Under the nuclear shadow
Arundhati Roy, Booker prize-winning author, looks at the conflict over Kashmir from her home in New Delhi

This week as diplomats' families and tourists quickly disappeared, journalists from Europe and America arrived in droves. Most of them stay at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi. Many of them call me. Why are you still here, they ask, why haven't you left the city? Isn't nuclear war a real possibility? It is, but where shall I go? If I go away and everything and every one, every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love, and who will love me back? Which society will welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan I am, here, at home?

We've decided we're all staying. We've huddled together, we realise how much we love each other and we think what a shame it would be to die now. Life's normal, only because the macabre has become normal. While we wait for rain, for football, for justice, on TV the old generals and the eager boy anchors talk of first strike and second strike capability, as though they're discussing a family board game. My friends and I discuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead bodies choking the river, the living stripped of their skin and hair, we remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of the building and we imagine ourselves like that, as stains on staircases.
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Eyeball to Eyeball, and Blinking in Denial

AS India and Pakistan, fledgling nuclear powers, edge closer to war, the rest of the world looks on aghast at a possible nuclear exchange that could kill millions of people. British and American envoys are rushing to the region in last-ditch efforts to avert catastrophe. On Friday, the United States government urged tens of thousands of Americans living in India to leave.

But here in India's capital — a plausible bull's- eye — there has been no panic. The sweltering city moves to its usual somnolent summer rhythm. At a recent seminar titled "Preparing to Survive," the subject was earthquakes and cyclones, not nuclear firestorms and radiation sickness.

And that is in large measure because India's ruling elite and many of its leading strategic thinkers are in nuclear denial.
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