings, not knowing what to expect, accustomed as we were to cenotaphs and stone memorials. Straight ahead was an innocuous looking stupa and we headed there first. As we neared, we could see human skulls piled up inside the stupa: up-up-up. Our footsteps slowed, but we kept moving closer although a part of us didn’t want to be there at all.
We paid our respects to the thousands of unidentified men and women who had been slaughtered there in the 1970s and then we began our ‘tour’, stopping at grassy knolls and under trees where atrocities were committed, listening to the commentary on our earphones that sent us into a solitary introspective frame of mind even though we were in a group and there were many groups like ours walking around.
It was almost too grisly to bear.
But worse, as we came back to our everyday lives: There were car bombs and suicide bombs and just bombs; there was Nigeria, there was Afghanistan, there was India, there was Iraq, there was Pakistan. It seems that every place has its own horror story. Soon, will every street and every field — our whole planet — become a vast killing field?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
