The stack of tens—more than 600 rupees—Frank Muller had dropped on my desk the night before, would cover the cost, so after my breakfast with Harlan, I approached Akshay at the reception desk and asked for a room. Once I’d shared my passport with him, he handed me a key. Ten minutes later, I was showering in room 915. This wasn’t the bucket bath I was becoming used to in my Sagar Darshan place, but a real shower. Hot water.

By seven thirty, the phones and electricity were working again. I tried calling Frank Muller at his flat, but the connection didn’t go through. Hardly unusual in Bombay on any average day. From the window, I could see people and cars on the marg below, the one that intersected with Cuffe Parade Road. The television was broadcasting nothing but the test signal. That was no surprise, of course. Programming aired only in the evening. And there was just the one channel, Doordarshan, which was run by the state.

I tried the radio instead. Jackpot. At 8:00 a.m., Mrs. Gandhi herself came on All-India Radio to address the nation. She gave a brief statement, in Hindi, then in English, intended to reassure the populace.

“There is nothing to panic about,” she said, then justified the Emergency—capital E now, I figured—as necessary to protect the country from threats to its stability. She concluded her address with a plea for cooperation and trust in the days ahead.

And that was it. Everything was going to be fine. For Mother India and, I assumed, for Mrs. Gandhi.

I dressed and ventured down to the street where I found a black-and-yellow taxi to take me to work. It was after nine, and the office was humming. Our reporters were all present. The stringer—Flaherty—who’d first told me about Willy Smets’s parties was chatting with Yusuf “Joey” Rahman, an Indian-Canadian who’d returned to the old country to find a wife and never left. He was still single, by the way, living with his grandparents in Mandvi. Herbie Reichel was a veteran American journalist who’d earned his stripes writing for—coincidentally enough—Stars and Stripes during World War II. He’d served in the CBI Theater during the war, met an Anglo-Indian girl, and got married. He’d been in Bombay ever since. He was planning on retiring soon.

The telex rattled as messages arrived in bursts every thirty seconds or so. Frank was pacing in his cabin, reading a newspaper and puffing on yet another Chesterfield. Where did he find those in India, anyway?

I tapped on his door. When he saw me, he nearly swallowed his cigarette and threw the special edition of The Indian Herald he was reading to the floor.

“What are you doing here?” he bellowed. “Why the fuck aren’t you in Delhi covering this?”