When (my) lights go out

It has already been two days since we finished the rickshaw race and I am still feeling under the weather. Despite consuming all manner of questionable eatables in my years in India I have been pretty lucky to avoid the worst forms of sickness that inhabit roadside food stands. But I have the feeling that my luck may have run out. I did a Google search on my symptoms and it looks like I am either still dehydrated from three days straight on a motorcycle, or I might have gotten a very mild case of typhoid. I'll pencil in a mid afternoon jaunt to the doctor today.

Adding to my overall misery was my most recent dance with the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the way the Indian government chooses to route power to Guru Nanak Niwas, my betel stained apartment building, it may come as a shock to you that even my own home is rife with a plague of bureaucratic idiocies.

For the last six months my wife and I thought we were getting away without paying our electricity bill. When we moved in our landlord gave us a yellow electricity card and told us to give it to the one-eyed decrepit chowkidar who pretends to keep brigands and terrorists away from our apartment complex. The system was supposed to be that a meter man would drop by once every couple months, take a reading, note it on the card and send us a bill. In exchanged we were allowed to plug in an array of electronic devices and enjoy near-constant power fluctuations and at least one explosion.

Two months passed and we anxiously awaited our first bill. It never came. A few more months slipped by and we thought that perhaps we were somehow off the books. Rather than figure out the problem, we hoped against hope that they would eventually send us a bill or drop a letter threatening to take us off the grid.

Then it happened. A day after we got back from Kanyakumari a man from the electricity board dropped by our meter, saw that we hadn't paid and promptly disconnected our power. In reality all he did was unscrew a single wire from our meter box, but it effectively blackened our apartment and sent us scurrying over to a friend's bungalow for a night.

The next morning we interrogated our guard who said he had never received our card. We asked him to check his files...er...shed for any sign of it, but to no avail. Instead he began to berate us in Hindi for being irresponsible and for letting the bill go unpaid for so long. We called our landlord who delivered a similar speech before inviting us over for tea at his house and chaperoning our first trip to the dingy government office that supplies power to our neighborhood.

We arrived with photocopies of the old electricity card, our lease, six types of identification, an affidavit from our landlord's wife (the actual owner of the apartment), several thousand rupees in cash, and a sinking feeling that this would take a long time. We took up positions next to a bureaucrat wielding a rubber stamp and one fingered typing skills. For the next half hour our landlord spoke to him in Tamil, smiled falsely, and said that the foreigners should be excused for their stupidity. They laughed at the last joke and sent us knowing glares. The man looked skeptical, but eventually capitulated when we gave him a little extra cash under the table. He issued us a fresh card and sent two electricians home with us to reconnect the power.

A couple turns of a screw later and the power was back on. The electrician explained that we should really buy a new meter (one that he could get us "real cheap") because the old one in my building runs a little too fast. My landlord said that would be a good idea and offered to let us pay for the improvements to our apartment.

After saying goodbye, Padma and I made our way up to our flat. We turned on the AC, opened up our laptops and went to check our e-mail when we ran into our second setback of the day. In a technological double-whammy our broadband provider had decided that since we had been out of our apartment for a week that they would disconnect our Internet as well. We spent the next few hours negotiating with a team of technical specialists and customer care people to get everything up and running again.

It was late at night before everything was back to normal and I decided to skip my blog for the day and ruminate on the mundane trials everyone in India has to go through for basic services.