Monday, December 01, 2008

Baby, When the Lights Go Out

November ended with a local blackout. Really...

I had just finished ironing my clothes for the work week and sat down with the laptop on the floor, a cushion on my lap and was contemplating on putting up yet another complaint post, throw a couple of comments here and there but even before anything could happen, the lights went off with a bang. It was about 7:15 pm and it was already dark. Using the light from my laptop which was running on battery, I looked for my mobile phone as a temporary torchlight until I found a real one (by the way, mobile phone lights are lousy for situations like this)

The first torchlight that I picked did not work and neither did the second one... so I traipsed into the kitchen and found matches, but no candles. A few phone calls later, I found a torchlight after rummaging in the dark, and also found some candles. I took a tin, the candles and the matches to the hall and lit it. Then I turned off the laptop.

Since there was nothing else to do, I decided to eat dinner. A candlelight dinner all by myself with the flame dancing in the windless hall. It was really weird and not romantic at all. The surroundings were also a bit too quiet save for the occasional car moving in the street or a bike, or a bunch of kids taking a walk to escape the stifling heat of their houses. After doing the dishes in the dark, I went back to where the candle was and sat down with my mp3 player. For a multitasker, the solitude and the inactivity nearly killed me.

Taking a candlelit shower is even more surreal. Every shadow is a ghost waiting to scare you, and every flicker makes you wonder if you're not alone in there (thanks to all the haunted bathrooms in schools - the fear never leaves you!) Thankfully I wasn't caught by any ghost or you wouldn't be reading this.

8 comments:

  1. November really wasn't your month!

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  2. Yeah... I've seen better days :)

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  3. there is something exceptionally eerie about candle lit bathrooms. Every so often I think its a good idea to do a stereotypical girl thing and have a bath lit by candle... it always weirds me out a little, so I tend to leave the hall light on and the door open. Weird isn't it! Why would ghost want to haunt bathrooms?

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  4. I don't know... I've always associated ghosts with bathrooms probably because every single bathroom in every single school I went to was haunted... then there's the fact that I feel terribly vulnerable when in the bathromm, because it's not as though you can run out immediately or something seeing that you can slip and break something

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  5. hahaha


    We in Karachi get regular power cuts, hearing a fresher perspective on power cut is funny.

    We are used to having candle lit dinner since we were kids. In any case i think romantic candle lit dinners are over rated. When you are in love, you can eat saw dust and even that would taste great.

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  6. Oh.. we get frequent power cuts as well. I blogged about it because I had nothing better to blog about! Am currently still kind of suffering from a case of blogger's block)

    I don't know about romantic candlelit dinners, but I really need to see what I'm eating.

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  7. I envy you, I really do, you make something as irritating as a power cut sound like a bucketload of fun. I can't wait for when the power here goes next.

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  8. Hmmm... I never looked at it that way. Anyway, when you get your next powercut, you know what to do ;)

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