We all watched as Anoop got up and unbuttoned his shirt, preened a little, then unzipped his pants. His chest was dark and shiny with sweaty whorls, thick hair covered his legs. Uma had complained once that he perspired a lot, had made me blush with talk of his sweat rubbing off on her thighs in bed.
Karun was slow to follow. He felt shy, I could tell, taking his clothes off in front of us. We were embarrassed as well and looked away, my mother and Uma and I. From the corner of my eye I watched him begin to pull his shirt off, waiting for the instant it covered his face. This was my cue to inspect his body, appraise any muscle he might have on his ribs, follow the line of chest hair snaking down to his thin waist. He worked the shirt free from his head, and I quickly averted my gaze, but not before catching Uma do the same.
He hesitated so long over his pants that I thought he might wear them into the water. Finally, satisfied that none of our gazes were on him, he began to undo his belt, fumble with the buttons at his waist.
I’m not sure why I did what I did. “Are those eyes in your skull or motor headlights?” my mother reprimanded me later. Perhaps it was all the times I had been through this, the number of boys to whom I had been displayed. Always told to lower my head, to never let them see the whites of my eyes. Maybe it was the novels I read—the racier Mills & Boon romances of late, Danielle Steel instructing me on international sex and sin. Uma claimed it was her dogged exhortations finally having effect, her years of summons to my killer instinct. I felt it awaken deep inside me that day—the urge to rebel, determine destiny myself.
So I looked. I stared. I caught Karun with his pants midway down his groin and studied his embarrassment with interest. He lowered his eyes at once and tried to pull his pelvis free. The red of his swimsuit shorts spilled out violently from the sheath of his trousers. He colored, he panicked, he got a foot stuck, but I didn’t turn away. I stared until my mother thrust the plates angrily at me, until his pants were fully shed.
Maybe that’s why he stayed in the water so long, to wash my stare off his body. We waited on the shore, shooing away a stray dog that kept returning, holding down the napkin-covered sandwiches so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. At last he emerged, the water dripping from his torso, his shorts a darker red and wrinkled against his skin. Anoop dried off, then slung the towel over Karun’s shoulders for him to dry himself as well. Uma offered Karun a sandwich and a paratha on a plate, which he accepted with a thanks. He talked with Anoop as he ate, he looked at Uma and my mother, but he would not catch my eye.
IT IS GETTING SO DIFFICULT to breathe that I wonder if we are all going to be asphyxiated. Are these shelters safe anyway? Wouldn’t the building collapse on us if bombed? Have we congregated in this basement simply for efficiency, because it would take only a single hit to bury us all?
Of course, it hardly matters where we hide if the Pakistanis have decided to jump the gun. If their promised schedule is a ruse as people claim, and this is the day they drop the Big One.
“They can’t do anything—it’s all a bluff,” one of the khaki-clad men scoffs. “Forget the atom bombs, even the missiles to deliver them are probably fake. All tactics to scare us, all hoaxes.” They nod their heads in agreement and I notice they wear matching saffron-colored threads around their necks. The effect is unintentionally dandy, as if they’ve taken pains to coordinate bow ties.
“Let’s not forget they’re Muslim—they don’t have our shastras, our Vedic knowledge. To build an atom bomb, you need centuries of scientific skills.”
“Besides, we have Devi ma to protect us. Let’s see them harm even a single blade of grass on our sacred land.”
Is he mad? Has he glanced outside on this singed sacred land of his, checked its current horticultural state? Or has his almighty Devi just been napping through the attacks? As if the daily terrorist explosions weren’t enough (becoming just one more urban tribulation, like water shortages or corruption), for the past month and a half, we’ve had to contend with Pakistani air raids as well. The hollowness of his bluster must catch up, because he sobers. “It’s October fifteenth today—the nineteenth is just four days away.”
The rumors began soon after the war did, at the end of August. At first, they seemed like the usual saber rattling—hadn’t Pakistan been sporadically ballyhooing its nuclear capabilities ever since the 2002 standoff? “It happens whenever they feel the need to bolster their own self-confidence—like now,” my father said. For months, Pakistan had blustered about the unprecedented atrocities against Muslims in India, threatening military action but shying away from an actual strike. “Too bad they can’t openly trumpet their achievements—all the terrorists they’ve sent in instead.” Finally, with its prestige plummeting to humiliating depths, Pakistan was forced to ask China for help (a move the Pakistani president vigorously denied). In a flash invasion, Chinese troops poured in through the northeast frontier—just like during Nehru’s tenure in 1962, my father pointed out. Their ostensible goal this time was to claim sovereignty over a border region so obscure that even our own prime minister had trouble pronouncing its name. The Indian government lost no time miring our military in this diversionary trap, then became too concerned with loss of image to pull out when Pakistan attacked from the northwest.
Ten days into the invasion, on September 4, the UN forced a bitterly resentful and chafing China to withdraw. That very night, Uma sent me the link for the communiqués that had surfaced on the web. The first was a report from the Pakistani chief of staff to their defense minister describing the planned piggyback of their attack in conjunction with the Chinese invasion. Even I could recognize its authenticity, what with its details of the number and type of weapons used, the exact positions of deployed troops, and operational and launch times down to the second. But it was the second communiqué that had left Uma so excited. It contained an analysis of the situation after the Chinese left: since India had stronger conventional forces, nuclear retaliation would be the only option if the war continued. The attached blueprint for an attack on eight Indian cities included a range of prospective launch dates.
My parents’ next-door neighbors moved out right away, announcing an indefinite stay at their Lonavla cottage. But for the most part, despite their incendiary contents, the communiqués didn’t cause the expected alarm. Pakistan’s strenuous assertion of the documents being fakes had little to do with this, since nobody believed the claim. (Their foreign minister furnished a similar web folio detailing a purported mirror attack on Pakistan, which both The Times of India and The Indian Express dismissed as an obvious fabrication.) What kept the waters calm was the certainty that the West would simply not allow things to proceed so far. Uma even heard a rumor that the U.S. had intervened to shore up the Pakistanis after China’s departure, that the pilots and planes and unmanned drones bombing us were now American. “They’re supposed to be doing this for our own good, to even out the two sides and prevent things from getting too nuclear.”
Then, on this year’s September 11 anniversary, the unthinkable happened. Dirty bombs exploded in Zurich, followed by five other cities, including London and New York. Computer viruses began their voracious conquest of the world: blackouts stretching from Los Angeles to Moscow, thirty-seven airliners sent crashing into the Atlantic in a single hour, nuclear plant meltdowns from Texas to Canada to France. Soon, the entire West appeared to shudder and yaw—Uma texted me furiously about sieges in Turkey and Denmark, a brazen attempt to invade Spain through Morocco, retaliatory massacres all over North America and Europe. Except who could tell which reports were true, whether any of these events had really occurred? The cyber attacks had also been relentlessly knocking out news and communication sources—one afternoon, as I listened, even the BBC blinked off. Overrun by hackers and unchecked by any verification of its truthfulness, the internet went gleefully rogue (“American president assassinated,” “Half of Europe perishes in nuclear attacks,” “UN orders extermination of all Muslims”). Even these hoaxes started to fade, though, as power failures strangled off computers around the globe.