On a routine day in a mall, while browsing for gifts for a friend, I heard shots..or crackers. It is hard to tell the difference but considering the world we live in, the mind begins to replay inexplicable campus and mall shootings, 26/11, stories of people running for their lives in the middle of a suddenly bloody railway station, a hotel lobby on fire. That can’t happen here, I tell myself and keep walking around the store where women are choosing crockery, shop assistants are talking gently and life seems to be a gift wrapped up in glossy forever that you can open and enjoy at leisure.
**
And then two young girls rush in through the glass doors..panic written all over their faces. They gasp, “The security guard is down..someone is shooting down there!” They rush into the aisle I am in and gesticulate wildly. I remember asking them, “What happened, what did you see?” But the answer is incoherent. It is just fear I hear.
**
I open the door to a toilet and gesture to them. They rush in. We lock the main door. My first thought is of gratitude that my son is not with me. And that we found a safe place. There is no fear though. Death does not worry me much. It has a finality. It is life and its unpredictable turns that niggle. I can’t make calls from my phone but I tell one of the girls to call the police control room. She does but can’t talk so I do on her behalf.
**
The woman on the other end hears me out and asks,”but where is the mall?” Again and again. Though I have told her the name of the mall and the location thrice. I throw up my hands and the girl takes over and pleads for help to be sent as soon as possible and then shakes her head at me, “I don’t think that woman will send anyone.” We discuss who she can call next while the other girl, now bunched up in a corner, begins to text and pray in between shivers. Soon the braver of the two, now much calmer begins to call some loved one while I wonder if we did the right thing by shutting ourselves in.
**
What if someone else is also looking for a safe place? There is a knock on the door and the shivering girl pleads, “please..please don’t open!” I hear a woman’s voice. Maybe she is trying to get in and I open it just a bit. There is a sales assistant outside and I hear her say, “Madam..please come out, it was a mock drill.” I come out and the other two girls do too but they are still dazed and confused. Panic has got to one of them and she is almost crying, asking to be taken home. The two girls leave and the whole store is dark as I get my gift wrapped in a pretty paper. The cashier grins, “Madam, don’t be afraid…there are going to be commandos in the store now.” In a scene lifted straight from a surreal video game, about ten men dressed as commandos walk in and begin to move in a stealthy configuration.
**
The cashier whispers, “We are learning how we will react if a terrorist attack really happens.” His colleague takes pictures of the ‘commandos’ with his camera. I walk out from the store. Spectators and store managers from the entire floor are gathered in one place. On the ground floor,someone is making coffee behind a counter. The floor is being swept. I wonder if life and death too are just a mock drills for something better. I wonder, if none of this is actually real. All the drama. All the fear. If the real gift is somewhere else, waiting to be unwrapped.
with
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.