Dark city blues

We all have the blues from time to time. Those days when nothing seems to go right and even if it does it doesn’t go right in exactly the way you wanted. You wake up with that grumpy dissatisfied feeling; nobody can do anything that makes you happy and you are determinedly miserable. It can last for days, the blues. Weeks. Months. All sorts of things can bring on a bout of the blues from a broken fingernail to the recipe that failed to delight the hard-to-please guest. And electricity. Or its absence. Bahawalpur had a dose of the blues last week that continues as these words are typed and very nearly turned into psychotic axe-wielding brick-hurling tyre-burning violence. The dark blue mood was brought on by a marathon powercut that by the afternoon of last Wednesday had the banks musing on the wisdom of pulling down the shutters on the ATM machines – and when the banks do that you can sniff the same trouble in the air as they can.

Passing down Circular Road on a day when the sun was in brain-frying mode it was almost eerie - few cars, fewer pedestrians and apart from bakeries and the never-closed-as-far-as-I-know RhimJhims Tobacco Store, no open shops. The shutterdown in protest at the loadshedding was almost universal, and small knots of people stood around looking like they were trying to decide if they were blue enough to make a bit of a rumpus. Small knots of police looked at them, and in the end it was far too hot for a bit of ad-hoc rioting and so everybody sloped off home to houses that were as powerless as the people who lived in them.

There was power in my house but of the very expensive sort created by a UPS system for the computers and a noisy smelly generator at the back that gulps petrol like a man dying of thirst. A rhythm has developed. The power drops, the UPS picks up the computers and if power is not returned after an hour off goes the fridge, off go the mains and on goes the generator. The TV is left on as it is an indicator of when the power comes back – the picture reappears and the cycle is reversed. Off goes the generator, on goes the mains and the fridge and the UPS unit begins to charge up again. This may happen five or six times over a day depending on the outtages and can turn the cheeriest of souls into an ultramarine monster. Currently it is costing around 300 rupees a day to fuel Mrs Genny – work out for yourselves what that does to the monthly budget.

Seeing an entire city switched on is a startling sight. From a velvet blackness punctuated only by the lights winking at the top of the mobile phone towers and the faint orange glow from the airport to the south, to twinkling vibrancy in the blink of the eye. My house and a couple of others had stood out as islands of light, marking us as rich enough to hold the darkness at bay which may not be the best of advertisements considering the prevalence of armed robbery hereabouts. But it was the dark and fanless houses that preoccupied me. Blue as I was it will have been as nothing compared to what others less fortunate – poorer - but perhaps more angry, were experiencing. There was no power during the time it took me to write this piece. Fridge off, mains off and where is the petrol can? Anybody seen the petrol can? Dark city blues…