There is a moment on my morning walk that I stop--every single time, mind you--and look up.
The Haryana mornings are so incredible. The space between fog and pollution is slim and the the light refraction of the two yields the most perfectly tangerine orange sunrise, a perfectly terrifying orange ball of gas and fire looking so coy, yet foreshadowing the terrorizing season to come. (Heat is spelled with a capital letter in our house and never spoken above a whisper.)
But that is not it.
In fact I stop because there is something I can't see, but can only hear. There is one moment in my morning walk where a hundred thousand bumblebees sing in unison, where everyone's radio is set to static, and where the white noise is blinding. It is the place where the north/southbound electrical wires cross and touch the east/westbound electrical wires. They hang heavy on each other, as if bearing the weight of the sound itself might make them topple. They look guilty.
Walking under these wires is like walking through a forcefield. The king of the Goths could make sparks come from his body. Radiant matter like dust particles settle on my neck and arms and legs and I wonder if I could make lasers come from my eyes. Just from looking, I reap all the wheat in one glance. The first time I thought it was a mosquito. But, no, in this one spot, there are no mosquitoes. There is nothing. No birds. No wind. Just corpses of wheat-slayers that came before. It is a black hole made with jumper cables and bobby pins.
But, the wires are also a place for resurrections, for magical, quasi-death-defying hyper-vitalism. Just beyond this point, every morning, there is in front of me on the dusty curb, one boy--who literally runs circles around me--who does hundreds of strenuous push-ups. He looks like he is made of jump rope. Bobbing up and down, he reaches to the sky between each rep and it looks like he is paying off some bad bet to the electricity gods; like an automaton, energy is his lifeblood.
He must have asked for something big, because the power has been cut for hours at a time. Hours that can be counted by tens. And he keeps doing these crazy push-ups. And though I know that when I get home I will have to throw out the milk from yesterday, I can literally see the current. It taunts and chides me. It is there. But it is not there. And I am trapped in a science fiction story written by a fourteen year old.
The truth is, they gave us a generator. A huge one. A private one. An orange one. Like the sunshine cutting through the pollution, our orange star is scary. In one minute, the carbon monoxide from it is equivalent to 100 cars. And its exhaust pipe points directly onto the security guard's chair.
In fact, after the first (and only) night we used it, I went outside to get the paper and the guard was slouching in his chair. And I thought, "Oh, God, we killed Ashok. The generator killed him." I prepared to go to the cross-wires and do push-ups. But then he shifted his body and I realized he was asleep. Since then it sits there cold, waiting.
But soon, the Heat. Will. Come. And though I know the current is buzzing overhead a few hundred meters away, it will fail us. And I will look for synonyms for swelter, though "hot" will be all I will be able to muster. And looking backwards and forwards, at the mosquitoes and the sun, playing electromagnetic hot potato, I wonder about all of these abandoned blackholes. This is my gigantic detail: When the heat comes, leave no victims or accomplices .
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