💬 Power cuts in the 90s were the best evenings we had

In the 90s the power went off almost every evening around 7. We were 6 people in a small house. My grandmother lit a lantern and put it in the middle of the courtyard. Everyone came out because the rooms were too hot. No fan, no TV, nothing to look at, nothing to do. So we sat in a circle on a bedsheet and she started talking. Her best story was about a ghost in the tamarind tree behind her old village school. She told it differently each time. Sometimes the ghost had a limp, sometimes a green umbrella. My cousin Farhan was 7 and would hold my arm so hard it left marks. By the end he'd say he wasn't scared, while sitting on my foot. When the light came back, everyone groaned. Someone always shouted, no, not yet. My father would switch the fan on and the story just stopped, halfway through a sentence. We never found out how a lot of those stories ended. She took half of them with her. I asked my mother once and she said she'd always heard a different ending anyway, with a goat in it. Last week the power went off for 20 minutes in our building. Everyone went quiet. I looked around. Even my mother had her phone out, torch on, scrolling something. I started the story about the tamarind tree. They gave me about 40 seconds. Then the light came back and somebody said, finally. I didn't say anything.

A lantern in the middle of the courtyard and a bedsheet circle is the best picture of an evening I can imagine. Our power cuts meant a candle stuck in a steel plate and my uncle doing animal shadows on the wall. No fan, no TV, and still nobody wanted the lights back. Tell me more about the ghost in the tamarind tree. Did your grandmother ever change the ending?

Our power cuts meant the terrace. We lay on a mat counting satellites because someone said stars were boring. My mother told the same 3 stories each time, the cobra in the kitchen, the lost wallet, the wedding. We knew every line and corrected her when she skipped a bit. Last time I called her from Houston I asked for the cobra one. She'd forgotten the ending.