What if the Moon disappeared?

It happened on Kojagiri Purnima, the full Moon when Anaya's whole lane stayed up drinking saffron milk on the rooftops. One moment the Moon hung over the harbour like a lamp. The next, it was gone. No explosion, no flash. Just a darker sky and a hundred people shouting at once.

By the next night, the stars over Mumbai were brighter than Anaya had ever seen them. Her grandfather, who had fished these waters for sixty years, didn't look at the stars. He looked at the sea.

The tides were wrong. The water still rose and fell twice a day, because the Sun pulls on the oceans too, but the Sun's pull was less than half the Moon's. High tide crept up instead of flooding in. The great spring tides that used to sweep the mangrove creeks barely reached the roots.

Boats that had always floated out on the morning tide sat in the mud. Fish that fed on the rushing tidal water went elsewhere. The government formed a Calendar Council to decide when festivals would now fall, since nobody could count months by a Moon that wasn't there.

At school, Anaya's biology teacher showed them a video from the reef off Lakshadweep. Every year, a few nights after a full Moon, the corals released their eggs all at once, a living snowstorm in the water. This year, nothing. The reefs were waiting for a signal that would never come.

Owls hunted badly. Some birds that migrated by moonlight flew into city lights instead. 'Life has been timing itself by the Moon for hundreds of millions of years,' the teacher said. 'You don't fix that with a council.'

Late one night, Anaya read the scientists' warning in a long article nobody else in her lane would read. The Moon had been holding Earth steady, like a hand on a spinning top. Without it, Earth's tilt could drift far more over millions of years, bringing seasons wilder than anything humans had known.

Not in her lifetime. Not in a thousand lifetimes. She went up to the roof anyway and looked at the place where the Moon used to rise, and for a long time she didn't move.