-A short story
June 11th, 2021 — Raindrops and Rambling Reflections
The electricity of the whole block went out around 11 pm. It was pitch black. I opened the balcony and the familiar smell of the wet soil, damp grass greeted me with the fond realisation that it had been raining for quite a while now.
The streets had given shelter to small puddles of muddy water. The air smelled sweet and a cool breeze blew in my always-locked fortified room. The black in my surroundings began to take shape. Objects chose different shades of black and grey to differentiate themselves.
Lightning crackled in the sky, lighting up the moonless night. Everything that was once shrouded in darkness became visible for a split second in all its glory before being engulfed in the blacks and greys once again.
A mighty enough lightning strike is no less sublime than the treacherously steep mountains or the depths of still-unending oceans.
But what is Bob Dylan to the unfeeling, Van Gogh to the blind and rain to a thick-skinned reticent recluse? The only indicator of the arrival of summer is the glowing numeric pad on the air conditioner, which now is comfortably settled at a pleasant 24 degrees.
- “Landscape at Auvers in the Rain”, Van Gogh (1890), Three Days before Van Gogh’s death
Lightning used to be the ferocious booming reminder of things beyond our control, capabilities and understanding. This is probably why our ancestors saw it fit to imagine lightning as the wrathful weapon of the king of Gods. In the West, it was wielded by the all-powerful tyrannical Olympian, Zeus, and thousands of kilometres away, in the East, by the warlike opulent Indra.
However, in the 21st century, the best they both have managed to do is - kill my electricity. I am now left to undertake the arduous peril-filled endeavour of sustaining myself without the aid of any electronic devices for the next few hours.
I glanced to the other side of the shared balcony and noticed that the room opposite my room was open. I spotted a figure sitting in the shadows swiping away on his phone, I politely nodded as I had so many times before in the hallways, near the water cooler, at the door of the building, never really bothering myself to remember his face, let alone ask his name.
I am not neighbourly.
It seems alien to imagine a time with no electricity. Yet, for most of our 200,000 years of existence, we did not know how to spell electricity let alone understand it and exploit it.
Thunderstorms and power cuts remind me of good times, back when I used to be neighbourly. Thunderstorms, as attention-seeking weather phenomena they are, would bring the mundanity of life to a screeching halt, in an instant.
For a 10-year-old me sitting in school, there was nothing more exciting than a thunderstorm. The creaking of the old blue swollen wooden doors, the shuddering of the deceitfully fragile glass windows, the flickering of the narrow long tube lights; it was all quite thrilling for me. The sky would be overcast with rapturous thunderclouds. The tube lights would go out as if on cue. Tiffins would open. The smell of the wet soil, damp grass and hot paranthas and Maggi would even put the most ill-tempered of teachers in a good mood.
A raucous trio, tripling on their bike, whizzed past my room and shook me back from my trip down memory lane. The streetlights blinked a block away. But there was still no power supply in our building. I was still on my balcony.
“Let’s go down and talk to the guard,” I suggested to my neighbour. We formally introduced ourselves to each other and indulged in a little small talk. We asked each other what semester, course, and cities we were from. Information that I was sure to promptly forget the next day.
The guard sat at the steps of the gate of the building on an old worn-out chair; the type that would be comfortable to him and only him in the entire world. He had been sitting in it for so long that the chair had moulded its structure to his body. He was a short man in his forties. He had thinning grey hair that looked like silver strings in the dim light.
As we walked towards him, he struck a match that illuminated his face. He had an ill-kempt stubble, full cheeks and a content smile plastered on his face. He stared out at the rain pouring outside and took a drag from his beedi. A small Nokia phone sat on his lap and quietly played Kishore Kumar songs in his earphones.
“Bhaiya, yeh light ka kya scene hai? ” enquired my neighbour.
The startled guard looked up and confidently replied, “Bass aa hi rahi hogi. Baarish ho rahi hai na toh yahan ki light chali jati hai. Peeche ki dikkat theek karni shuru kar di hogi. Thodi der mein, theek kar denge fir aa jaegi fir. ”
My neighbour and I hummed in unison, finding ourselves to be in agreement with his thesis. He continued. “Waise aapne dekha hoga, yahan light jaati nahi hai itni. Bass yahi ek achhi cheez hai iss ilaake ki.”
“Haan woh toh hai.” chimed in my neighbour. The conversation-starved guard had chosen the optimum point to set his chair. In the middle of the gate, between the hot and humid ground floor and the cool and breezy road, a pressure system seemed to have formed such that I could confidently classify the current of air there as a gust of wind instead of a breeze.
My neighbour and I pulled up two chairs and sat next to him. The guard offered us beedis which I politely declined but my neighbour didn’t mind. The rain poured down steadily. The streetlight down the street faintly lit up the porch but most of the light came from the live end of the beedis. Smoke from the beedis curled up in the air to make shapes that seemed to enact the stories that the guard and my neighbour exchanged as Kishore Kumar's tunes continued playing on his phone, now on speaker.
He hailed from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, enjoyed Shah Rukh Khan’s films and had two sons, a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old. He had been a guard in one PG or another for the past 15 years. His stories had a texture to them. He told us with conviction about the adventures that college students would get up to and how he had saved them from unfathomable doom at the hands of their parents, landlords and professors, countless times.
There were silences between the threads of conversation but they were not uneasy. Soon, the rain winded down, the beedis ran out and the Kishore Kumar playlist started to repeat songs. The conversation naturally came to an end. It was 1 am when we finally decided to go to bed. The guard locked the gate and my neighbour and I headed up the stairs under the light of the matches the guard lent us.
Scarcity draws attention.
The hallways of the building had always been flooded by light. I had never paid any attention to the walls, the wiring, the lights on the ceiling or the big MCB box mounted on the wall. But now under the faint light of a single matchstick, it looked clearer than ever. Clear enough to notice the singular switch that was turned off on the panel.
We had missed the obvious.
As soon as I flicked the switch on, the building clumsily came back to life. The lights started buzzing, the refrigerator humming, the fans whooshing, the air conditioners rumbling. Let there be light.
My neighbour and I, the two of us, engineers in the making, sheepishly smiled at each other.
I might be a bit neighbourly now.
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