When our lives came to a screeching halt

Just at two seconds to 9, I had peered into my phone to check what time it was. Exactly at 9 pm, the lights in our apartment went off.

“What just happened?”, rolled out of my lips inadvertently. This utterance would have been out of place had it been Delhi. Where, paying heed to my dad’s advice, I had once bought a hand fan and a torch to challenge the summer months, when our days’ plans were dictated by the loathed ‘load shedding.’ But having left the country for few years now, we have come to take certain comforts for granted. No power outage being one of them. Only that till today, we did not get a first hand experience at how our lives could come to a screeching halt, without the blessed electricity. And this time it was going to be gone for good 4 hours.

This unexpected outage happened over Saturday evening. Luckily, we strayed from the routine and stayed home for the second half of the day - in an act of gratefulness around the relief of not having to do grocery this weekend. The chicken was simmering away in the skillet in the kitchen, across the seating area in the living room. And I had just put the jasmine rice (weekend indulgence) in the rice cooker. Both me and the husband slouched blissfully on the sofa ( hands on phones, ofcourse). We sat there soaking up the tantalizing aroma of the smoked ‘bhoot jolokia’ (ghost pepper) in the chicken. The fragrance of the starchy rice too was filling up the room. The toddler was in her perky best too, after having napped well to indulge in a longish Saturday evening. Exactly at this moment, when the aroma of food wafting across the room, and the thought of devouring it had just peaked, our hopes were ruthlessly put out, along with the lights.

“This is crazy.”

“Did we miss an email or notice regarding this?”

Next few seconds were spent frantically scanning the inbox for a mail informing us about the power outage. But to our dismay, there wasn’t any.

“How could they?”

“There should have been a heads-up.”

“This is unacceptable!”

The vocabulary of first world problems and the legitimacy of these sentences floated freely from our lips. It was not very heard though, to step out of the body, and watch us talk from a distance. The sweltering Delhi summer nights of power outage conjured up infront of my eyes effortlessly. That harrowing heat and the outrageous power shortage! The romantic in me however easily raised above these thoughts. My wistful mind marveled at the walk we took in the VK Sector-A park in a particularly unsparing humid day of power cut. I remembered how we had talked and talked till we didn’t want to go back home, and wanted to fall asleep on the uncomfortable wrought iron bench.

Since the apartment management kept its line busy, from the Tampa Electricity Board we found out that the transformer had blown up and they were hopeful about fixing it by 1am. That was clearly a lot of time for the toddler to get worked up in barely manageable lighting. She was tumbling over things, at first accidentally, since her eyes hadn’t adjusted fully to the small beam of light that filtered through the balcony. Soon this became a game – of tripping over toys and household items. I brought out all the candles I had collected over a period of time – host of candles in all shapes, sizes and fragrances that lit up the kitchen counter top like it would during Diwali. Once I was done lighting them, I took a good moment to admire the whimsical sight. But only to be shaken back to reality by the playful toddler who had started singing ‘happy birthday to you’ now in her barely intelligible tongue.

The clock was ticking away and the uncertainty of the power situation was now making me positively nervous. The thought of the overwhelming number of things we could not do without electricity was gnawing at my head. Most of all I missed the microwave. The plan was to heat up the already cooked food for the kid and feed her slightly later than her usual time because it was Saturday. But clearly, that plan didn’t work out in my favor.

“How do I heat up food now?”

“The chicken is half done too, so is the rice.”

“'To go’, again?”

“Gawd, noooo!”

With malls and most public places shutting down by 9, it made heading out aimlessly seem like a  stupid plan. So we made few calls, dressed the toddler in miss-matched clothes and headed out to friends’ place. The parked cars from our apartment parking lot were disappearing in quick succession with everyone heading out to beat the boredom that the power situation presented. We packed toddler’s dinner and whipped out of the driveway and our car disappeared in the dark woods in the neighborhood. The apartment that stood opposite ours, had blacked out too, we remarked in unison – “O, there’s gone too.” Peals of laughter filled the car reminding us of the good old days when all was well as long as the neighbor’s power was out too!

Once we reached friends’ place, we got busy around feeding the kid. O well, at least trying to feed the kid. She had filled her wee little stomach with the fries that came with the burgers we had picked on our way, and she declared it was her cheat day and she is not taking a morsel down her mouth. So there, all the effort of packing food, wading through Saturday night traffic to feed the girl, was met with outright rejection.

Mercifully, soon after we finished dinner, we got the news of electricity coming back in the area. It took them two hours instead of four to restore it. We reached home with a peacefully sleeping kid. The cooker came back to life, like our existence, one more time. The wifi got connected in a matter of seconds. Ofcourse we lost our appetite for the chicken and rice that was put back on induction for the final touch. Had this been a day from our couple-dom, we would have stayed back home, without having to tend to cranky toddler irritated over powered-out i-pad and phones. We would probably have talked and talked about everything under the sun, just like we did the other day after putting aside our phones, with a sleeping kid in the next room. We perhaps would have made sandwiches from left-over breads and sauced and peppered it with chips and onions and sat around the candles, and cracked up over our pathetic attempt at romance – the kind candle lights are associated with.

But I like this version too - of cutting across the city, to heat up food of all things, at friends’ place. This version that lets me witness the neighborhood in its stark naked darkness. The one in which my stomach twitches to see cops around car accidents over Saturday reckless driving. This chance at a view of the pulsating city transforming into a dazzling tapestry – hopeful, alive, and charming, yet dangerously vulnerable. This excuse, that pulls us out of our comforts and lets us see things in a different light. This pretext, where we dare to show up at friends’ door steps unhinged, with the comfort of the trust of friendship. 

But most of all, this version - because, it teaches us to keep those candles safe, like our memories, for you can never tell, when you need to rely on them.