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January 13, 2114
(New Delhi) In the pre-dawn hours yesterday, just as cab drivers and street sweepers were beginning to stir, the darkened city became the white-hot center of the sun. In that flash, hundreds of thousands of lives were extinguished. Pakistan, striking from a border station South of Lahore, sent a single nuclear warhead into the city yesterday morning. The blast radius extended out as far as the holy Buddhist city of Sarnath, though for people at the perimeter, death came more slowly.
This is the fourth nuclear attack in as many years, but Pakistan’s first. The explosion leveled the old city along the holy Ganges River, and shock waves laid waste to much of the central core. Within several minutes of the blast, Indian officials were estimating a death count of 500,000, and the Indian Army was mobilized to attend to those who might have survived the initial explosion. There is only a short window for treatment before radiation poisoning becomes fatal. Even those who survive the initial exposure have shortened lives complicated by many health problems, including virulent strains of cancer.
This is the latest atrocity in a war that has simmered for more than four decades. The office of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawab Ali Iqbal released a statement moments after the attack citing retaliation for recent incursions into Faisalabad. India, which has been pushing deeper into Pakistan in search of water from the Chenab River, had no immediate comment. India has become increasingly desperate following the Chinese decision to dam the Bhramaputra River, and has consequently stepped up ground wars in search of water. After reaching a population of 1.6 billion in the 2050s, India’s population has slowly dwindled, a consequence of the famine brought around by drought and water privation. It now stands at 750 million, a point it last reached in 1990.
Varanasi, one of the old cities in the world, has long been a sore spot in Muslim-Hindu relations. It offers no strategic importance, so the attack can be seen in purely symbolic terms. Hindus regard the city as their religion’s most sacred, and humans have lived on the spot for well over 3,000 years. According to tradition, those with the good fortune to die on the banks of the Ganges in this ancient city receive immediate moksha, or liberation. But no one here is talking about good fortune today.
As night descends on the chilly Gangetic Plain tonight, India must contend with the loss of her most holy city. As war drags on in the North and the endless famines leave the air above the plains choked with dust, it is yet one more horror for the country to absorb.
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