In most of the dystopian stories I have read, it gets totalitarian in the long run. In some cases, society falls into anarchy. There is no going back from it. I think of them. Along with them, my thoughts wander off to the various end-of-the-world movies that I have seen. Train to Busan comes to my mind, a zombie movie. It sends a small shiver down my spine. I shrug it off quickly. The last thing I should be worrying about is zombies.

The Indian coffee house from where we were supposed to have our breakfast is a couple of shops away. I hop on the scooter and ride towards it. I am on the wrong side of the road. Normally I wouldn’t have done this. If I had to do something of this sort, my conscience would have been hurt. I would be doing it cursing myself under my breath. I just hate it. I would rather prefer going around, getting stuck in a signal for a minute, taking a u-turn, and then approaching the shop from the correct direction. It kind of applies to parking too. Whenever I park my car, I make sure that I have parked it inside the line in such a way that it will not cause any inconvenience to anyone else. I am very particular about it. I will take time to get it right. Only then will I get out of the car with a feeling of satisfaction. Even then there would be some situations where I would have to ignore it. Ignoring is the hard part. I will have to distract myself from it to get it off my head. It also makes me feel irked when I see someone parking their car in an uncomfortable way. I always feel that we need to think of others when we do certain things. Our actions should not cause any kind of harm or discomfort to others. This has been one of the principles I have stuck to my entire life. It is going to stay on for sure. My attitude revolves around it to a very good extent and so it would be very difficult for me to change it. The change can only happen if something of a large magnitude happens that compels me to see it from a very different perspective, thereby forcing me to make amendments.

Since there is no one on the road, or in the surroundings, I take the wrong side and drive towards the restaurant. It is closed. It opens at seven - that is what is written in the timings. But today the shutters are down. The adjacent shops are closed too. It is nearing nine. I am starting to feel a bit hungry. I haven’t felt the need to take a dump yet. It’s a part of my daily routine. But I don't give it much thought. I could use a cup of tea though.

Mornings we have tea. Most of the days I make it. She makes it when I am late to get up from bed or when I have to rush to the washroom having kept the milk to boil. She adds some cardamom to it, giving it a good flavor. I love it. I don't put it though.

I want to make a good sulaimani tea one day. I was floored by it when I visited my father's friend's house for dinner. They served us mutton biriyani. It was utterly delicious. Aunty brought us the tea after our meal. We had to retreat to the sofa. I was feeling full to the brim, so I was reluctant to take it. She persisted to take it saying I would feel better. I took it. It was sweet and soothing. Also, I felt better. The fullness of my stomach was gone. I don't like that feeling at all. Because of that I always avoid filling myself to the full. But the biriyani was really amazing. Honestly, I didn’t realize that I had gorged down heavily. The tea helped my stomach to relax.

I asked Aunty for the recipe. She said there was nothing special in it, just some spices and a squeeze of lemon juice. That's it. I remembered it for a while. Last Tuesday I wanted to have a sulaimani tea. I tried to recollect the recipe but in vain. I had to resort to YouTube to find a recipe that was kind of similar to hers. A few of the ingredients came back to me as I was browsing through the videos. I finally zeroed in on one of them and executed it. It came out well. Anna was doing night duty. I told her that I had finally figured out how to make sulaimani tea. She congratulated me and said she would taste it when she gets back home. Before calling it a night I tasted the tea. It had lost its charm and flavor. I threw it out. I decided to make it fresh when she came. But she was in a hurry to get back when she arrived in the morning. So I couldn’t make it. She never got to taste it.

In the evenings we have filter coffee. When I first moved into our house in Trivandrum, we drank instant coffee. She had brought a packet of locally roasted coffee powder. It was ideal to make black coffee. We used to consume it more often. After a week her stomach started getting upset. It took us a few days to zero in on the reason - the black coffee. We decided to cut it off. But we were still in needy of a good cup of coffee. We were going to our hometown that weekend. When we are at my home I was reminded of the filter coffee set I had bought from Madras. I asked my mother for it. She found it after some searching. We took it along with us.

Now we had to find a good filter coffee powder. I didn’t know that the coffee powder used in it had to be of certain grind and coarseness. I used the finely ground local coffee powder we had. It didn’t produce the desired result. Because of its extreme fineness, the hot water just seeped out through the compartment without extracting anything from the powder. Hot water with a very slight coffee taste was the result. The next week, we went to the supermarket and bought two powders in the hope of any one of them working out. The first one we opened worked out beautifully. We have been using it ever since.

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Our evening coffee time is a bit late. It gets pushed to six, mostly beyond that. This is because she comes back from her duty after three in the noon. We have our lunch together on most days and then take a nap. By the time we wake up, the sun has set. It would be nearing seven. I get up and head to the kitchen to boil the milk and prepare the concoction. By the time the coffee is ready, she would be up. Somedays we don't feel sleepy. We lie down and watch something on Netflix. But we get bored soon. I then go and make coffee for us. We take it to the balcony, stand there, watch the sky turn red and gorgeous, and sip on it. I have a close friend who is a big coffee aficionado. She found an equally crazy coffee lover in her partner. They go about tasting coffee and clicking pictures. They are more into black coffee. A conversation on coffee with them will lead you deep into the intricacies that go into making coffee. I am a casual coffee lover. I love to try them out wherever I go.

There is a police station nearby. I decide to go there. I turn my ride and race past the signal, onto the road that leads to the airport. I take the right fork at the next intersection.

I am in front of the police station. The police jeep is parked inside the compound. There is no activity going on inside. I park the scooter just beside the gate and walk inside. I take a peep inside the jeep through the front door. The radio is off. I decided to fiddle with it later on.

As I enter the station there is a desk with a register on it. I go through it. The last entry was at nine fifteen the previous night. A mobile phone lies on the desk. I pick it up. No network. I walk in through the corridor. On either side are two rooms. One of them belongs to the SI. The other is a common room. The right corner has the cell. I peer into all of these rooms. They are absolutely empty. Some of the desks have mobile phones on them. I pick them up and check for networks. By now I have come across all the networks we have here. None of them are functioning. Still, I pick them up in a hope that I cannot explain. There is a walkie-talkie on one of the desks. I pick it up. I switch it on by turning on the volume knob. I hear the click sound when it turns on, followed by the low static. I click and talk into it.

‘Hello! Hello! Can anybody hear me? Hello! Hello? If anyone can hear me please respond.’

I wait for a while. No response. I press some of the buttons that are on the side. They give off different sounds. I don't know what their purpose is. I stop pressing them. The channel is set to 5. I don't change it. This must be the channel the police would use to communicate within themselves. If that is the case then I must stick to it.

I decide to pocket it. It can come in handy. I look for the charger. I find it in one corner of the opposite room. I take it out from the plug, wrap the cord around the charging dock and walk out of the station. Before I walk out, I take a minute to stop by the front desk. In the open register, I write down that I was here and if they want to contact me then they should call me on these numbers. I write down my two numbers and my wife's phone number. As I write this I ponder the case of the phone networks not coming up. In that situation, the radio being independent of it will work. I write down the radio channel to contact me. The police working here would know it. Still, I write it across the length of the register in big letters. I want to make it as conspicuous as possible.

I walk out towards the jeep. I open the door and sit in. I switch on the transmitter. It doesn't turn on. I need to turn on the jeep. I look for the keys in the ignition. It is empty. I run into the station and look for the key. After a couple of minutes, I find it hanging with a bunch of other keys on one of the walls in the common room. I take it out and get back to the jeep.

I open the driver's door and jump in. I put the key on and turn it on. The transmitter turns on with a crackle. I turn on the volume and sit in anxiousness.

Once I had to go to an offshore installation as part of a project we had been assigned on short notice. It was a very new experience for me. I had no clue as to how it would turn out. We were taken in a chopper to the installation. It was nearly a hundred kilometers away from the shore. We were told there wouldn't be any network available. Our phones were dead.

The majority of the communication out on the sea is through the radio. There is a common channel through which all communication takes place. You switch channels when you want to talk in private without the whole community knowing it. Even in my workplace when there was some work going on in different parts of the installation, we used walkie-talkies to communicate amongst ourselves. Having used it there, I have a basic idea of how radio communication works and how to use it. It was a novel experience.

After the offshore project, we had a project the next year in which the client provided us with radios for communication in the field. It proved to be a very neat way of communicating with each other. Since it uses radio waves to transmit messages through the atmosphere, one is totally free of networks and their drawbacks. It was also a great mode for transmitting a message to everyone. When I sent the message through the walkie talkie I sent it out to everyone who was on that channel at that moment. It is as if you have sent a message out into the sky for everyone to see and respond to. In that way radios are versatile.

I take out the walkie-talkie from my pocket and switch it on. It is in the same channel as the transmitter in the jeep. I press and say hello. I hear my voice coming out from the receiver in the car. This brought a small smile to my face. The radio is working. I had got my hands on a medium of communication. I smile at myself and stare into the distance.