Last night, just after shutting down and heading to bed, the lights went out. The water cooler began to whine, as the voltage was fluctuating. (Please note: I haven’t thought of the term”voltage” since my eigth grade science class).
I noticed the wind was picking up outside, and whistling through the windows. One of my neighbor’s doors slammed below.
I looked outside at the purple dark sky, and the orange street lights surrounded by a cloudy halo of dust. I could feel a thin cover of sand as I walked back to bed. In the stuffyness, I gave up on the mattress and opted for lying on the floor–first on a woven mat, then I migrated again to the bare marble-with-dusty-film. Between the heat and the hardness, I simply could not get comfortable. Not to mention the eery gusts of wind that beat against the windows and threatened to break them with bits of tin roof that they lifted off slum dwellings. Ok, maybe my imagination was exaggerating a tad.
Photo by Steve McCurry
While I was super-freaked, my husband slept on without any disturbance except me waking him to keep checking if the power was back, which was about every two hours. He has grown up having faced many of these outages and dust storms, so had no reason to be perturbed. He used to play on sand dunes.
I managed to drift off in between, but would awaken again to the stifling heat with severe stiffness. Somehow I got on the mattress and got a little rest there. At 4:30am we decided to open the balcony door, as the dust storm had passed, but then realized the pigeons might try to invade so the breath of fresh air was short-lived.
As the morning approached, it began getting even hotter. We awoke at 8:30am and hoped repairs would have begun, enjoying a bit of chill from the cooler, but were afraid it would get damaged in a power surge. Eventually, the voltage died down and we were left with nothing again. So we waited and waited.
At least the maid came, and we were fed. We decided to leave for my in-laws place, but the taxi which was supposed to come in 30 minutes took an hour to arrive, without notifying us of the delay. Customer service here is sorely lacking. In the meanwhile, to keep myself going crazy from the heat, I tried the following tactics: drinking something cool, sitting in one place, writing in my journal, standing in front of the cooler to get a wimper of air. I found walking/dancing to be pretty effective, since I was creating some wind. Or something. Maybe I was just more distracted from my discomfort. Mind you, my husband was merrily doing offline activities on his computer, with barely a bead of sweat on him.
Did you know that no power means no water also? Yes, because our water comes from a bore-well and is pumped by a motor. No electricity, no pump. So by this time the water in the pipes had run dry. The temperature was around 43 degrees Celsius/109 Farenheit.
Finally I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, and I would go wait in the lobby which had the chance of being slightly cooler than our top-floor apartment. It was, and had a nice current of air going.
I had the chance to observe many interesting characters. Our emaciated guard reading the newspaper (he’s literate!), looking at his watch (he has a watch, quite a status symbol!). A blue-collar worker, wearing fancy new sneakers with yellow details and inspecting them seriously, standing as if posing for a photo shoot with hands on hips. An overweight neighbor, heading out to his motorcycle with a white handkerchief on his head. The laborers outside, seemingly unfazed by the sun.
I'm a model, you know what I mean, and I do my little thing on the catwalk.
Just as our taxi arrived, guess what? The power came back.
