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Extremely offline. What happened when a Pacific Island was cut off from the internet by Samanth Subramanian. Read by Raj Gattak.

For a while, Sam Veer had been smelling sulphur on the air, only mildly infernal,

like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday evening,

when the explosion happened, he sat up in fright. It sounded so near, he thought some cataclysm

had occurred right there in his neighbourhood. The windows trembled, the curtains fell off.

Veer peaked out of his house house but saw nothing destroyed or on fire,

so he looked at his wife and said, this has to be the volcano.

Via and his wife live in Tofua, which, if you squint and picture Tonga's main island

of Tonga Tapu as a long medieval shoe, lies just below the instep on a gentle rise of earth.

They just returned home after dropping their daughters at a birthday party, but now

Vea dashed to his van to go and collect them.

On the way back, the road filled with cars hurrying away from the sea and tiny pebbles fell from the sky.

Not that long before, curious to see what a big volcanic eruption looked like,

Via had watched Dante's Peak on Netflix.

In the movie, he remembered now, a white-hot rock had punched through the roof of a truck

and killed Pierce Brosnan's partner, so he pulled over to wait out the traffic.

The skies grew mottled with dust and ash.

Drivers got out, took off their shirts and wiped their windshields down so they could see the road ahead.

When they reached home, after two and a half hours, Veer sent his children to hide under the bed.

...