03:02 (3 page)

‘Don’t worry, I’ll drive over to the hospital and get some help.’

Having a mission, or at any rate something useful to do, cleared my head and got me into action. I walked down the stairs, cursing the fact that having an apartment on the fourteenth floor was great when it came to lake views, but really sucked at times like these. I was happy, though, that I had kept myself in decent-enough shape that I wasn’t winded when I finished my descent.

All the four guards were huddled near the gate of the society, and their supervisor, an elderly pot-bellied man called Pandey, walked over to me.

‘Sir, something’s wrong.’

‘I know, looks like the whole bloody electrical grid has gone down.’

Pandey had spent years in the Army before retiring and taking this job, so I knew he wasn’t a man to be easily spooked, but today I saw something in his eyes I had never seen before.

Fear.

‘No, Sir, it’s something else.
Everything’s
down. We had these fancy generators installed a few years ago, but those aren’t working either. Even cars are not working. That has nothing to do with the electricity grid.’

This just did not make any sense to me, so I jogged over to my parking spot and pressed the button on my key ring. I was greeted by silence instead of the usual beep signifying that the car had been unlocked. I opened the car door the old-fashioned way and slid into the driver’s seat, but when I put the key into the ignition and turned it, there was no response. I tried again, but with the same result. I looked out to see others like me gathered around their cars, similarly puzzled.

What the hell was going on?

My phone was still dead. I asked a couple of the other men gathered near their cars and they said their phones were also out. Near us, a middle-aged man I had often seen walking his dog, was shouting at someone.

‘I’m telling you something is very wrong. My dog was whining from bloody three in the morning and she refuses to get out of the house. Would the bloody police or government or someone tell us what is going on?’

The man at the receiving end was the building manager. At the best of times, Anil Jain was incompetent and pretty useless, and I knew the society had been talking of getting rid of him. With my work timings, I never really took much of an interest in housing society matters, but that much gossip was easily available from Pandey and the other guards when I shared a lift with them on the way back to my flat at night. At a time like this, Jain just looked shit scared and totally out of his depth. He said something about checking with the management and scooted from the scene.

No matter what was going on, I still had a job to do. The Guhas needed help, and Hiranandani Hospital was, after all, just a short walk away, so I went out of the gate and began to jog in its direction. I had barely left the society gates when I saw a few cars stranded in the middle of the road. It was as if they had stopped while someone was driving, and never started again. Next to one was a young couple, and I walked over to them.

‘What’s going on?’

The man seemed to be in his early twenties and looked terrified.

‘You tell me, dude. We were driving back from a party. I was scared Mona’s dad would kill us for being too late and then the bloody car just stopped at some three in the morning and wouldn’t start again. Thank god she lives around the corner, so I walked her home and came back for the car, but it wouldn’t start. I tried calling my folks, but the phone was out as well. All the phones are out.’

Mona was standing next to him and she looked really scared.

‘Nobody seems to know what’s going on. There’s nothing coming on TV or radio. The computer won’t switch on, so there’s no internet either.’

‘Guys, I’m going to the hospital. I’m sure they’ll know what’s going on and if I see a cop along the way, I’ll ask,’ I said.

I jogged down Central Avenue, which was lined with restaurants and banks, and saw several men outside the HSBC ATM. As I passed them, I heard one of them shouting, ‘How can all the ATMs not be working?’

A few feet down the road, I realized my hopes of an early morning coffee were also going to be dashed. There were several people gathered outside the Starbucks and the manager was trying to pacify them.

‘I’m sorry, all our systems are down, the generator is not working and we don’t have any authorization from our head office to process payments outside the system. Please wait while we get that.’

‘How will you do that? All the phones are down as well, and there’s no internet.’

I didn’t wait to hear the manager’s reply but jogged on and saw almost the same scene being played out at the D-Mart supermarket just down the road. People were confused, they were scared and, still, there was no news about why this was happening. I tried to focus on the job at hand. Continuing down Central Avenue I saw more abandoned cars around. Normally, a car that had broken down here would be towed away in less than an hour, otherwise it would totally clog up an already busy street, but I guessed no tow trucks were running either.

When I reached the Hiranandani Hospital, I realized things there were no better. There was a large crowd of people outside, many sobbing, more than a few shouting. A thin line of security men was trying to keep them at bay at the main entrance and a handful of policemen stood by one side of the gates, carrying riot batons. I pushed through the crowd and reached the entrance only to be shoved back by a guard. It was not hard enough to hurt, but certainly hard enough to tell that he meant business.

‘Hey, what the hell are you doing?’

He looked at me and I saw no animosity or anger in his eyes. Only utter confusion.

‘I’m so sorry, but they’ve asked us to keep everyone outside.’

‘It’s an emergency. My neighbour’s pacemaker isn’t working. I know he had a heart attack just a few months ago, and I need a doctor to help him.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do anything to help.’

A big man behind me pushed past.

‘I’m going in. My brother is in there and these bastards will not stop me!’

He pushed hard and the guard who had stopped me went down in a heap. Two more guards tried to wrestle with the man but he struggled against them and was almost inside when a policeman cracked him across the back of his head with a baton. The man howled and went down, blood streaming from the wound. The guards pulled him aside and a hush fell over the crowd, horrified by this sudden outburst of violence. Many people took a step back. The cop was now looking at me, hefting the baton in his hands, assessing whether I was going to be trouble. I held both my palms up and open towards him, to show that I was no threat. But I was not going to back off so soon.

‘This is a matter of life or death. Why don’t you let people inside? No matter what has happened to the lights, this is still a hospital, isn’t it?’

I spotted a doctor walking inside and shouted out at her. ‘Doctor, please. Listen to me. I need help!’

She walked over and I saw that her white coat was badly crumpled and stained with blood. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and she looked like she would collapse at any moment. She was young, thin and, under the circumstances, seemed way too frail to deal with all the chaos that had suddenly descended upon her hospital.

When I explained to her what I needed, she sighed deeply.

‘Things are crazy here as well, that’s why everyone is on edge. Three people have died overnight and we’re trying to save others. That’s why we’re keeping crowds out. Having angry and anxious relatives inside won’t make our job any easier.’

Died? That made no sense to me.

‘Why would people die? What’s going on?’

She was clearly in a hurry to get back inside, and she turned away from me before facing me again. Maybe she just needed the brief respite that came from having someone to talk to.

‘There’s been no power all night, and we lost two patients in the ICU. Another one was on dialysis and he passed this morning.’

‘You’ve got generators, don’t you?’

Now she looked to be on the verge of tears as she replied, ‘Normally we would have saved all of them, but our generators failed. The electrician’s been working all night and has restored one of them, and he says he can restore a few of the lights soon. He says he did that by rewiring the generator by bypassing all the electronic circuits, but the machines in the ICU still won’t start up. He says that every circuit is fried.’

She saw the look on my face and handed me a pad.

‘Write down your address and the patient’s name. When we have a few of the lights back up, and once things are a bit stable, I’ll have someone go over and take a look.’

When I stepped back onto Central Avenue, I saw that the crowds outside the banks and the shops had only got bigger. It was not yet noon, and in just one morning without power, people were beginning to panic.

What would happen if this didn’t get resolved soon?

When I got back to my building, I saw a hand-scrawled notice on the board. There was to be a society meeting in an hour and everyone was encouraged to attend. I had never attended any of these meetings before, but today I thought it would be a smart idea to be there. I had never really socialized with anyone in the building before, my work and my friends at work being more than enough to occupy my time and energy, but now it felt important to be with others. To be with others who were facing the same perplexing situation I was.

I did not particularly want to climb the stairs up to my apartment, but I did so to pass on the news to the Guhas. I updated them but I left out the part about people dying in the hospital. They looked pretty spooked as it was. A quick trip to my flat to pick up spare cash, drink some water, grab a portable charger for my phone in case the phone did decide to come back to life, and I was back down to join the society meeting.

The managing committee, which normally was pretty efficient in resolving matters related to plumbing or setting out rules about how late people could party, looked clueless. The meeting room was packed, with more than half of the sixty or so people there standing and the four-member committee was sitting facing them, looking at each other, waiting for someone to begin.

Finally Mrs Khatri, the silver-haired retired teacher who was the head of the committee, began. ‘We have no new information to share, but it’s important that we stay calm. We sent someone to check the surrounding areas and also go to the Powai police station and he has just come back. Let’s hear what he has to say.’

One of the guards walked to the front, looking pretty intimidated by all the attention he was getting.

‘I cycled there, and as far as I could see, every single building is without power, cars aren’t starting and there is no TV or mobile reception. It’s definitely not something only in our area. At the police station, there were folks from Nahar and Lake Homes who had come to see if the cops here had any more information, and it’s the same story there as well. In fact, it seems to be the same way across the city if the rumours are to be believed.’

‘What did the police say?’

I didn’t recognize the man who had asked the question. He was tall, bald, probably my age, and still wearing a rumpled tracksuit that he must have worn to bed. That was part of the problem of living the way we did—most of our waking hours were spent at work or with people at work, and you barely knew the people who lived in the same building as you.

‘They know nothing. Their networks are all down and they haven’t heard anything from their seniors. Sounds like the whole city has gone dark.’

‘Does anyone know how the electrical grid is set up? Maybe it’s just this part of town.’

‘How the hell do you explain the cars? And the generators? And the mobile phones?’

People were beginning to raise their voices and while I had no desire to get the spotlight, I decided that standing around, speculating and arguing, would not help move things forward. So, I took a step towards the front of the room and faced everyone. I began in a slightly louder voice and brought it back to normal when I’d got everyone’s attention.

‘I was at the hospital, and they seem to have figured out how to get one of their generators working. I don’t understand enough about the technology but here’s what they told me.’

When I had finished sharing what I’d learned, the man in the tracksuit stepped forward.

‘I’m Nitish, and I was an electrical engineer. Sounds like anything with a chip or circuit is fried—that would explain the cars. I guess we could try and get our generator to work by bypassing it.’

‘Why would that explain the cars?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.’

‘I’m Aaditya,’ I said, sticking my hand out, and Nitish shook it.

‘Well, the thing is, we’re all kicked about technology and what it does for us, but almost everything we use nowadays has a computer or microchip in it. Our cars, our appliances, even the bloody auto-rickshaws have GPS and electronic meters installed in them. If those are fried, then everything stops.’

There was an audible murmur as people took that in. Then Mrs Khatri voiced the question that was on everyone’s mind.

‘How did this happen?’

Nitish shrugged. ‘I have no idea, but let’s try and get that generator working before it gets dark. God knows when the power will be back up.’

I could advise people on whether or not to invest millions of dollars in a venture, could help restructure an organization, could help develop complicated M&A deals, but as Nitish worked on the generator, I realized none of those skills mattered in the least now. He kept at it for several hours, and we had a couple of false starts, but finally, at well after three in the afternoon, a huge cheer went up when the lights in the common areas flickered to life and the elevators began working.

Anil, the building manager, gathered everyone back in the meeting room where someone had rustled up some sweets that were passed around. Everyone was shaking Nitish’s hand and congratulating him. Nitish, for his part, looked pretty sheepish and awkward at all the attention. Anil instructed one of the guards to turn on the power to the apartments as well. The emergency generator could run the elevators, power lights in the common areas, and the lights and fans in apartments, though not the air-conditioning. However, I knew that choosing to power up the apartments in addition to the common areas and elevators would consume significantly more fuel. The guard was about to rush off and do as he had been asked when something struck me. Quite without conscious thought, I spoke aloud what was on my mind.