Column

Hummingbird

Listening to the news channels trying their best, despite the impassive faces, to create a quiet panic among listeners by the sheer force of repetition made me wonder what would really happen if scientists had zeroed down on India as the target of the satellite that was freefalling towards Earth, and announced that to the press.

Worse still, if they could not predict the exact location in the country that it would hit, but knew only its general direction to be Indiawards…

I wondered what I would do. Writing a will would be of no use; finding flight tickets and rushing to another country would not probably work, as I watch the news sporadically, and would perhaps be among the last to know. In fact, chances are, I would notice something was amiss only when I discovered that most of my colony was empty. By which time flights would be full for the next year or so.

What does one do when faced with sudden threat? Living in this city, I have got accustomed to the fact that it faces many terrors. We have the fear of being rained under every monsoon, ever since the big deluge of 2005; we have bomb threats every now and then; there is the very real fear of being stranded on a flyover in an unending line of immobile traffic on a Friday before a long weekend.

I remember one year we had the threat of a cyclone hitting the city.

Indeed, it was veering with crazed determination towards our coastline, and one look at the INSAT picture had high-rise inhabitants rushing down, searching for terra firma.

I was at that time, at work and in a near state of panic — my home was a good 30 kms away from my place of work, and the hurricane was to strike in the next few hours. Whatever happened, I wanted to be with dear ones when it did.

By the time I started on my homeward journey, I had phoned the family to buy candles, and shut all windows, and a hundred other instructions… futile attempts to prove we could resist Nature and win.

The roads had emptied by then but, as we sped home, my husband and I, the sky did darken ominously and shaded our fears with distinct strokes.

Even as we sat quaking and I tried to stem the excitement in my ten-year-old’s voice, he asked endless questions about what a cyclone looked like, the night passed in a deathly quiet. It was the quiet that, though ominous, told us the storm had passed without touching our shores. I think the city heaved a collective sigh of relief and, the next morning, we were all at work.

That, I think, is what we could do even if we knew the runaway satellite was fast approaching us. Besides the ones that would try to flee — who I believe lack the true Mumbai spirit — the majority of people would talk about it in trains and in buses as they went to work, but would stick to routine in all other ways.

Maybe because the never-say-die spirit makes us think nothing can really touch us, or maybe because we have learnt that living in fear can be a constant state of being in this city, and thus not worth the side effects.

Maybe because, living as we do on the edge, with everything from war to HIV Aids and global warming exploding around us like mines, and the television screen and newspapers presenting us continuously with the catastrophe that the world has
become, one more threat seems immaterial and does not quite sink in.

But really, what can anybody do?

I, for one, know I will first stem the panic that rises in my stomach, then pray, then think out the possibilities.

Escape is impossible, as anyone would know, because no one knows where to run. Staying calm is the only alternative.And then the law of probability says that India is a big country, and all of it could not be hit by one measly satellite. Even meteors do not annihilate entire countries, even in the movies.

So chances are, it will fall elsewhere, maybe in some other state, city, village…God help them. The multitude of gods who have protected our land from invading hoards and foreign domination and civil unrest, and held us — despite our diversity — together, might decide to deflect the falling missile just that bit and it could fall…. No, not where you think, but harmlessly in the sea!

That, I think, is what each of us will think, as we take the train, bus or expressway to work.

Email: ssaran@dnaindia.net