03:02 (16 page)

We both went to the balcony and looked out.

‘That looks like south Mumbai.’

Fires were burning out of control over a large area of the city, and we stood there, watching it, realizing that the danger we had known was out there, was not very far from us after all.

‘Is it the terrorists?’

I had no answer to Megha’s whispered question. It could have been terrorists, looters, rioting between different groups, or even just an accidental fire that was now spreading with nobody to rein it in. There was no way we could find out what had happened, but the devastating results were laid out before us. I looked around and saw almost every balcony occupied by people looking at the flames, wondering what was going on in the city we called home. We stood there for a long time, holding each other’s hands and watching the flames. Life had never been as unpredictable and never been so much out of our control.

As we walked back to the sofa, I looked at Megha, not sure if she was any longer in the mood. She looked back at me and smiled. ‘When everything around us is going up in flames and when our world could end at any point, we should at least enjoy the moments we have together.’

I led her to my bedroom and drew the curtains. We could not stop the mayhem that was engulfing our world, but for just a few hours, we could shut it out.

When I woke up, I felt Megha’s head on my chest. She was still fast asleep, and I lay still, feeling her breath on my chest, feeling her warmth against me, feeling her body rise and fall gently as she breathed. It had been a long time, perhaps for the first time since college, that I had felt myself being drawn this strongly towards someone. In college, it had been a case of adolescent hormones, but this was something much stronger. Was it just our circumstances that had made us seek comfort in each other’s arms? Would our relationship sustain if things got back to normal?

I put those thoughts out of my mind. What might have been and what might be in the future did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the here and now. The beautiful woman with me, and the few moments of joy we could give each other in the black world we lived in now. If the last few days had taught me something, it was the futility of planning. In my office, we had made such a ritual out of talking about long-term career objectives, of making grand plans of the promotions we’d have, of the money we’d earn, of the designations we’d have. Now, we lived in a world where daily survival was the ultimate, and only, prize—those promotions, bonuses and other trinkets of upward mobility counted for nothing.

I felt Megha stir and she looked up at me.

‘Good morning.’

When she said the words, lying next to me, it was easy to believe that it would indeed be a good morning. That was till we heard a loud thud and then people screaming.

Dr Guenther had the body carried inside as fast as he could and a crew cleaned up the area, but a body does make a bit of a mess when it falls ten storeys. Much more than they would have you believe in the movies. A young boy, who had been undergoing medication for depression, had jumped from his balcony after telling his parents that he had nothing to look forward to. If a seventeen-year-old could come to that conclusion, I wondered what all the older folk were thinking.

‘Aadi, people are starting to unravel slowly,’ Guenther said. ‘The initial shock gave way to some constructive action when we were faced with the gang, and then the immediate need of getting food and water, but when people have time to sit down and consider where we are and where we are heading, it is easy to lose hope.’

What the doctor left unsaid was the damage that each suicide did to everyone left behind. The meeting that morning was a depressing one. General Lamba was in a corner, looking pale and gaunt. The stresses of the last few days and the loss of his friend were clearly beginning to tell on him. Everyone else was silent and looking downcast. I had thought I’d tell them about the weapons we’d got from Mr Sinha’s guards—there hadn’t been time the evening before. Now, with two sten guns and three pistols, our armoury was substantially increased. Each checkpoint could have one person armed with a firearm. Pandey would already have started his basic weapons-handling lessons, having selected a crew of three young men who had been in the NCC to handle the pistols and Akif and Ismail, summoning up their half-forgotten military training, would be handling the sten guns. It was a step-change in our ability to defend ourselves, but I doubted if any of that would lift the mood in the room.

I heard a tapping noise and looked up to see Mr Sinha walk into the room. Everyone had heard about his society agreeing to join us, but nobody had expected him to come in person. As one, everyone looked at him.

‘Good morning, everyone.’

I could see Mrs Khatri start to say something, but she stopped mid-sentence, perhaps too shocked at his sudden appearance. Mr Sinha sat down on an empty chair and looked around, a smile playing at the edges of his lips. ‘I know you all think I’m very reserved and don’t mix with people, and to be honest, I don’t. Not because I don’t want to, but because I spend eighteen hours a day working.’

A few people looked away as he continued, ‘My family had a huge construction business in Lahore and then overnight we lost it all during the Partition and became penniless refugees. We had to start all over again and I built what I did, what became the all-consuming legacy of mine. And then, overnight, all of it disappeared again, in the blackness that overtook our world.’

He had everyone’s attention now.

‘I dealt with it the wrong way, by hunkering down, by being selfish, and then I was reminded of how to react to such situations, how my own family came back from nothing. By learning to trust and help each other, through the kindness of strangers, by opening our doors to those we do not know. That is what I want to offer now. I am an old man, alone, my Saroj passed away years ago and my children are in the US, but if I can help, I will. That lesson is something a certain young man taught me so well last night.’

He gestured towards me, and all eyes in the room turned to me. I involuntarily took a step back. It was ironic: in my career, I had spent years seeking the limelight, seeking out recognition, seeking out badges of progress, but now that real lives were at stake and not, as Dhruv had so presciently said, numbers on a spreadsheet, those seemed like trifles.

The General got up. ‘Mr Sinha, thank you for joining us. Certainly, together we are stronger than if we were alone. We have been managing as a committee, but to be honest, we are struggling. None of us has experience of leading a large community, but you do, both in leading a billion-dollar business empire and as an elected leader. You could help us, and I think many of us would welcome you joining our leadership team.’

Mr Sinha looked at me, a twinkle in his eye. ‘That young man also taught me that being a true leader does not mean having a position or title.’

That day was spent in the daily routine of activities that defined our schedules—gathering water, helping with the planting of crops, conducting training on how to deal with emergencies, and so on. To be honest, I thought people were focusing on whatever task they could find at hand to keep their anxieties from overcoming them. All of us had seen the fires the previous night, and even now we could see several pillars of black smoke rising over the horizon. Once in a while people would stop, gaze at the smoke and wonder aloud what had happened, but none of us had any answers to offer.

Nitish did manage to get us all to focus on immediate problems when he shared the fact that keeping the lifts powered all the time would mean that we would run out of diesel for our generators in less than a week. While some people still moaned and groaned, and it took a debate that lasted more than an hour, ultimately we did manage on a compromise. The lifts would run every alternate hour during the day, and would be shut at night between midnight and six in the morning till we were able to get more fuel. People volunteered to have the diesel in their cars siphoned for a common pool, and Nitish and a few volunteers got to work.

As we walked out, I saw Rani at work with her crew and once again had to smile at the out-of-shape, middle-aged executives and office-dwellers working under her strict supervision. I asked her what she was planting.

‘Things that will grow fast so we have some food supply soon,’ she said. ‘Things like beet. In a month we can have something. Also some things we’ll need but will take more time, like potatoes.’

It was late afternoon when I could finally walk to the club to check on Megha. She was sitting against a wall, looking totally drained.

‘Aadi, we lost another patient and there has been one more suicide.’

I sat next to her and let her talk and get the frustration out of her system. Sometimes that was the best you could do.

‘Healthcare was something we took for granted. But now that we’re back to where we were perhaps a hundred years ago, illnesses that were no more than minor inconveniences are becoming killers. We’re struggling to keep some stocks of insulin under refrigeration, but it’s draining the hell out of our generator, and we’ll run out soon enough. So diabetics will be at severe risk. Two people have died of heart attacks; if we had a full-fledged hospital with defibrillators running they may have lived. And at least one of the suicide cases was on antidepressants which ran out and we had no resupplies.’

We were fast moving into the kind of society none of us had experienced. The world we had lived in was considered civilized largely because our advancements in technology and science had helped even those who were unwell have a shot at a full and healthy life. In the black world we inhabited now, it was much more Darwinian, truly a survival of the fittest, and the sick and the old were being hit first and hit hardest.

‘In a city the size of Mumbai, there must be stocks of drugs out there.’

No sooner had I said the words when I realized just how difficult a proposition it would be to scout such a huge area on bicycle, especially if there were looters or terrorists around.

‘I just wish there was one goddamn car that was working.’

We sat in silence for a while, holding hands, savouring the comfort our company was giving each other in the midst of all the gloom. When I got up to leave, planning to do a round of the checkpoints before night fell, my ears caught a sound I had not heard in many days.

The sound of an automobile engine.

As I rode the bicycle towards the checkpoint near the lane that led into the Nahar area next to SM Shetty School with Megha behind me, I could hear shouts of excitement and people milling on the streets. A few days earlier, nobody would have thought anything of a vehicle driving through the crowded streets, but now it was as if people had never seen or heard a car before. As we reached the checkpoint, I could see a crowd already gathered there, staring at an auto-rickshaw. The driver was a thin man wearing white clothes which had turned sooty brown from dust and dirt and was grinning at us.

‘Let me in and point that bloody gun somewhere else.’

I realized that that one of the guards was pointing his pistol at the vehicle, and I gently touched his shoulder and asked him to lower it. I also noticed that in his excitement and nervousness, he had forgotten to flick the safety off. Clearly we needed more than just guns to defend ourselves, and we would need to train our folks much more. I walked towards the auto-rickshaw.

‘How the hell did you get this to work?’

The driver looked at me with a slightly sheepish grin.

‘Ever since they made us put on the fancy meters and gadgets, I’d found a way to mess with them and connect the engine directly, the old-fashioned way. When my auto-rickshaw would not start the morning after the lights went off, I tried it the other way and it worked.’

It seemed to tally with what Nitish had said about the generators as well. Anything with modern electronics or circuits had been fried, but rewiring them the way they had been before modern computers and circuits seemed to work.

‘Can you fix other auto-rickshaws?’

He smiled at me, and I saw the glint in his eyes. ‘Yes, I can, but for that you need to let me in and let me stay here.’

‘Wait here and I’ll be back.’

We had a ten-minute debate on it, and several of the society leaders talked about how we had turned refugees back before. That was when Mr Sinha stepped in. ‘Part of dealing with crises is being pragmatic and being able to change as circumstances change. Yes, we’ve turned people back before, but this man brings a skill we don’t have here and which could improve our chances of getting through this. Let’s allow him in and deal with other refugees as they come.’

As I looked around the room, I realized that perhaps most of the people there agreed with Mr Sinha, but they had been waiting for someone to make that decision for them.

The driver, who told us his name was Mahadev, was soon in front of us, looking pretty awkward at all the attention he was getting. Mr Sinha was explaining the rules to him. ‘Stay here and find a spot inside the club or one of the common areas to sleep. Help fix as many auto-rickshaws as you can find and you’ll then be in-charge of our transport department, helping ferry people and supplies. But remember one thing. Your messing with the meters would have got you jailed in the old world. If you get any ideas about bending the rules or laws here or perhaps stealing something, you’ll get much worse than jail. This young man will put a bullet in your head.’

It took me a second to realize Mr Sinha was talking about me. Mahadev looked long and hard at me, and at the pistol tucked into my belt. Then he shuffled out to get to work, and several people in the room broke out into grins.

‘Thanks for making me the resident executioner.’

Mr Sinha grinned back at me. ‘We are all old fogeys and unlikely to scare anyone. To set the rules, whether in an office, a municipality or in the neighbourhood we call home, you need the carrot and the stick; the motivation and the muscle.’

If only for a short while, it was easy to forget just how brutal and hard our lives had become. People were lining the streets. Someone was passing around drinks from a previously concealed stash of beer, and in the absence of any working music system that would be loud enough to be heard in such a large open area, a group of kids had decided to entertain us with their badly off-key rendition of One Direction songs. It was loud, it was chaotic, but most importantly, it was to celebrate the return of one aspect of what we had taken for granted.