It was around 5 the next morning that I woke up to a hissing of the wind. It was no light hiss; rather, a mean shrill. At first, I thought I was dreaming. But I wasn't. Trees were being hurled right outside my hotel room window. There was a storm-like feel but even I hadn't imagined the destruction that lay ahead. Winds at a speed of about 270 kmph were ripping through the carefully laid-out gardens at the Oberoi: there was not a single tree standing erect. They were slowly falling, succumbing to the onslaught of this treacherous cyclone. It never stopped. The pounding continued unabated. There was a fury in the air which one had never seen before. On our part, every hotel guest was too much in a stupor to realise what was still to come. It was a cyclone which was to die down in a couple of hours: instead, it intensified at noon. Flights were then cancelled. I called home and office several times. I kept reassuring my family that we were safe. But were we? I was to see later the destruction around me. Friday went by with each of us quivering under the might of this unrelenting cyclone. It stopped not once, lashing rain with every cycle. It was Nature at her possible worst. The Oberoi continued to function but the cracks could no longer be hidden: the pool doors cracked, trees shed all their coconuts and flung them into the pool. There was not a tree or bush left standing. The general manager's Cielo was now parked under a huge tree. When we sat down for dinner on Friday night, I couldn't eat. I had to be in Delhi on Saturday: I had invited people over for a house-warming party and here I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. But nothing had prepared me for the day after. On Saturday morning, I forced the hotel to ferry me to yet another hotel where, ostensibly, the phones were working. We travelled a distance of 3 km in about an hour-and-a-half only to find that there too phones were dead. It was then that I decided to hazard a risk: I went off to the airport. But there was no airport left, certainly not as we know them to be. The airfield was in waist-high water. Step ladders were strewn around like unwanted fruits from a tree.