Justice is served hot...
It was an evening for evening out the odds. Actually it was nighttime. A summer night in India. The heat reaching unprecedented highs. Our servants and their kids were sleeping on their mats on the floor as always. Mum had told them to use the desert cooler to take some of the edge off the heat while they slept.
I came downstairs for my daily bedtime ritual - turn on the AC in the bedroom I shared with my two sisters, pray Isha in the cooling blast, curl up with a book and read until I doze off. I reached automatically for the AC switch to turn it on, and then the unthinkable happened. The circuit breaker was shot, the switch wouldn’t operate, and we were AC-less for the night.
Our options were:
A- Wake up my dad and see if he could fix the switch.
B- Go upstairs and sleep in our parents’ room
C- Take the cooler away from the servants and bring it into our room
D- Open the windows, turn the fan up high, and tough out the night
Options A and B were discarded because they involved disturbing our sleeping parents. Option C was like delivering our soul to the devil. The three of us agreed unanimously that it was grossly unfair to rob the servants of the marginal cooling of the cooler, just because our AC was not working this once.
And so it was that the tables were turned for one night.
The windows were opened, blankets thrown away and we settled down for the night. Tossed, turned and sweated, until we eventually drifted into oblivion.
That night, for once, our servants slept more comfortably than we did. And maybe, just maybe I slept a little better too. Free of that guilt I’ve felt every night when I would step out of my AC room into the heat of the hall to have a drink of water, and wonder how they slept in it. Wonder about life and its unfairness. Wonder about my part in it.
I had once spent part of one night in the balcony, with a sheet on the bare floor when there had been a prolonged electricity failure in Hyderabad years ago. But that had actually been nicer, with the outdoor breeze and the cool floor, if I disregard the mosquitoes. So, this probably counts as the harshest night I have ever spent in terms of temperature. But when my alarm rang for Fajr, I was up in an instant, fresh and ready to pray. No procrastination, no sleep filled brain turned to mush, no sleeping through alarm.
And it made me wonder what the real deal is. Maybe that night, I was actually better off in more than one way...
1 Comments:
You are just being self-hating I would say, you dont have to feel bad about the Luxuries Allah(swt) has bestowed on you, Thank Allah for that and share it with your fellow human beings, definetly it was a evil thought to snatch the Air cooler, and alhamdulillah you didnot do that, but you proved yourself a bad engineer, cmon you could have shorted the ciruit breaker with a fuse wire for the night and replace it witha circuit breaker next day.. I am so proud today of not spending my time with books but rather in my dad's dingy workshop, all the sawaab of giving a nice sleep to me and my two brothers (if i were in your position)
Ok after all the bloating and boasting is done isn't it unfortunate that an electrical engineer who was in the top 3 or so of her class didn't repair a circuit breaker, its not your fault bu the system that didn't train you for this, cos its no rocket science its simply replacing a circuit breaker with a piece of metal(with a thermal resistance coefficient high enough to melt off when the current flowing through it exceeds the safe currents for your device). a piece of copper stripped from a wire 2mm thick would do the trick.., its the systems fault, I'm sure my sister cannot do that as well though both of you are much more intelligent than I am..
Anyways the easiest way out was to apply a liberal layer of odomos (mosquito repellent cream) on your body and sleep in the balcony ;)
Post a Comment
<< Home