Manil Suri - The City of Devi

She stares at my numbers. “It’s actually 0.3 and 0.06 percent. You made an arithmetic mistake.” She starts to show me all the people she’s saved, then puts the paper down. We both know there’s no way around the sickening magnitudes still represented by these decimals; the horror of all those burnt and twisted bodies cannot be juggled away.

ON HAZE-FREE NIGHTS when Sarita doesn’t need my ministrations, I descend to Vincent’s candlelit communications center in the basement. He has cannibalized the hand-cranked radio, along with various other pieces of equipment (some “borrowed” from the Diu airport) to construct a transceiver set. “Almost as good as the ham radio I had, before the power surges blew it out.” Wires leading outside can be connected to different antenna configurations laid out in the garden (his “aerial farm,” he calls it)—for nighttime hours, he finds the swastika shape works best. The family has dedicated the diesel generator, with its precious remaining supply of fuel, to his communications experiments.

With his enhanced setup, Vincent manages to put together a much clearer picture of what lies beyond Diu’s shores. The two-way communication allows him to quiz operators to test their genuineness. “What numbers do you see on the large sign at the end of the runway?” he grills someone claiming to be at Delhi airport, and they promptly go off the air. “From where did you say you viewed the bomb fall on Hyderabad, old man?” he asks VU2ARF, who confesses he only heard it thirdhand.

He succeeds in contacting not one, but two hams in Lahore, and they both talk about recently returning from the countryside. “Not just here and Rawalpindi, but also the other cities. People are still trickling back, after fleeing the Indian nuclear threat.” The modus operandi of the warnings sounds exactly the same—swamping of the internet, followed by a deluge of calls on mobiles. “But what your savages did to Karachi—who imagined anyone would actually go through with it?”

Mumbai remains resistant to revealing its fate. Vincent still hasn’t been able to find anyone transmitting while physically in the city. The most persistent rumors claim a warhead was indeed launched by the Pakistanis, but hampered by some sort of malfunction—the device detonated either too high in the atmosphere, or several kilometers off course. If so, the most severe destruction may have occurred within a smaller radius, the fallout leaving Mumbai virtually uncontaminated. Some of the airwave chatter sounds clearly wishful: the Devi has saved her city, the missile has fallen harmlessly into the sea, the Hindus have reconciled with the Muslims, even the cracks along the shoreline have begun to heal. More apocalyptic assertions, of shockwaves liquefying reclaimed land to plunge large sections of the city into the sea, appear just as spurious. Nobody can provide a plausible explanation as to why India and Pakistan each stopped at exactly one target instead of throwing their all into the melee.

Except, that is, for G6AQR—“Mr. Cheerio,” as Vincent calls him. “He must have an encyclopedia just on Diu right next to him. Dozens of questions—about street intersections, museum idols, even the number of cannons at the fort, to check on me. I’ve never seen a ham so suspicious—all to confirm I wasn’t some other nationality.”

To Vincent’s chagrin, Mr. Cheerio refuses to reciprocate. “He claims to be a former BBC broadcaster, says it’s too dangerous to announce where he’s located. For all I know, he could be a jihadi hatching a terrorist plot from somewhere in Iran or Yemen.”

What Mr. Cheerio does share is news about the rest of the world. The most serious loss of life, wide swathes of it, has resulted from nuclear plant explosions. “Two confirmed reactors in each of Canada and France—a near-affirmative on at least a dozen more.” The cyber viruses have ravaged the more computerized countries of the globe, incinerating power lines, transformers, anything plugged in, down to kitchen blenders and laptops. “They say the plague was bad, but this epidemic is worse. Enormous electric surges in alternating directions—that’s how the basic strains work. No easy way to repair the grid—things will continue like this for months.”

Mr. Cheerio does have some cheerier news, however. “Don’t believe all those lids babbling about EMPs—or for that matter, tsunamis or earthquakes or locusts. As for the terrorism, it’s pretty much faded. Dirty bombs have become superfluous, the jihadis retreated to their caves.”

He’s philosophical about the India-Pakistan exchange. “It was time. Too much tension had built up. Not just in your corner, but the world over. For quite long, the mere prospect was deterrence enough. But eventually the memory fades, there arises the need to see and smell and taste blood.” He points out that the bombings immediately cut off combat not only between the two countries, but across the globe. “It stopped World War III in its tracks—hopefully, for at least a few decades to come. Even the civil war insurgents in Pakistan have forgotten what they were fighting for.”

So far, although we can’t verify any of his claims, Mr. Cheerio has spoken in the measured, authoritative voice of a seer, an oracle. But now he starts spouting a mess of allegations, for which he freely admits he has little or no evidence. “It all comes down to the Chinese—not just the computer viruses but also the scare of October nineteenth. Operations meant to blow off steam, kick up the sand, take their rivals down a few notches.” He believes it had to be the Youth Democratic League. “They recently executed all the group’s hothead leaders according to my Hong Kong old man. It might be a while before they go the liberalization route again—democracy isn’t for the fainthearted.”

Like a conspiracy theory buff, Mr. Cheerio has an answer for everything, even for the facts that don’t quite fit comfortably. Since jihadis appear to have been involved, the young Chinese renegades had doubtlessly forged links with Islamic terrorists. The September 11 anniversary date must have been chosen, quite plainly, to draw suspicion away. He believes the Chinese had been funneling in support to both the HRM and the Limbus to keep India in a state of ferment. “Maybe even with their government’s blessing. At least until things spun out of control, until the nukes got wheeled out and the viruses went crazy.”

At first, my inclination is to dismiss everything—Mr. Cheerio seems to suffer from a particularly virulent case of Yellow Peril Fever. But then I start wondering. Ascribing sophisticated cyber sabotage techniques to jihadi organizations like Al Qaeda always seemed a stretch. And the communiqués that contained such accurate information of attacks coordinated with Pakistan—who else but the Chinese could supply such details? Come to think of it, didn’t Rahim mention something about Chinese guests visiting his guesthouse? And weren’t there reports that when the Indica faced bankruptcy, a Chinese company had saved it? Could they be the puppeteers who forbade its bombing, the protectors Sarahan refused to name?

“Let me tell you how I think the nuclear exchange played out. The Chinese must have owned up when they realized how far their pit bulls’ juvenile scare had gone. Egg on their face, it’s true, but they hardly would want to actually blow up either India or Pakistan. Unfortunately, even a warning issued well in advance would have trouble trickling down through all the communication breakdowns. Who knows what Pakistani general, blinded by the fog of war, triggered that one errant bomb?

“Of course the missile partially malfunctioned—I’m still trying to verify what happened and how. But could the Indians believe it inadvertent, even if the Pakistanis themselves sent an apology before it came down? There was good proof it was an accident: instead of the multiple warheads trained on Mumbai, Islamabad had made only a single launch. The Indians retaliated, as they must—they bombarded Karachi with four to Pakistan’s one. Not just to ensure against malfunction, but to warn against further escalation, to punish for the insult.