In our village, bijli did not go for a few hours. It went for days.
Sometimes a week. You would forget what your own bulb looked like when it was on. The switch stayed on the wall and everybody still pressed it out of habit while walking into a room. Nothing happened. Then somebody lit the lantern and the evening carried on.
We had a television. It sat under a cloth like a piece of furniture. Doordarshan ran a movie on the weekend. Shaktimaan came and went. Half the country watched it. We heard about it afterwards, from cousins who lived in town.
Because town had a solution. Somebody there had turned the power cut into a business. You could go to a shop and rent a battery for the night. Carry it home in the evening, watch your movie, return it the next morning, pay for one night. The shop charged it up again and rented it out to the next house. Clean little business. He did not fix the electricity. He just charged money for the gap between what people wanted and what they were getting.
But town was town. We could not just go and come back. So we skipped.
That was normal. Movie hai? Bijli nahi hai. Bas. Theek hai. You slept early.
Then one evening the younger uncles did something.
They walked out to where the tractor was standing, opened it up, pulled the battery out, and carried it into the house. Connected it to the television. And the TV came on.
I was small. I remember standing there, and it was not the movie that got me. It was the idea. It had never occurred to me that a tractor and a television had anything to do with each other. A tractor belonged to the field. A television belonged to the room. In my head those were two separate worlds and the wall between them was solid.
That night the wall came down.
After that, I became a nuisance. Every time something worth watching was coming, I would go to my father. Battery le aayiye na. Sometimes he said yes. Sometimes he said no. The no was not strictness. Pulling a battery out of a tractor is not a small job. Somebody has to walk out there, loosen it, carry that weight back, connect it, and then reverse the whole thing before five in the morning when the tractor is needed. And if it gets drained on a three hour movie, the tractor does not start, and a full day of work in the khet is gone.
So every movie was a negotiation. Every movie needed a favour. And a child asking for a favour learns very fast that the answer depends on the mood of the day.
Then Bhoora chacha did his thing.
He did not take the battery out. He left it sitting exactly where it was, inside the tractor, and ran the connection out to it instead. The way you start a dead car off a running one, two clips and a cable. He pulled a line from the tractor battery to the house. A bulb on one side, the television on the other.
Nothing was removed from anywhere. The tractor did not lose an organ. It worked in the field all day, came back in the evening, stood in its usual spot, and quietly ran our TV.
We had an inverter. We just did not call it that, because nobody in our house had heard the word yet.
I have thought about those two evenings many times, because from the outside they look identical. Both nights the TV was on. Both nights we watched the movie. If you only counted the result, the uncles and Bhoora chacha did the same job.
They did not do the same job at all.
The uncles solved it. Chacha ended it.
The first way needed a person every single time. It needed my father to be free. It needed somebody strong enough to lift the thing. It needed the tractor to not be wanted early next morning. Remove any one of those and there is no movie. It was a solution held up by a favour, and favours run out.
The second way needed nobody. Chacha did the work once, on one evening, and then it kept working on its own for years. Nobody had to be asked. Nobody had to be thanked. A small boy did not have to stand near his father and make his case.
That is the part I keep coming back to. A fix that only works when somebody agrees to it is not really a fix. It is a request with a good success rate.
And the other thing sits underneath all of it. In town, people were paying for a battery every night. A real business, real money, nobody cheating anybody. But that whole business stood on one belief. That a battery is something you go and get from somewhere else.
We had one in the courtyard the entire time. Out in the open. Covered in dust. Doing one job only, because that was the only job we had ever seen it do.
We were not short of a battery. We were short of the thought.
I notice now that most of what I need works the same way. It is already parked close by, doing something else, filed so firmly under one heading that I cannot see it. The friend who could actually make that introduction. The thing I learned in an old job that fits this new problem exactly. The hour in the day I keep calling wasted instead of using. Nothing has to be bought. Something has to be noticed, and then connected.
I think about Bhoora chacha whenever I catch myself asking for the same thing a second time. Then a third. The asking is not the problem. The repeating is the signal. Somewhere in there a wire could be run once, and after that nobody would have to ask again.
He was not teaching us anything, by the way. He had no lesson in mind. He just did not feel like walking out to that tractor every weekend.
That is usually how it goes. The people who fix things properly are rarely trying to be clever. They are just tired of doing the same work twice.
~Vazhi
P.S. Every village had a Bhoora chacha. Somebody who ran a wire, fixed a pump with a bicycle spoke, made one thing quietly do two jobs. Hit reply and tell me what yours did. I read every reply.