Suraj was trying hard to make sense of the alphanumerics but was failing splendidly. "Give me alphabets and I'll give you a sonnet" he thought as he tried hard to concentrate on his Applied Mathematics book. The house was bustling with life. His grandfather was watching television while his grandmother was cooking a delicious dinner of rasam and vada, singing to herself as she often did.
In normal circumstances, he would have minded all the noise and activity. However, exam time meant that he welcomed any distraction, small or big. If he could spend fifteen minutes tracking the movements of his building dog and thinking what the dog must be thinking, he could easily live with songs and television.
He purposely sat at the couch by the window, facing the compound of his building where elders sat in the morning, dogs sunbathed in the afternoon, children played in the evening and married couples sat on the swings at night; and of course the omnipresent watchman. Today the compound wore a deserted look, with cars parked around and not a soul travessed the gray concrete of the compound.
And then the lights went off!
The world plunged into darkness and the numbers and alphabets became black just like the night sky. Suraj looked out of the window to see that it was a major power outage; after all, the roads were dark too!
"Aaho, haven't you paid the bill?" asked grandmother from the kitchen.
"Of course I did! Everyone's light has gone" said grandfather, mildly annoyed at grandmother questioning his competency in paying bills.
Suraj chuckled at their relation. He knew that grandmother was teasing grandfather and that grandfather would never know that he was being teased. He gazed outside at the darkness and the silhouette of the trees outside his window. An odd speck of light from a vehicle would pass by, illuminating the trees and bringing their green leaves to life.
He was reminded of his childhood when power cuts were a source of joy. They mostly occured during the summers, when everyone had their holidays. And they always occured at night, somehow. All the children would meet downstairs to evade the heat in their houses. Everyone would be happy that the lights had gone off since it meant meeting your friends after the normal permissible time limits. It meant playing hide and seek, the real deal, where seeking someone was truly difficult because of the absence of lights. It meant getting their handheld torches and trying to scare everyone by illuminating their faces and making horrible expressions.
Once they plucked out the leaves of a tree and placed the leaf just above the torch. The intricate network of veins in the leaves amazed them. That something so beautiful, intricate and detailed could exist in something that seemed so normal at face value affected Suraj. That was the night that he wrote his first poem about how people are like leaves : dense, intricate, detailed and beautiful.
As the years went by, the running would stop and now they would sit around and talk till the lights came back. And when they did come, there would be a tinge of sadness as it meant that they would have to go back to their homes, no excuses remaining.
In school it gave them an excuse to ask the teacher to give them a free period. Even though school was in the morning and all the power cut did was make it hotter, they could take the slightest of excuse to ask for a free period. And the teacher, tired from the constant arguing and the increasing amount of sweat would give in and agree not to teach. And the world was a happy place.
But now the power cut meant different things, thought Suraj. Now the first thing that crosses the mind is the absence of the WiFi because of the power cut. The stress about a piece of work that you have to submit the next day. The exam that you're supposed to study about but you left it to the last minute and now you're freaking out. Now you don't have the time to see the world in it's dark majesty.
"Suraj!!" a voice called him from below. "Coming down?!"
Maybe it wasn't as bad as he thought. Maybe he wasn't that old. And maybe there was still hope, as Robin Williams said, to suck the marrow out of life.
He shut his book and raced down, happy again about the power cut.
