Tuesday 7th October 2008

I am the Anglo-Saxon terrorist.

The security guard looked at my gate pass suspiciously. I am white (starlingly so, I realise among these Indian faces), blonde, and for some reason I come dressed in a salwar kameez. He is dressed in a crisp blue shirt with a gold logo on the lapel, and wears his hat straight on his head. He a slightly sadistic smirk lurks beneath his thick moustache. He jangles his keys on his belt – they’re on a huge metal ring, like those on a cartoon jailer. He sits me down kneecap-to-kneecap with his junior officer, who eyballs me intensely. Occasionally one will shoot me a sentence in Hindi, and it is all I can do to shrug and look confused. Perhaps they think this is one of my tactics. I wave to my Indian-skinned colleague Neilesh who is sitting on the other side of the room, though he’s sensible enough not to open his mouth and reveal his American identity. I’m not allowed to move. They’re clearly not convinced that I really know him. It’s quite possible that the Hindu fundamentalists have sent me as a mole to infiltrate the newspaper. It’s quite possible that I am the Anglo-Saxon terrorist.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had asked the same security guard to let me into the office I’d been designated the day before. He looked at me, and then looked at the door and gabbled something in Hindi. When I shook my head and shrugged he picked up the phone and called security downstairs. He asked the morning risers who were in the newsroom who I was. None of them had any idea. So here I am, pinned to the chair by the gaze of the junior security guard. I’m wishing my boss into the office as soon as possible. A young man comes round with the chai – he served me several times yesterday. He nods to me, but his ackowledgement doesn’t fly with the newsroom gestapo.

India has become a security-paranoid country. Metal detectors line the entrance to buildings and stations: ramshackle planks of wood nailed together with wires protruding from the corners. Officers take your names and sign you in and out from desks that are so makeshift they barely stand on four legs. Security hasn’t been part of India’s culture. But it is now.

India’s too busy fighting its own terrorists to bother about the world’s. Muslim mujahedeen have terrified marketplaces. Hindu nationalists attack Christian refugee camps. The Naxalists, an underground Marxist movement that has been growing over the past decade, has been fighting a guerilla war for years along the central belt of the country. Stories of rapes, bombings, riots and slaughters shout from every day’s front page, creating a white noise that is slowly reaching fever pitch. There’s an electricity of fear in the air that Delhiites tell me never existed before. A filler story which ran in the Times of India today said psychologists have found an increasing number of anxiety disorders they link to terrorism. It’s not the veracity of the story that matters here, of course, but the fact it made it to the paper in the first place perhaps says something. The atmosphere is something akin to the fear the IRA inflicted on England’s cities a decade ago: attacks are not strategic, but instead are visited on anyone who gets in the way.

I’m not an Anglo-Saxon terrorist. Instead, I’m the intern at the newspaper who no one’s quite sure about. And the fact that I am quarantined and guarded here at this desk space could perhaps only be considered a drill for when the real thing comes. My boss walks in the door, shouts in Hindi and points to the jangling keys hanging from the security guard’s belt. The guard smirks beneath his logo-ed hat as he unlocks the door - he’s had his fun with the intern.

“Ignore him,” says my boss, handing the confiscated gate pass back to me. I look at my ID photograph: I’m wearing a flower behind one ear and grinning like a cat. My boss just leans over and whispers, “he’s an asshole.”