And I so spent an evening by candlelight.

It does seem a tad roman­tic. It really wasn’t that way though.

An evening by candlelight

I went back home from office late in the night to real­ize that my elec­tric­ity con­nec­tion had tripped (I have no idea what this means in elec­tri­cal terms but it does sound rather cool). No self respect­ing elec­tri­cian in Ban­ga­lore would come to my res­cue at that late hour and this not being Mum­bai, (when I could have prob­a­bly called one), I decided to spend the evening by candlelight.

I realised how much we take things for granted. Things like elec­tric­ity. I made a list of things you can’t do as a result of the lack of elec­tric­ity. You can’t charge your phone, you can’t oper­ate any elec­tri­cal appli­ance, you can’t watch TV, you can’t read or write. I tried some writ­ing by can­dle­light and found like I was trans­ported into one of those low light­ing slow movies (like Eyes Wide Shut or some­thing). I thought of gate crash­ing options and decided that I might not be wel­come at that time of the night.

Writ­ing by can­dle­light has a nice slow movie kind of feel to it

The most impor­tant thing I realised was that I couldn’t oper­ate my mos­quito repeller and mean­while my rooms were swarm­ing with mos­qui­tos. Big, small, noisy & buzzing crea­tures — you realise just how much of a pest they are when you don’t have electricity.

Finally, resigned to my fate and hunger (I had not the slight­est incli­na­tion to cook in the dark), I decided to try and sleep early. But I did quite fore­see the dif­fi­culty in this seem­ingly sim­ple act. Being a late sleeper, I found the sleep gods unwill­ing to descend at that hour.

My mind went back in time… About 2 decades ago to my grandma’s place : a town called North Lakhim­pur. Elec­tric­ity there would come for about an hour in the evening. It was a time for much rejoic­ing. Every­one gath­ered in the fam­ily room and there was excite­ment all around. This lasted for about an hour, till the pall of gloom would descend again as the town plunged into dark­ness for the rest of the night. We had to eat by the light of gas lamps peer­ing into our plates, some­times not quite sure what the next morsel was all about. It has to be said that there was an ele­ment of sur­prise dur­ing meal time.

Then, back to Guwa­hati where we would spend our sum­mers. All of us cousins would con­gre­gate at my other grandma’s place. Even though many of our evenings were con­ducted with­out elec­tric­ity (load­shed­ding was a com­mon occur­rence), we invented games to play in the dark (hide and seek for exam­ple, gets much more dif­fi­cult when you can’t see). It was the days of the AGP agi­ta­tion against for­eign­ers (read: Bangladeshis) and while tyres burnt and folks shouted slo­gans out­side and the town was ensconced in a dark cocoon, we in our inno­cence, con­tin­ued our games.

Count­ing sheep by can­dle­light is a rec­om­mended activity

Back to the present — Kit Kit thinks the can­dle is a play-thing. She goes near the flame, screws her nose to get a whiff. I scream, she yelps and scam­pers off with her tail between her legs.

I decide to count sheep by can­dle­light. I am over­whelmed by how quiet it sud­denly is. With­out the hum of elec­tric­ity and all related appli­ances, the sound of silence is so much louder.

As the can­dle burns to the very end around mid­night, I finally fall into a deep dark sleep.

All in all, a rather “enlight­en­ing” expe­ri­ence. Try it sometime!