Light Don Come

In my mother's house, the return of electricity is an event with its own liturgy.

First the fridge exhales. Then a neighbour shouts "up NEPA!" into the compound and three other voices answer from three other windows, like a call to prayer for people who worship air conditioning. My mother, wherever she is in the house, says "thank you Jesus" in the same flat voice she uses for good news and mild inconvenience, because after fifty years the line between them is thin.

Then the work begins. The rice that was going to spoil goes on. Phones are plugged in according to a hierarchy only she understands. The iron comes out even if nobody is going anywhere, because you press clothes while you can. Growing up I thought everyone lived like this — in bursts, storing light like water.

I live abroad now, in a flat where the power has never once gone off. The first month, I kept a torch by the bed out of habit. I kept buying candles I did not need. When friends complained about their bills I felt a strange, unearned smugness, like a man who has survived something they only read about.

Last year my mother visited. On the second evening the room went dark for maybe four seconds — some trip switch, back almost before it left — and without thinking she said "eh-eh, they've taken light," already rising from her chair.

The bulb came back before she was fully up. She sat down slowly, a little embarrassed, and we both laughed. But I understood her body better than my own in that moment. Somewhere in me, too, a part is still standing up in the dark, ready to be grateful.