Not again. But it has happened. I woke up and found the fan in the hall whirling at full speed all night long, as if the little circulation of stagnant air in the shuttered room could stir the standstill of treetops and stimulate currents of refreshing breeze. But it was I who was in that room before the ritual of bolting the front door and fastening the latch. Add a 100 rupees to the debit side of my budget.
Like select bowlers and fielders in cricket, people are divisible into two parallel types: the on-siders who keep the “switches on” and the off-siders who are fanatics for “switching off”. I was trained from childhood in the dictum of “waste not, want not” that my mother’s father, Thathu, insisted upon. It was disconcerting when he or his informers went around checking and blamed one of us for the dripping tap in the courtyard or the lighted bulb in an empty room. His dictum meant that if we avoided waste, we would not be in desperate want of the product, whether bread or jam, electricity or water. Seven decades ago, rationing was mandatory in Madras for rice, sugar and petrol, though evaded by those who knew the “black market”. I went with my uncle to the depot down the street and returned with a pile of twigs and stalks tied to the carrier of his bike, in lieu of firewood.
In political terms, we might divide ourselves into two parties: the conservers and the liberals. The former are the true conservatives, the latter are destroyers. Think of the mongrel dogs and pathetic pups rummaging in the bin, cows feeding on banana leaves, the squirrel in the park licking the silver paper foil of a discarded chocolate wrapper. Our own kind, hapless refugees waiting for food packets to come from rescue aircraft, also invite pathos and gratitude. The elders were right in insisting that we finish what is given on the plate down to the last morsel.
Street lighting and water pipes are perennial problems. I fumed when the street lights were burning dim at midday. I never found the right way to rouse the wastrels, each office bidding me to go elsewhere.
Luckily the era of shortage hasn’t quite robbed us of comforts. If the switchers-off do not make an impact, it will be made for us when supplies diminish and the cruel hand of privation begins to demolish our comforts and confidence in the black market. Our home suffered a crisis when our gas cylinder suddenly went empty. Our supplier would not answer the cellphone. Three days of angry frustration ensued. The company, when my call finally got through, promised to send a substitute the next day, then the day after, and so on. We lacked the know-how to buy our way out. If forced rationing becomes the norm for essential supplies we the neo-bourgeois can adopt the austerity of our ancestors who went on regular fasts and accepted deprivations without complaint as their karma.
A friend reminds me the wicket-keeper has to be alert to both on and off, and bouncers!