PART NINE: The Departure or the Denouement: November 28, 2008 - 3:15 a.m.

My mother has an Apple-skull chihuahua named Coco. Actually, Coco was the name I gave her when we bought her in late 1993, and while I was studying for the bar exam in New Orleans in the summer of 1994, Coco became the first pet in our family to fly -- in her case, to Kennedy Airport. As soon as she arrived at my mother's apartment on Ocean Parkway, where White Castle hamburgers and barbecued chicken became her introduction to local cuisine, Coco adopted my mother, or vice versa, and ever since, Coco has been my mother's dog.

The last dream I had, sometime after midnight on Thanksgiving night, was about Coco. A veterinarian had just diagnosed Coco with incurable brain cancer. Within a short time, she would lose her ability to understand words and would begin to get vicious. She would then develop convulsions which could be expected to become more and more debilitating. In the midst of one of these attacks, we could expect to lose her, he gravely added, unless we wished to do the merciful thing and end it all.

At this point, my mother began wailing and shook her head. The doctor, mistaking the shaking of her head for assent, went behind a curtain. I heard a shovel hit the ground. My mother wanted to hold the dog, and a Pakistani or Bengali man walked out of the back saying it's too late, we had to do it fast, that's the only way because it's contagious. I screamed out, "What have you done, you animal?" and went behind the curtain to look at Coco lying in a pool of her own blood, which, I remarked in silence, was orange.

I woke up in a cold sweat. The comforter was on the floor, and the corner of the top sheet that remained on my body was damp and wrinkled.

I called the front desk to make sure that a hotel car would be ready to take me to the airport at 3:30 a.m. The flight was scheduled to leave at 6:45, but I wanted to leave plenty of time for police checkpoints. Did they think this was enough time. Yes, there won't be any problem, that should be fine. Could they ensure that the driver was a hotel employee and not some private contractor? Yes, he was man of confidence, one who had been with the Intercontinental for years. I crawled under the comforter and began flipping among news reports again.

At 3:15 a.m., I went to the lobby, paid my bill for the two nights (Rs. 45,000, just shy of $940), and was escorted by the reception staff into the car. I remember looking at the driver's nametag and saw that he was not a Muslim, which made me nervous. I told him not to stop for anyone except a uniformed policeman and to shoot through every red light because I wanted to get into the airport as quickly as possible. In the airport, I thought to myself, I will be safe.

I need not have said a word. The twenty-odd kilometers between Marine Drive and the airport normally take an hour and a half to cover; in one of my previous visits to Mumbai, when I arrived during the morning rush hour, it had actually taken me more time to get to my hotel than to fly from Dubai. It was now the middle of the night. Not a soul. And the police checkpoints about which they spoke on the news? Where were they? This was the Western Highway, for God's sake, the only way of entering or exiting Mumbai. I saw not a single cop, not a single police vehicle. We cruised through every red light without slowing down or rolling to a stop because no cars were on the road. As we passed Worli (where the Ganesh temple and the new Four Seasons Hotel are located) and entered the old Muslim district of Mahim, the number of people sleeping on cardboard on the pavements grew. There was one block, I remember, which looked like an open-air ward in a public hospital. But, no police, no security, nowhere. The entire trip took thirty-five minutes, and the first time we were stopped by law enforcement was when we entered the precincts of the airport. I remembered that the sight of their fatigues and the machine guns slung over their shoulders comforted me.

The airport was jammed with passengers, bursting at the seams, in fact. A normal night at Mumbai Airport. In the business class lounge, passengers bound for Japan were asleep in front of a television playing exactly the same news reports I had seen as I drifted in and out of sleep in Room 435 of the Intercontinental on Marine Drive. One of them snored loudly.

I poured myself a vodka and tonic and continued listening to the news, half expecting that my flight would be cancelled because the incoming flight itself had been suspended. But it was a normal dawn at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai. I called my mother and brother and told them I was waiting for my flight back to Muscat.

They didn't mention Thanksgiving, and neither did I. Nor have we spoken about it since.