03:02 Read Free Page B

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 few 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