The Emergency

"DON'T BURY THEM IN THE MORNING"

IT WAS ALMOST LUNCHTIME when the school kids made a run for it. A blur of red-and-grey chequered uniforms, they were hoisted onto scooters and crammed into autos parked in the light rain outside Our Lady of Fatima Convent High School. The school, and the moss-tinged Portuguese fort it sat in, shone in the August drizzle. A wet road led down to a breach in the fort’s walls, beyond which the land swelled to a crest over a muddy river. On this side was Moti Daman, where the district’s administrative offices were sheltered within the fort’s stone ramparts. On the other side, the northern side, were Nani Daman’s liquor stores, beaches, and hotels. Together, these two halves formed the tranquil seaside town of Daman, held fast by the town’s only bridge, a workaday construction 20 years old.

Fakir Mohammad Fadra, a wiry cable-service operator with a purposeful walk, lived at the eastern end of the Nani Daman promenade. A thicket of mangroves obscured the view of the bridge from the front door of his house, but the Daman Ganga River, only feet away, he could see just fine—and on that day in the summer of 2003, the river looked swollen, as it often did when officials at the dam upstream released water. He couldn’t help keeping watch. Twice in his lifetime the river had burst its banks, forcing the town’s residents onto rooftops for airdropped supplies.

It was nearly 1.30 pm—time for his four children and four nieces to return from school to the home he shared with the families of his brother and sister. The Fadras were old faces in the small town of 36,000; Daman knew Fadra as ‘Baba’, and after all this time, it recognised him by no other name. (“Fakir who? Oh, Baba!”) Residents on both sides of the river subscribed to his cable television service. He had lately begun to feel that goons had overrun the trade, and had hired a hefty young man to help him run the service—the muscle to Fadra’s lean frame. The previous year, his father, Captain Nizamuddin Fadra, had died from prostate cancer after a long and rich life lived mostly on the sea. Towards the end, the captain told his wife to make sure she looked after their 14-year-old granddaughter Tafsir, one of Fadra’s daughters, whom they both adored.