As time and the city frame the sociology of the drama, the protagonists set the terms of combat. Terrorism is an electronic cybernetic war where one man can immobilise the network called the city. Our terrorist spreads out his wares on a table, opens a flask, nibbles at a sandwich cut delectably by some caring wife.

The commissioner is an orchestrator who has to assemble a team to fight the odds. The ordinarily competent or the mundanely good won’t do. You need sadists who believe in interrogation, professionals who kill as a reflex. As he assembles the team, vignettes of the city get played out. One realises in a quietly underplayed way, the city; its wharfs, markets, crowded flats, bustling crowds is the real hero of the terror movie. The drama of its normalcy will eventually exhaust and encompass the melodrama of terror.

Meanwhile the other characters acquire a thickness of their own. There is a cop, a suspended misfit, who is a specialist in physical torture, played by Jimmy Shergill. There is the Chief Minister who is made to realise that fighting terrorism is a no holds barred affair. Media creeps in as a third term in the guise of a UTV correspondent, ever in the search for news. Media makes news but news makes the media and media is always seduced by terror as news. It is the ultimate melodrama. Shah phones a TV correspondent offering her the story of a life time. By then the commissioner has assembled the four terrorists Shah demands and two specially trained cops drive them to the airport. The message is subtle. Terrorism always shows that mere professionalism can’t combat terror. Terror eventually meets its match in the unorthodox individual.

... contd.