“The body crippled without
The fluidity of water —
The wine of the mind is metaphor
The Ocean is Dawn’s daughter...”
From Poemsutra by Bachchoo

It wasn’t Friday the 13th but Friday the 3rd. My bed is pushed against the wall so I get out of it on the same side every day. I don’t believe in stars, fate, luck, prophets, Gods, virgins (only a little maybe), miracles, tantra, Ouija, meditational revelation or any other pacificatory explanation for what is written in the codes of our destinies.
“Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, Que sera, sera” sang Doris Day and I have long regarded her as my chief prophet and philosopher of earthly occurrence.
Never mind my non-superstitions. What happened to me on this 3rd of September was that I woke up to an electric kettle that didn’t work. My toothbrush, which is operated manually, did. So I brushed my teeth and went to examine the fuses of the house which were, it seemed, intact and up and running. I boiled my tea water on the gas stove and resolved to call the electricity supplier to complain that all the electricity was off despite the mains fuse being alive. I then went to the home phone to call and found it dead.
Disasters come in threes, they say. I went to my computer to find out from the Internet if there had been a blitz on the South London electricity supply and a phone blackout of any sort.
Please believe this, gentle reader, the computer came on but could not find the wireless connection it had operated on for months.
I thought one solution would be to go back to bed, switch myself off and then wake up again and the world might then be put to rights. The electrics would work, the phone and computer and Internet would be as they normally were. I pulled the blind down to deny the day, pretended to be asleep and sprang up again and started the day afresh.
The toothbrush, being manually operated, worked as normal, but getting down to the kitchen and trying the electric kettle presented the same problem as before. And so with the home phone which didn’t give me a dial tone. And so with the wretched computer which would not even this time round access the Internet website and froze and collapsed and went dark on me when I tried America Online.
I felt as though I was the victim of some Kafkaesque procedure or perhaps had woken up in a science fiction film. Everything couldn’t collapse at the same time. Obviously, with no electricity, there was no point in switching on the TV to ascertain whether there had been some nuclear attack from Iran or Sierra Leone or some other of these recalcitrant places.
But hah! My mobile worked. It was my lifeline to the reliance we place on modern tech. I found the number of the electricity supplier and dialled.
A female voice answered the phone and gave me five options of buttons to press, one asking me if I was calling about insurance, others offering me shares in the company, holidays in the Cayman Islands and the final one instructing me to hold on if I had a problem. She said calls cost 39 pence a minute from a landline and unspecified but larger amounts from mobiles. She seemed to be deliberately prolonging her message so that the phone company could take more of these +39pence from me — she would, no doubt share in this loot.
Then another very English voice came on and said that they were experiencing a “high volume” of calls that day and that I could go away and access their website or I could wait for another “customer service representative”. I waited.
The phone played Eine Kleine Nachtmusik about 17 times. I hung on.
No doubt the meter for the +39 pence per minute for mobiles was ticking.
Eventually a clearly Bangalorean voice came on the line, replacing Mozart and asking me what my name was, what my post code was, what my mother’s maiden name was, whether I wanted to buy any cocaine, change any money, make love to his sister, buy a ticket to a lottery to win a trip to a coconut grove... and other questions.
I may not have got all the questions right, but answered to the best of my ability and he seemed satisfied. Then he addressed me by my name, bade me a good morning and asked me how he could help me. I told him my electricity had taken a dive for the worse. He said, “Not to worry, I will do my best to solve the problem”.
“So finally we get to it,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked.
“Has the area power collapsed?” I asked.
“Have you checked your main fuse switch?” he asked. I said I had. He asked 15 further questions, the last of which was whether I had a burglar alarm system in the house. I happened to know that we did.
“Did it go off at any time?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Has anything been burgled in your house?” he asked.
“My computer and electric kettle are still there”, I said.
My Bangalorean comrade, very friendly now, asked me to go through my valuables and see if anything had been taken and also to check if any points of entry to the house had in any way been violated. He said he would wait on the phone. And all the while the +39 pence a minute ticking.
I surveyed the house. Yes, the window in the study had been violated. The violators hadn’t bothered to take the laptop, which was an insult. There were no other valuables the thief, or in fact I would have wanted.
I went back to the phone.
“Someone has been in here”, I said.
“It’s what I am thinking. They have cut off your electric supply and your wireless wire connection in one swoop because they want to cut off the wire to your burglar alarm and they are not knowing which is which, so they are cutting all outside and inside your house. Everything dies”, he said.
“You are the Bangalorean Sherlock Holmes, the Bangalorean Spinoza”, I said.
“We are getting these calls from fools every day, sir”, he said.