The sound of the siren would terrify the socks off my little, three-year-old self. This is my earliest conscious memory of fear.

On summer evenings, in a cantonment in northwest India, following the siren, a military truck would trundle past our home and expel giant fumes of white smoke from the banned mosquito pesticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT that would blur lawns and hedges, blow past the tall pink sweet peas, the cane gate, the wooden trellises, and make the faces of my caretakers disappear.

This obscuring of the familiar was too much for my small nervous system. My parents would soothe me, my face streaked with tears, red from screaming. All would be better when the alarms faded, the van rolled out of view and the fog scattered.

A few years later, in a different cantonment – cooler climes, no mosquitoes – when news of child kidnappings started to crop up, my mother ordered my brother and I: If anyone comes up to you at the playground and says, your mother is calling you, walk away, go join your friends, run home, do you understand? Do not get into the car. Do not take toffees. Run. Have you understood?

That was silent paralysing fear accompanying us on our brisk walks back home every day.

Grown up fears took still different shapes. More than a decade later, one evening after waiting by the road in a residential colony for friends to pick me up at an agreed time, I absently, stupidly, in the dark, got into the wrong car, one that had slowed near me, and one that I mistook to be my friends’.

I got in to the left rear seat and for mere seconds, sat among three unfamiliar grinning men – who may perhaps have been as stunned as I. On glancing at their faces and recognising my blunder, in what is known as the rape capital of the world, and before the driver accelerated, I yanked the door handle and fled.

That is silent, sweating panic over scenarios of what-if.

When my heart stilled and I subsequently entered the right car with the right people, I didn’t voice what had happened. My narrow escape was mine to shudder at – no shrieks, no cries, no silent gratitude either, two decades belatedly, for a wailing siren that performed at least the courtesy of announcing when terror was headed our way.