The power went out at eleven forty-five PM.
Not a building issue — a section outage, the kind that happened in old Civil Lines neighbourhoods when the summer-adjacent monsoon months put strain on an electrical grid that had been scheduled for an upgrade for eleven years. She knew this because she had the municipal infrastructure data memorised and the Civil Lines section was in the red zone on the grid capacity chart.
The flat went dark. Both of them were still up — she in her bedroom with her laptop (now suddenly dark), he in his room presumably doing the same. She heard him go to the kitchen, heard the scratch of a match — she had candles, she had found them in the kitchen drawer on Day Two and left them there in case of exactly this contingency, which was the kind of contingency you prepared for when you had the ward-by-ward infrastructure data in your head.
She took her phone torch and went to the living room. He was already there with a candle on the coffee table, which gave the living room the specific amber quality of a room lit by a single flame, which was either atmospheric or inconvenient depending on your frame of mind. She was choosing inconvenient.
"Grid outage," she said. "Civil Lines section. Should be back in two to four hours."
"How do you know it's the grid and not the building?" he said.
"The streetlights are out," she said, gesturing to the window where the absence of the usual orange glow was visible. "Building issue would only affect the building."
He looked at the window. "You have the grid capacity data."
"I have the grid capacity data."
