Maybe that’s why he stayed in the water so long, to wash my stare off his body. We waited on the shore, shooing away a stray dog that kept returning, holding down the napkin-covered sandwiches so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. At last he emerged, the water dripping from his torso, his shorts a darker red and wrinkled against his skin. Anoop dried off, then slung the towel over Karun’s shoulders for him to dry himself as well. Uma offered Karun a sandwich and a paratha on a plate, which he accepted with a thanks. He talked with Anoop as he ate, he looked at Uma and my mother, but he would not catch my eye.


IT IS GETTING SO DIFFICULT to breathe that I wonder if we are all going to be asphyxiated. Are these shelters safe anyway? Wouldn’t the building collapse on us if bombed? Have we congregated in this basement simply for efficiency, because it would take only a single hit to bury us all?

Of course, it hardly matters where we hide if the Pakistanis have decided to jump the gun. If their promised schedule is a ruse as people claim, and this is the day they drop the Big One.

“They can’t do anything—it’s all a bluff,” one of the khaki-clad men scoffs. “Forget the atom bombs, even the missiles to deliver them are probably fake. All tactics to scare us, all hoaxes.” They nod their heads in agreement and I notice they wear matching saffron-colored threads around their necks. The effect is unintentionally dandy, as if they’ve taken pains to coordinate bow ties.

“Let’s not forget they’re Muslim—they don’t have our shastras, our Vedic knowledge. To build an atom bomb, you need centuries of scientific skills.”

“Besides, we have Devi ma to protect us. Let’s see them harm even a single blade of grass on our sacred land.”

Is he mad? Has he glanced outside on this singed sacred land of his, checked its current horticultural state? Or has his almighty Devi just been napping through the attacks? As if the daily terrorist explosions weren’t enough (becoming just one more urban tribulation, like water shortages or corruption), for the past month and a half, we’ve had to contend with Pakistani air raids as well. The hollowness of his bluster must catch up, because he sobers. “It’s October fifteenth today—the nineteenth is just four days away.”

The rumors began soon after the war did, at the end of August. At first, they seemed like the usual saber rattling—hadn’t Pakistan been sporadically ballyhooing its nuclear capabilities ever since the 2002 standoff? “It happens whenever they feel the need to bolster their own self-confidence—like now,” my father said. For months, Pakistan had blustered about the unprecedented atrocities against Muslims in India, threatening military action but shying away from an actual strike. “Too bad they can’t openly trumpet their achievements—all the terrorists they’ve sent in instead.” Finally, with its prestige plummeting to humiliating depths, Pakistan was forced to ask China for help (a move the Pakistani president vigorously denied). In a flash invasion, Chinese troops poured in through the northeast frontier—just like during Nehru’s tenure in 1962, my father pointed out. Their ostensible goal this time was to claim sovereignty over a border region so obscure that even our own prime minister had trouble pronouncing its name. The Indian government lost no time miring our military in this diversionary trap, then became too concerned with loss of image to pull out when Pakistan attacked from the northwest.

Ten days into the invasion, on September 4, the UN forced a bitterly resentful and chafing China to withdraw. That very night, Uma sent me the link for the communiqués that had surfaced on the web. The first was a report from the Pakistani chief of staff to their defense minister describing the planned piggyback of their attack in conjunction with the Chinese invasion. Even I could recognize its authenticity, what with its details of the number and type of weapons used, the exact positions of deployed troops, and operational and launch times down to the second. But it was the second communiqué that had left Uma so excited. It contained an analysis of the situation after the Chinese left: since India had stronger conventional forces, nuclear retaliation would be the only option if the war continued. The attached blueprint for an attack on eight Indian cities included a range of prospective launch dates.

My parents’ next-door neighbors moved out right away, announcing an indefinite stay at their Lonavla cottage. But for the most part, despite their incendiary contents, the communiqués didn’t cause the expected alarm. Pakistan’s strenuous assertion of the documents being fakes had little to do with this, since nobody believed the claim. (Their foreign minister furnished a similar web folio detailing a purported mirror attack on Pakistan, which both The Times of India and The Indian Express dismissed as an obvious fabrication.) What kept the waters calm was the certainty that the West would simply not allow things to proceed so far. Uma even heard a rumor that the U.S. had intervened to shore up the Pakistanis after China’s departure, that the pilots and planes and unmanned drones bombing us were now American. “They’re supposed to be doing this for our own good, to even out the two sides and prevent things from getting too nuclear.”

Then, on this year’s September 11 anniversary, the unthinkable happened. Dirty bombs exploded in Zurich, followed by five other cities, including London and New York. Computer viruses began their voracious conquest of the world: blackouts stretching from Los Angeles to Moscow, thirty-seven airliners sent crashing into the Atlantic in a single hour, nuclear plant meltdowns from Texas to Canada to France. Soon, the entire West appeared to shudder and yaw—Uma texted me furiously about sieges in Turkey and Denmark, a brazen attempt to invade Spain through Morocco, retaliatory massacres all over North America and Europe. Except who could tell which reports were true, whether any of these events had really occurred? The cyber attacks had also been relentlessly knocking out news and communication sources—one afternoon, as I listened, even the BBC blinked off. Overrun by hackers and unchecked by any verification of its truthfulness, the internet went gleefully rogue (“American president assassinated,” “Half of Europe perishes in nuclear attacks,” “UN orders extermination of all Muslims”). Even these hoaxes started to fade, though, as power failures strangled off computers around the globe.

The only certainty to emerge was that we couldn’t count on the West, so embroiled in its own cataclysms now, to protect us any longer. So when a new Pakistani communiqué surfaced the day after Karun left, settling definitively on a nuclear strike as a deterrent against defeat, the panic that had remained at bay so far started escalating. The proposal went into great detail about the order and logistics of the missile launches, picking the date based on how long the country’s weaponry reserves could stave off collapse in the current conventional war.

By the next day, the message had mysteriously blanketed the web—all I could pull up on my computer screen was an image of the communiqué and nothing else. My watchman was also abuzz about it—a recorded version in Hindi had gone viral over phone networks. The same phantom voice called over and over again, inflaming the computerless (but mobile-equipped) masses with the inevitability of an October 19 attack.

Uma arranged for us all to flee in my father’s car almost immediately after that. “The further south, the safer—the missiles will have a harder time reaching us in Kerala or Madras.” She begged me to accompany them, as did both my parents—but without Karun, how could I leave? I waited on the balcony for him every night, wondering if he had got stuck somewhere, trying to return to me. Could he breathe the same air, see the same stars, which ever since the blackout shone so exuberantly?

Perhaps the others who’ve stayed have similar reasons. Or perhaps they just believe themselves invincible, having survived the terrorists and enemy planes so far. They say only ten percent of us remain (how they arrived at this statistic, I have no idea)—the city looks emptier by the day. Even with phones and the internet dead from lack of electricity, the nineteenth still fires Mumbai’s synapses, powers its rumor mills. The date gives order to our lives through the chaos and confusion, blinks dependably through the haze. Europe and America could exist on a different planet: we’re too mesmerized by our approaching doomsday to care about theirs.

My khaki friend articulates the question that throbs in all our brains. “It’s not like the Pakistanis can be trusted—who knows when they really intend to launch? Why not finish them off first—why are we taking such a chance?”


OF COURSE, NO MATTER how terrifying the threat, one can’t stay high on it for too long. We’ve learnt to distract ourselves, to flick through magazines while waiting for the bomb. I watch as people form clusters around the room, as the curds of a social order begin to thicken and clump. A group of businessmen stakes out the center by spreading a red blanket on the ground and surrounding it by a border of footwear. They sit on the blanket with their backs to the rest of the room, talking animatedly in Gujarati and massaging their bare feet. The Maharashtrians gravitate towards the right, forming a solid block next to the area cordoned off for the medical staff, while a south Indian language (Tamil? Malayalam?) emanates from the other side of the room. A circle of saffron-clad women hovers patiently near a man with high-caste marks on his forehead, as if waiting to see whom he will select as his bride. Even the far side of the room, which resembles an abandoned chemistry laboratory with its shelves of dusty flasks and beakers, gets colonized. I make out knots of people squatting in the dark between the stacks: servants, ayahs, laborers in shorts and torn white undershirts.

Should I try to be included in a group? I could ask about getting to Bandra, to Karun—perhaps someone might help. The congregation closest to me looks particularly affluent—men in safari suits and women in silk saris lounge like cocktail party guests. All that’s missing are drinks in their hands. One of the women throws back her head and laughs splendidly from deep within her throat. I notice the heavy gold bangles she wears, the two necklaces, the earrings. Is this her idea of how to dress for war? Then I see the rip in her sari, the pleats spattered with mud, and feel guilty. Maybe she is fleeing from a bombed-out house, carrying all the valuables she can. Our eyes meet, and I nod at her in sympathy. She seems to reciprocate in a half-smile, as if a full one would be too reckless, would commit her too much. Encouraged, I get up from the floor, discreetly dust myself off, and go up to stand next to her.

“The bloody rascals,” the man in the tan safari suit says. “Three years we gave them work, and they walked out, the whole lot of them, the day after the war started. Nobody’s interested in service anymore.” With his short hair and starched mustache, he looks like a colonel.

“Least of all cooks and gangas. And don’t even mention drivers,” a woman who might be his wife adds. Her sari is bright red with gold paisleys embossed on the border. Could she have been interrupted on her way to a wedding?

Another man, also in a safari suit, shakes his head in despair. “I thought at least our generation was safe, that it would be the next generation, our sons and daughters, who’d have to deal with this kind of disloyalty. But even if there was a smidgen of reliability left, this war will have killed it. God knows what we can look forward to—how much these bounders will ask for once they return.”

“What about you? Have all your servants fled as well?” the woman with the jewelry asks. She is still only half-smiling, still erring on the side of caution.

“Oh, there’s only two of us, so we’ve never really needed a servant.” As soon as I blurt this out, I realize my blunder. The colonel coughs, the woman’s expression turns to one of frightful regret. “Though the ganga who cleans the dishes did stop coming last week.”

But it’s too late, I’ve failed the test. A pall falls over the group, and the women dab themselves with their handkerchiefs. Their gold flashes at me in reproach for setting my sights too high. I throw out my question about the train to Bandra anyway, but am greeted with silence. “We don’t have much occasion to go to the suburbs,” one of them finally responds. “Certainly not by train.” Conversation only normalizes after I meekly edge away.