by Mainak Dhar
India had always had an all-volunteer Army, and the NCC was designed both as a way to expose youngsters to the military as well as create a pool of trained people who could support the authorities in times of crisis, especially natural disasters. Many of the kids who joined the NCC with me did so because it would look cool on their résumé, but for me it served a very clear purpose. It was my stepping stone to the military. While others bitched about the discipline and marches, I embraced them. My years of being in the NCC, my family background and my athletics were all going to be factors that worked in my favour when it came to applying to the Army.
In my second year of college, I started reading up on what it would take to crack the Combined Defence Services Exam and the fitness tests that followed. Then came the cold dose of reality and a shock my father perhaps never recovered from. My uncle, Baba’s beloved younger brother, someone who had been a friend and a mentor to me, died in action in Kashmir, killed in a terrorist ambush. Coming on top of the fact that Baba had lost his own father in action, he forbade me from joining the Army. Then came the arguments and the fights. Baba reminding me of responsibility, of the fact that we were a middle-class family and could not afford to chase fanciful dreams; of how, when he retired, I would need to ensure I could be settled. He reminded me of how hard my grandfather and uncle’s deaths in action had hit the family. Of how the family could not handle another of its sons coming back in a flag-draped coffin.
I argued, I fought and then, ultimately, I gave in. I remember the look on my coach’s face when I told him I was going to prepare for MBA entrance exams and could no longer play on the team, and that I would not try out for the Indian Military Academy. But I also remember Baba’s face when I got offers from several of the top business schools in the country and finally joined an IIM. It was the first time I had seen him smile since my uncle died.
I guess you can never please everyone, can you?
The Man of the Tournament trophy and the Best Cadet shield I held in my hand still felt good after all these years, but if Dhruv thought our jobs were all just numbers on a spreadsheet, weren’t these nothing more than hunks of cheap metal? No, I didn’t regret anything I had done. Baba had made his career in the government, and when I got my first bonus, I realized I was earning more than he had after decades of working. My job had allowed us to get the best treatment for Ma when she was diagnosed with stage three cancer, and to ensure Baba was comfortable when she passed. I had hated my old man at the time, but I also realized that a government salary like his would never have covered Ma’s chemo costs and all the experimental medicines we tried in our desperate bid to save her.
Life is full of hard choices, and I had made mine. We just have to roll with the choices we make.
I threw the trophy and the shield back in the box.
Today was not a day to think of old dreams but to celebrate newer ones coming true. Just a couple of years ago I myself would have considered it a pipe dream, but now I could see a clear line of sight to it.
Vice President, head of the Mumbai office, our biggest in India, reporting directly to the CEO. The logical next step was to be groomed to be the CEO. At thirty, age was on my side, and I was in no real hurry. One of Dhruv’s earliest pieces of career advice to me had been that the patient bird got the worm.
I went to my bedroom but didn’t feel like changing. It was a Sunday the next day anyway, and I had asked the maid to take the day off knowing that I would probably want to loll around in bed, nursing a hangover. Then a walk down to Starbucks for a coffee to get myself to join the ranks of the living, and then figure out what I would do with the rest of the day. Most Sundays saw me in office or on calls—it was officially our day off but, in our business, days off meant little since most of my projects were with Indian entrepreneur-led ventures that worked 24x7 or basically whenever the entrepreneur wanted to work or needed advice or help. But this Sunday I would celebrate and give work a pass. It would be nice to have a day with nothing planned and nothing to do, for a change.
As I lay down on my bed, I realized that my grand plans of taking the Sunday off depended entirely on whether or not I got a mail or call from one of the entrepreneurs we were working with. Till that happened, though, I would continue to indulge myself with the fantasy that I would indeed have a rare day off from thinking about work.
My phone was right next to me and I picked it up to make sure the alarm was off. The last thing I wanted was for an accidental alarm to spoil my grand plans to sleep in. As I picked it up, I saw a message from Kartik. His spelling was a great indicator of just how wasted he was.
Grate party. Had tots of fun. Congrass, Boss!
TWO
I had been sleeping the dreamless sleep of the contentedly drunk when my eyes snapped open. I had heard something loud, like the pop of a firecracker, only duller. My head ached a bit, and my throat was dry. When I picked up my phone to check the time, the screen was blank and refused to flicker to life though I pressed the button repeatedly. Perhaps I had forgotten to charge it. I cursed whichever idiot had burst a firecracker at this unearthly hour as I checked my watch on the side table.
The time was 03:02.
I lay back down on the bed and then decided that, since I was up, I might as well drink some water. Hydration would do wonders for my parched throat and make the hangover more bearable. I walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge, only to see that it was dark inside. The water inside was still cold, so the fridge must have turned off very recently. Figuring a surge had caused it to trip, and that was what had made the noise that woke me up, I walked towards the junction box and turned on the light switch in the living room on the way.
Nothing.
Looked like the mains had tripped. I fetched the small torch I had in the kitchen and went to the junction box. To my surprise, when I flashed the torch at it, I saw that none of the switches had tripped.
That was when I heard all the voices. Why the hell were so many people up and talking at bloody three in the morning?
I began walking to the balcony but stopped short at the sight of something I had never seen before.
The whole of Mumbai, as far as I could see, was dark. It was as if a giant, unseen hand had taken a brush and, in one massive stroke, painted all of the city black. All except for a bright flame in the direction of the airport. Was there a fire somewhere?
I had the night guard’s mobile number saved on my phone, but when I picked it up to make the call, I was reminded that my phone was dead. I walked to the intercom to call him, but there was only static. Looked like the mother of all power failures had hit us. Perhaps it was a transformer or power station on fire somewhere. That might explain the flame.
There was nothing I could do about it at three in the morning, and certainly not when I was still half-drunk and feeling the onset of a massive hangover. I figured that things would be sorted out sooner rather than later, and my fretting about it wouldn’t help. So I finished the bottle of water and went back to bed. It didn’t take a lot for me to blank out the voices and fall back to sleep.
When I woke next, it was due to a shrill noise. On instinct, I grabbed my phone, wondering if I had set an alarm by mistake, but the screen was still dead. My watch told me that the time was 7:15, and after a few seconds I was awake enough to figure that the noise was coming from outside. When I walked around my apartment, I realized that the power was still out and, looking out of the balcony, I saw groups of people huddled around the various housing societies in the area. Someone was blowing a whistle trying to get people in one of the societies opposite mine to stop shouting and pay attention to him. I couldn’t remember the last time electricity had gone for such a long period of time, and it was no wonder people were getting concerned and, from the sounds of the occasional raised voice, pissed off.
I took a quick shower, the heater not working meant that there was only cold water, but in a way that was good, because it was just the thing I needed to fully wake myself up. A fe
w minutes later, I was in front of the lift and realized that it too was not working. The people across the corridor were an elderly retired couple, and I had barely exchanged a couple of pleasantries with them in the four years I had stayed on the same floor as them. Today, Mrs Guha gingerly opened the door and looked at me, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Nothing’s working. His pacemaker is not working either. I can’t call the hospital since the landlines are down as well, and we can’t walk down the stairs.’
‘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 an
xious 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.
