Nostalgia about a power cut . . .

I’m from a place in India where power outages were frequent and familiar. The lights would go off just as we were about to sit down for a meal of chicken curry, spiced okra, and hot rotis with a side of homemade yogurt. Someone would whoop on the road outside, and the power cut would fall like a blanket of silence. There would be a mad scramble for candles with my mom yelling to the maid-servant in the kitchen, “Meena, where did we keep the candles I bought from Modern Bazaar last week?”

There would be a minute or two of deepening silence, finally broken by our landlord Dr. Gupta\'s reedy voice floating up from the ground floor level.