Life with electricity

What’s that again?

I have often received envious comments from fellow married cousins and friends in Pakistan on how lucky I am to be living ‘alone’. I can understand why a person living in a household of ten people would fancy an independent lifestyle, but this independence does come at the cost of loneliness, which is not always as glamorous as thought of.

Being alone does funny things to you. When you discover you have no one to visit or call in your day time without waking them up in their middle of the night, very soon strange things add to your friends list. Your laptop becomes your best friend, your x-box – a dear cousin, mobile – a faithful lover, and the telly a shoulder you can always rely on.

Basically, technology starts replacing the role of human beings in your daily life. What makes this alliance with technology easier is the fact that, believe it or not, here in Europe we get electricity 24 hours a day! Hence, we really don’t need people to entertain ourselves when everything else fails.

Three years back, when I was still in Pakistan, and when this loadshedding conundrum had just begun, my siblings and I used to have plans on how to kill time when there was no electricity. We had our ludo board and the emergency light ready to beat the one hour without light. Then there was light again for an hour, in which we would quickly complete our electricity-related chores (log in facebook) and seat ourselves back in front of the ludo table right in time for the next round of loadshedding. Of course, that was three years ago, when we had just started becoming familiarised with life without electricity; I am sure now they have figured out newer ways to deal with that light-free time.

The hardest part of loadshedding for Pakistanis is definitely the loss of the air conditioner and fan, their saviours from heat. Where I live, I don’t even have an air conditioner or fan in my house. The few weeks of summer that are fairly hot here, around 23, 24 degree celcius maybe, I just open my flat’s windows to get some fresh air, and that’s enough to subdue the heat. I am not scared of bugs or flies entering my house from these open windows, because strangely, these creatures are only present in ample population in Pakistan. Here, we get quite excited if we see a bug crawling in our apartment.

As far as light is concerned, in the long summer days we don’t need to turn on our lights till at least 9 pm, and for a new mother like me that is close to bed time anyways. So, come to think of it, my use of electricity is quite less than that of my family back in Pakistan. While, they need electricity to actually survive, I need it just for luxuries, but these luxuries are, as a matter of fact, necessities for me, because I cannot imagine a life without my gadgets.

Just because I enjoy a life with full time electricity does not; however, mean that I am not affected by the loadshedding in Pakistan. It has often interrupted my very important skype video chat sessions with beloveds. As soon as we are in the middle of sharing a joke or even better, juicy gossip, the connection fails. Suddenly my sister is offline, and I know – it’s loadshedding time. I don’t know what she does in that one or sometimes two hours when her internet is disabled, but I surely feel bored staring at my laptop screen waiting for her electricity to come back.

We have to owe this much to loadshedding though: it is trying its best to ensure that we Pakistanis living abroad do not feel left out from the fascinating life back home without electricity.