by Mainak Dhar
Tears welling up in his eyes, he went on. ‘Mihir killed both bastards, but was fatally shot as well. He was not given any order, he was not given any authority, but he stepped up and took charge, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Sometimes, my son, taking on leadership is not about a position or power, but sacrificing yourself for others. Putting yourself second. You are much like Mihir in that respect, so don’t shrink from the leadership that you are already earning. Embrace it, and the burdens and sacrifices it brings.’
When the General left, neither Megha nor I could get back to sleep, so we lay beside each other, watching the city burn in the distance, wondering what horrors people there were enduring. It was at 05:30 in the morning when we both stood up and gaped at what we could see through my bedroom window.
The lights at the international airport had come back on.
None of the meeting rooms at our societies would have accommodated the crowds that gathered the next morning, so we decided to gather at the park, much to Rani’s annoyance that her planting would be disrupted. There were hundreds of people there, and everyone had one question on their mind: could the lights coming on at the airport mean that things were getting back to normal?
I could see several expatriates gathered in a corner. There were at least two dozen families there and many of them had made Mumbai their home, working for companies that had their offices in the area. I could only imagine how hard the last few days must have been for them, to be stranded in a foreign country, and with no way of contacting their friends and families back home. One of them, a tall blond whom I had seen in the gym on occasion, stepped forward.
‘Several of us have talked it over, and we’d like to get to the airport. There’s no way anyone could have turned on the power at the airport without some government agency being involved. That means flights will resume soon, and we’d like to be there when they do. At any rate, if someone from the government is there, it may mean that we can contact our embassies.’
When nobody said anything, I stepped forward, remembering the General’s words. ‘I can’t tell you and your families what to do. However, we’ve all seen the fires burning in the city, and we know the lights going out was the result of some sort of attack. Why not wait till we find out more?’
That was when two things happened in quick succession which ensured that any appeals for caution were thrown out the window. First, Mahadev made a grand appearance with two BEST buses which he and his buddies had been able to fix. He was beaming when he stepped out from the lead bus.
‘They threw electronic displays and meters in them which were fried, but under it all, these were old pieces of junk. Once I rewired things a bit, it all worked. I spotted an old Maruti 800 which I may be able to get working as well. I tried my hand at a Honda City, but all the newer cars have too many of their systems dependant on chips and circuits.’
Just as he finished, someone screamed.
‘I can see an airplane!’
People clapped and cheered as a plane came into view, headed for the airport. The expat who had spoken clapped me on the shoulder.
‘There you go! Now they’ve restored air traffic. Folks, we’re about to go to the airport in one of these buses and try and get a flight home.’
Several of the other expats cheered, and it was easy to get carried away by the sudden positivity that was sweeping the group.
As the expat families headed off to pack whatever belongings they could carry in backpacks or small bags, Megha squeezed my hand. ‘Aadi, that wasn’t a passenger jet. That was a C-130 transport.’
I remembered that she was an Air Force kid and probably knew her airplanes.
‘The Indian Air Force has them for Special Ops. Maybe it is one of ours,’ she said.
I felt relief wash over me. Perhaps I was being paranoid; maybe things were finally getting back to normal, and we would soon have help.
After about ten minutes, the blond man came up with his bags. He introduced himself as Don and shook my hand. ‘You’ve done a fine job here and thank you for taking such good care of all the families. This is home for us and none of us is going to bail on you, so we’re just taking some necessities to maybe reconnect with families and figure out how things are back home. We fully intend to be back here as things get back to normal. Till then, goodbye.’
One of the drivers commandeered a bus and almost all the expat families crowded into it, singing and cheering, and waving to the others. I noted that Dr Guenther and Marie made no move to join them. When I looked at him, he shrugged and said, ‘A doctor cannot leave his patients. Mangla needs a lot of help.’
The bus left, and I stood there watching them, hoping that the optimism was going to be proven right. I felt Megha lean closer to me as she gripped my hand even harder. ‘Aadi, I just hope things are as good as they look,’ she said.
The euphoria soon gave way to mounting concern when the bus had not returned for over two hours. Even in normal Mumbai traffic, a round trip to the international airport would have taken little over an hour. With no traffic now, the bus should have definitely been back. People had been milling around in groups, waiting for the driver to return with news of what he had seen, and—at least for some people—the hope had been that soldiers would be coming over to help secure areas and get things back to normal.
‘For all you know, the driver is sitting at the airport, enjoying the hospitality of our soldiers,’ someone said.
Mr Sinha leaned towards me and said, ‘Aadi, I hope the flight means that things are indeed getting back to normal, but I’ve learned never to be too optimistic, because that may blind you to what may still go wrong. Let’s keep people busy and focused on some goal that is close at hand. That is the only way to keep them from panicking when the road ahead may well be long and uncertain.’
He stepped back and called out for everyone’s attention. When they turned to him, he said, ‘A lot of apartments don’t have gas cylinders, and people have been living off canned food. When my family crossed over after the Partition, I remember my grandmother saying that sometimes what is most needed for morale is to get a hot, freshly-cooked meal in your stomach.’
A few people chuckled in the crowd and he continued. ‘There’s lots of flour lying in Haiko, and we have a lot of potatoes. It won’t be a fancy menu, but I propose we start a communal kitchen using one of the restaurants where a team will cook lunch and dinner, maybe pav-bhaji, for everyone. At least everyone will be assured of a hot meal and it’ll give more of you a chance to get involved in helping us through this. If you agree, we could start getting volunteers for the cooking team.’
I saw a new spark in the eyes of Mrs Khatri and Anu, both of whom had been looking lost as the crisis lengthened. Anu raised her hand.
‘My daughter runs a bakery. We can use the wood-fired ovens there to bake the bread.’
Mrs Khatri and four other women came forward.
‘We can start off with the cooking and create a roster where volunteers can rotate through the duties. Lunch will be served in two hours, people.’
People got busy with their chores and we were lucky to have hard taskmasters like Kundu and Rani in charge. I remembered what Megha had said about medical supplies and I went over to the club to tell her my idea.
‘Is it safe to go out there?’
‘I’ll be in Mahadev’s auto-rickshaw, so if there’s trouble, we can get back fast. We won’t have to go too far—I’ll check the chemist stores nearby and see what things are like there.’
We all knew that many life-saving drugs were in short supply and it wouldn’t hurt to look a bit further out for some of the specialist drugs that Megha had said we needed.
‘I could tell you to ask someone else to go, but I know you won’t do that.’
I could see the conflicted emotions on Megha’s face. Her role in our little community meant that she realized just how critical the medicines were, but she also didn’t want me to put myself in harm’s way.
‘Megha
, I promise you that I won’t take any chances I don’t absolutely have to. Till this began, if someone asked me what I have to live for, my answer would have started with my career and my dream of becoming CEO one day. None of that matters now. Today, what matters is knowing that, no matter how bad things are, I have you in my life, and the hope that as things get better, we have a long life together to look forward to.’
She was tearing up so I pulled her close and we stood there, hugging each other, and then we kissed, in plain view of everyone passing the club. Before the Blackout—as I had heard Yash and a few other youngsters refer to it—I would have cringed at such a public display of affection, but now I didn’t care, as did nobody who passed us. We had all realized that life was way too short and unpredictable to put things off or to hold off on telling those who mattered to us how much we cared. Many romances had bloomed in the community, and I suspected several of them were simply relationships coming into the open instead of being carried out in the shadows. The morality police had disappeared along with the uniformed sort.
‘Just go prepared, will you?’
Preparation took the form of opting for one of Mahadev’s stripped down auto-rickshaws. It was a trade-off between safety and being able to defend ourselves. A covered auto-rickshaw at least gave the nominal protection of a tarp cover, but it left way too many blind spots. If there was danger, I wanted to be able to see it, and respond to it. For that, I took Mihir’s pistol, with the holster at my side, and also the 0.22, more as a good luck charm than anything else.
A reasonable crowd gathered when Mahadev and I were about to begin our journey, since a lot of people were curious not just about what the world outside looked like, but also about news from the airport. In theory, I was not to go anywhere close to the airport. The stated plan called for us to sweep through Nahar, Chandivali and Sakinaka, looking into chemist shops, and also checking if there were any societies there that had news about what was happening. We had been turning back small groups of refugees every day—perhaps word had got around that we had guns, so people were giving us a wide berth—but we had heard from some of them about how other buildings in the area had been swarmed by refugees, with looting and fights breaking out. We knew we were living in an oasis of relative security in our neighbourhood, but we also knew that security could not be taken for granted, so a secondary mission for us was to see what was happening in the immediate vicinity and if there was any trouble lurking there.
I was in the auto-rickshaw when Akif came and sat beside me, his sten gun on his lap. I had asked him why he hadn’t gone to the airport with the other expats, and he told me that he and Ismail felt they still had a duty to help the community which had given them refuge, and they would leave for home only when it was crystal clear that the crisis had lifted.
Now, when he got into the auto-rickshaw, I said, ‘You, and the gun, are needed here, Akif. We still see dozens of refugees every day.’
He smiled. ‘No, my friend, you will need the help. I can see in your eyes that looking for medicines is not the only thing on your mind.’
He was very right about that. I wanted to see for myself what was happening at the airport and what had happened to our expatriate friends.
The first few minutes of the ride were uneventful enough, as we passed through largely deserted lanes heading into Lake Homes, the huge housing complex near Hiranandani. It was when the complex came into view that we realized just how bad things were. I could see Akif raise his sten gun to his shoulder and I also wrapped my fingers around the pistol in the holster at my side.
Every shop in the complex in front of the society seemed to have been looted, and some were blackened from fire. The complex itself seemed abandoned, with no sign of habitation. As we neared the main gate, we could see bodies lying on the approach road. Whether it was looters or terrorists, this kind of bloodshed so close to our homes made me realize just how thin our blanket of security was.
‘Do you want to go inside?’
The stench of death dissuaded me. Besides, there was neither medicine to be found there nor any answers to what had happened to the expatriates.
‘No, let’s push ahead.’
We drove through the area and into the Nahar complex. This was a more or less self-contained community like our own and I had been hopeful that people here would have fared better. I was disappointed to see that, at least at first sight, it seemed abandoned.
‘Where has everyone gone?’
That question was answered when we neared the school. Tables and cabinets were piled up in front of the gate, forming a makeshift barricade, and behind it were two young men carrying hockey sticks. When they saw us, I saw them turn pale. They looked fit, but—with just their hockey sticks—they wouldn’t last more than a heartbeat against men armed with guns. I stepped out of the auto-rickshaw and approached them, both my palms open towards them to show that I meant no harm.
‘Where are the others? We’re coming from Hiranandani Powai.’
One of the boys ran inside and came back out soon with an elderly man. I could see a large crowd gather behind them.
‘We have nothing of value. Please leave us alone.’
It struck me then that they had taken us for looters.
‘We don’t want anything. What happened here?’
The man now came around the barricade and stood in front of me.
‘For a couple of days we just waited for the lights to come back on. Then the looting started. Then there were riots between Hindus and Muslims out in Sakinaka because someone spread some rumour about a temple being destroyed. After we had been hit two nights in a row, some of us decided to move out in search of friends or relatives, and the remaining took refuge in the school.’
‘How are you doing for food and water?’
From the look in the man’s eyes, I could see they were in desperate straits.
‘We are okay for maybe a day or two more, but I do hope whatever’s caused the power to go out comes back. Just doesn’t make sense though for the cars and phones to stop working.’
It dawned on me then, just how lucky we had been to have the pilot reach us. Otherwise, we would also have been clueless as to what happened, and that it wasn’t likely go away anytime soon. That had made us rally together instead of dispersing and scattering like the people here, and had also made us focus our energies on longer-term solutions for food and water supplies. I took a step back, about to leave, but then I stopped myself. These people deserved to know what we knew, if only because it might help them prepare for the days and months to come, if it wasn’t already too late for them. When I finished telling them in brief what we had learned from the pilot, I saw shock on many faces, but equally disbelief on others.
‘That sounds like a sci-fi movie. I’m sure there is some much more reasonable explanation.’
I looked at the middle-aged man who had said the words and realized there was no point in trying to convince him. I just wished them luck and headed back into the auto-rickshaw.
As we turned into Sakinaka, I saw a chemist shop with its shutters open. The food and chocolates had been ransacked, but most of the medicine shelves were untouched. As we got out of the auto-rickshaw, I looked at the list of medicines Megha had given me. Would taking the medicines from the shop be looting? Someone had ransacked it anyway, and it was likely someone would be back again later; it was not as if I was going to help prevent it from being looted, was I? I had killed people, and now it looked like I would have to steal. That was when I felt a strong grip on my wrist. It was Akif.
‘My friend, you do not have to take the burden of every decision on your conscience. Let this be on mine.’
Akif went into the shop and emerged a few minutes later with his arms laden with boxes. ‘I got most of what Megha wanted and also some basics like paracetamol,’ he said.
As I stacked the small boxes by our feet, Akif went in again, this time coming back with a box of batteries. As we proceeded further, turning rig
ht towards the road that would lead to the airport, we saw a scene of utter chaos. At the best of times, this was a busy intersection, and while the Blackout had happened at three in the morning, there were still several trucks, taxis and auto-rickshaws stranded along the road. And then there was the occasional body. It was hard to believe our city had been reduced to this, and harder still to reconcile to the fact that someone was responsible for it.
Mahadev pulled over at a gas station and came back with two jerry cans filled with diesel. ‘There’s more in there, but I don’t think we can carry that much. We should bring more auto-rickshaws or maybe get a bus here and stock up.’
I nodded, but my mind was elsewhere. We had completed the mission on which we had ostensibly set out on, but I knew that less than five hundred meters ahead was the road that curved left towards the new International Airport terminal. A road our expatriate friends would have taken to reach the airport.
If I had any doubts about whether or not to check the airport, they vanished when we heard a loud droning noise. We looked up to see another airplane coming in for landing. It seemed to be of the same type that had come in earlier. The difference was that, this time, we were much closer to it and, as it passed overhead, I could see that it didn’t have the familiar roundel of the Indian Air Force. In fact, there were no markings on it. Who was flying into the airport and who had taken control of it?
‘Mahadev, go on till the airport road. Let’s see what’s happening there.’
We had not said anything to each other, but I could feel each of us tense as the auto-rickshaw approached the airport road, having passed a partially burnt down Times Square office complex and ransacked shops and restaurants. I had the pistol out of its holster and was holding it with both hands and I could see that Akif also had his sten gun ready on his lap. Mahadev stopped just at the edge of the road.
‘What happened?’