This weekend was quite uncomfortable due to electricity shutdown, which, on Saturday evening, started at 7.10 pm and lasted for twenty-two hours, with only two phases on the meter alive that allowed me to keep only the ‘TV lounge’ meagerly illuminated by two dimly lit hundred watt bulbs – until on Sunday evening, our poor-in-resources wapda arranged a working transformer for replacement.

While I am jotting down these lines, I am continuously bothered by the flies, untiringly buzzing around me, trying to rest on my forearm and knee. And also bothering me is the noise of kids playing cricket in the street, in front of my house – the noise of bouncing the tennis ball off the ground, their bats - as they strike them repeatedly on the hard surface as a part of their habit, and their consistent yelling and shouting out over minor acts of unfair game play. And a next door neighbor, who shares a ‘common wall’ as a mark of separation of two houses, is also bugging me with his loud speech volume and irritating pitch – while he is involved in a ludicrous conversation with a girl of a ‘paindo’ accent younger to him, which, I judged from her voice.

To some amazement, it’s a sort of monologue - the girl is rather listening and not talking much. Imagine – she, twisting her fingers, rolling and unrolling her ‘dupatta’ on her thumb repeatedly, blinking her eyes more than normal without blushing so much - fully aware of her accent (and/or maybe due to her un-brushed teeth!), considers it wise to keep her mouth shut and remain environment friendly in all possible respects.

Meanwhile, my gate knocks. I know, it’ll be a kid on the door, claiming his tennis ball, which crosses our boundary several times in the evening. Sometimes I do respond, but most often I just turn a deaf ear to the ringing door bell. I inform the kid with a diabolic contentment that his ball is not here; it might have fallen through the fence into the basement where I have no access at all. I pick up today’s paper from the garage and return. It is 4.45 pm. Early morning showers had caused a delay in the delivery of newspaper – but it was too late to deliver it in the evening.

There aren’t any signs of electricity despite phone calls to SDO since yesterday, who, on my both calls assured me of his understanding of the problem and the readiness of his workers awaiting the availability of a spare transformer.
Well, electricity has just been restored. I send a sms to say thanks to SDO for bringing the whole area back to life –but he didn’t respond back. May be he had smelled the hidden hypocrisy in my message.

When I started this post I actually wanted to write how troublesome the previous night was. I had kept the doors open in the evening – attracting and inviting the mosquitoes to the lights inside. I only realized this terrible mistake when I hit the sack at 12 in the night.

‘5 balain, 3 runs’, the boys are still shouting. As the new transformer is fixed and set to working, kids in the neighborhood are celebrating and playing again. ‘Jaldi Aao, Jaldi Aao’, I can hear them through the widow and the opened door of side-gallery.

The night was worst, most of the time I kept scratching my face, arms, and feet. Around 2 am, I decided to drag the ‘char-pie’ into the garage. Had I hardly laid the ‘khais’ over it, it started to downpour all at once that I feared it would not be safe to sleep there. I pulled back - and do remember it rained continually till 6 am. A phone call woke me up at 10.30 am. Now it’s 5.30 pm, weekend is almost over. Nothing much to mention except that tomorrow is Monday. I have to calendar clothes, complete some paper work and type this post for publishing with some necessary editing.

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Reading Now: Putli Peking Ki by Mustansar Hussain Tarar. Read it's review here.