It was not so in my placid hamlet of Basirhat in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal when India came of nuclear age on May 18, 1974. I was a student in the 10th standard at that time. Our house had the lone transistor set in the village and people used to come to our house and sit in the drawing-room where the set was kept. They would be there for hours, listening to news and various entertainment programmes that the Calcutta station of All India Radio dished out.

That crucial day, unfortunately, no one was around. A cultural function elsewhere had proved to be a compelling counter-magnet. So it was my father whoalone heard the news of Pokharan-I late in the evening. And we felt the tremors in our house too, as he almost jumped up in the air and solemnly proclaimed that from then on India would have the sting to bite, that we no longer needed to be afraid of China or Pakistan.

My father migrated to India from Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, in 1967. He was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha before 1947 but later on, as he chose to stay back in his ancestral house in Satkhira town of Khulna district in East Pakistan, he severed all relations with the outfit for fear of persecution. He could not evade it ultimately, of course, not so much for his links with the Mahasabha but on false charges of espionage. A criminal lawyer in Satkhira Court, he was loved by the local populace, comprising mostly Muslim landless labourers, for his philanthropic work. My mother recollects how, after returning from court in the afternoon, he would go on a visit, with bags full of rice and daal, to the area where these poor people lived. Hewould meet the villagers and learn about their needs at first hand.

But these acts of benevolence, which many upper middle class and rich Hindus used to perform as a matter of course, did not prevent General Ayub Khan, then President of Pakistan (whom my father met once in our town), from branding them anti-nationals and throwing them behind bars during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. But more pathetic was the fact that even before my father's arrest my mother, revered by people for her benevolence and kind-heartedness, was thrown behind bars along with two little sisters and a brother of mine.

My purpose is not to spew vitriol against the Pakistani establishment of General Ayub Khan's day but to depict the repercussions that the first Pokharan blast triggered in our placid village on May 19, 1974. As we woke up to the news of the blast, there was widespread euphoria in our village, which had a dominant Muslim population. There was a `we-can-also-do-it' message writ large on everybody's face. Village folk huddledtogether in orchards, on the bathing ghats of ponds, in the drawing rooms of people's houses, and got into animated discussion about the fallout of the blasts. ``Now America will attack us,'' declared the village pedagogue, with a grim face. ``Don't worry,'' assured an elderly schoolteacher. ``We have Russia with us.'' Even the village belles, normally nonplussed about what is happening in the country, wore jubilant expressions and their gossip sessions at the village playground lingered on beyond the usual 6 p.m. deadline without anybody caring to notice.

But amidst all this euphoria and ecstasy, it was my mother who expressed a note of dissent: ``Can these blasts feed the beggars in our village?''No one had an answer.