Subir Roy: The mother of all crashes

OFFBEAT

I woke up in a cold sweat and so shook the bed that it made the wife awake up too. As I slowly recovered my breath, she asked commiseratingly if I had just had a nightmare. Yes, I nodded, and added that it was not funny at all. Nightmares are never funny, she agreed soothingly.

After a few minutes when I showed no sign of trying to go back to sleep, she had no option but to ask me what it was all about. It took me all my effort to put in words the horrific image that I had seen so graphically before me and eventually all I could manage was the words, it has crashed, and wave my hand to indicate the room and house we were in. Now, my wife's irritation turned to slight concern. What has crashed, this building is fine, there has been no earthquake or whatever, she said.

There was no point in trying to convince her with the graphic details that I had just seen with my own eyes "" dreams shattered, castles suddenly turning into figments of imagination constructed in thin air, people running in all direction out of their offices, the devastation writ large on every face. So all I could do was to lie down again, not to go back to sleep but to simply avoid my wife's questioning.

The hours to dawn passed somehow and then there was the agonising wait for the morning's papers. No, they didn't report the earthshaking crash, the way they had reported the devastation in Kutch. But I had seen it with my own eyes! I became like the chief protagonist of that indifferent movie who could see calamities coming, would run to warn the victims, get thrown out for being daft and then have the sickening experience of seeing the calamity he had foretold happen.

I had to tell somebody but had to make sure that he would not get an immediate heart attack or be the thin end of an expanding torrent of panic.

So all I could do was to call up my lifelong friend, with whom I have been through a lot, in and out of trouble, from college days.

I took him to the loneliest restaurant I could find and whispered to him the details of my nightmare. It was as if he had seen a ghost. You actually saw all this, he asked. When I nodded, he shook his head held between his hands and said, oh god I wish you had seen the stock market crash.

That is chicken feed, I said, we have seen it so many times. You recover from those but what will happen to all the peoples' dreams, their confidence, the economy, how will we as a nation remain on the road to becoming the latest Asian Tiger?

My friend nodded and added that it would surely make him homeless, for his new home would crash before it was built and the bank would send the debt recovery tribunal after him. He would be hoist with his own leveraged petard. All he could say was, don't even mention this to anybody; we can take everything in our stride "" plague, tsunami or what have you, but not a property market crash!