Nidhi Desai
1
The heat had been building all day, pressing down on Delhi like a smothering hand. By nightfall, the air felt thick enough to drink, and the streets carried the scent of dust, sweat, and faintly rotting garbage. Then, without warning, the city’s power grid collapsed. First the lights flickered, dimmed, and then everything snapped to black. A sudden hush fell over the neighborhood as the hum of air conditioners, refrigerators, and ceiling fans ceased all at once, leaving only the faint sounds of traffic in the distance. Ananya Mehra sat on the edge of her bed in her one-bedroom flat, beads of sweat already rolling down her temples, her cotton kurta clinging to her back. The silence was deafening. With a frustrated sigh, she rummaged through her drawer for matches and lit two half-melted candles, their yellow glow pushing back the darkness in small, trembling circles. Outside her window, the skyline of East Delhi had gone ghostly—an outline of shadowed buildings under a moonless sky.
The heat grew more unbearable with every passing minute. The fan above her head, dead and motionless, looked almost mocking. She tried opening a window, but the air outside was just as stifling, carrying only the occasional bark of strays and the faint echo of a car horn from some restless driver braving the darkened roads. She stood there, fanning herself with a magazine, when a knock sounded on her door. At first she froze, her heart leaping—power cuts often made people restless, sometimes even reckless—but then came a familiar voice, muffled through the wooden door. “Ananya? It’s Raghav. Does your inverter work?” She hesitated for a beat before unlatching the door, letting in her neighbor from across the hall. He stood in the doorway with a torchlight in one hand, sweat gleaming on his forehead, his T-shirt damp at the collar. Even the beam of the torch looked weak, swallowed by the oppressive darkness surrounding them.
“No luck,” she replied, her voice clipped. “The inverter’s been dead for weeks. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed.” He gave a short laugh, though it carried no real humor. “Same here. Guess that makes both of us useless tonight.” For a moment, neither spoke. The unspoken weight of the heat, of the city’s vulnerability, hung between them. She noticed how tired he looked, but there was a steadiness in his presence that felt oddly reassuring against the disorienting silence outside. He shifted, glancing past her into the candlelit flat, then back at her. “It might last all night,” he said, tone casual but edged with something like warning. She rolled her eyes lightly, though the thought unsettled her. A night without power in peak Delhi summer was more than an inconvenience—it was survival against sweat, mosquitoes, and sleeplessness.
When he left to check another neighbor’s flat, Ananya shut the door and leaned against it, closing her eyes. The flickering candles painted long shadows on the walls, stretching and shrinking like restless phantoms. The blackout wasn’t just outside anymore—it seeped into her mind, amplifying her solitude. She thought of the article her editor had demanded earlier that evening, now impossible to finish without power, and of her phone’s battery draining steadily on the table. Her apartment felt smaller than usual, suffocating, each minute stretching into an eternity. Somewhere beyond the window, a shout rose from the street, followed by laughter, then silence again. She realized how fragile the city felt without its electric heartbeat, how exposed everyone was in the pitch-dark summer. Yet, strangely, as she blew out one candle and shifted closer to the other, she couldn’t shake the sound of Raghav’s voice at her door—the mix of concern and dry humor, cutting through the oppressive quiet. It was only the first hour of the blackout, but Delhi’s night had already begun to unravel her carefully built walls.
2
Raghav returned a while later, his torchlight beam sweeping across the corridor before he stepped into Ananya’s flat with an awkward knock. She had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wavering flame of her candle as if it could somehow will the electricity back. When she looked up, his expression told her what she already suspected: the blackout wasn’t ending anytime soon. “The whole block’s out,” he said quietly, shutting the door behind him. “No generators, nothing. People downstairs are saying it could be a grid failure.” She groaned and rubbed her face, the sticky film of sweat making her skin feel alien. For a few moments, silence stretched between them, broken only by the faint buzz of insects outside. Finally, he cleared his throat. “It’s unbearable in my flat. Feels like the walls are sweating. Do you mind if I…?” He gestured vaguely, as though asking permission to linger. She hesitated—the thought of someone invading her private space unsettled her—but the heat, thick and merciless, made her relent.
They sat opposite each other on the floor, the single candle throwing their shadows onto the walls. At first their conversation was stiff, the kind of neighborly small talk they had avoided in the months since they’d exchanged polite hellos in the stairwell. He asked if her work was difficult in a city like this, always chasing chaos; she asked if his freelancing meant he was “one of those IT guys” who could live anywhere with Wi-Fi. Their words were accompanied by restless gestures—her pulling her hair up into a messy knot, him fanning himself with a folded newspaper. Outside, the occasional sound of a distant generator kicking in only underscored their own building’s isolation. With each passing minute, the room grew warmer, their clothes clinging tighter, the candle’s flame bending as though suffocated by the heat. “Feels like we’re trapped in an oven,” Raghav muttered, and Ananya let out a laugh, short and surprised. It was the first real crack in the heaviness of the night, and it lingered between them like an opening.
The blackout stretched on. They tried moving closer to the window, but the air outside was just as stagnant, carrying only the distant chatter of neighbors who had also gathered to escape their sweltering rooms. Ananya fetched two earthen pots of water she had filled that morning, their coolness dulled but still a small relief, and handed one to him. The act felt oddly intimate, like a gesture shared between companions rather than near-strangers. They drank in silence, the earthy taste mingling with the metallic tang of sweat on their lips. At one point, their eyes met across the small distance, the silence louder than any words. It was Raghav who broke it, his voice low: “You know, it’s strange. We’ve lived across from each other for months and barely spoken. And now here we are, sitting like old friends, because the city decided to shut down.” She smirked, but his words carried truth. The blackout wasn’t just stripping away power—it was peeling back their defenses.
By midnight, the apartment had become suffocating. Even the tiled floor radiated heat, pushing them closer together as they sought the faintest trace of comfort. They shifted positions, their knees nearly brushing, their conversation stumbling into more personal corners—family they rarely visited, ex-lovers who lingered like ghosts, the absurdities of Delhi life. Every word seemed easier than the last, as if the darkness itself demanded honesty. Yet, beneath the tentative camaraderie, a quiet tension hummed. They both knew this arrangement was temporary, born of necessity, but the closeness already felt like crossing into forbidden ground. When Ananya finally muttered, “You can stay here if you want… at least until the power’s back,” she surprised even herself. Raghav didn’t answer immediately, but the faint curve of his lips in the candlelight said enough. The city outside tossed and turned in the blackout, but inside her flat, two restless strangers had agreed to share the night.
3
The night dragged its weight into the flat, pressing down like a suffocating blanket. The candle had melted to a stub, leaving the room steeped in half-light, where every shadow looked deeper, more intimate. Ananya and Raghav shifted to the floor near the open window, though the air outside was as stagnant as the air inside, carrying only the faint, burnt smell of asphalt still radiating the day’s heat. Sweat clung to their bodies, trickling down the back of their necks, seeping into cotton shirts that now felt like damp rags. The walls of the flat, usually comforting in their solitude, seemed to close in with every passing hour. It wasn’t just the blackout that left them restless—it was the forced proximity, the awareness of another body breathing, fidgeting, existing so close in the dark. Claustrophobia wasn’t only about space; it was about the thinness of barriers, the knowledge that walls between them—both literal and emotional—were beginning to crumble.
They started by talking about Delhi summers, perhaps because it was the safest topic, the one both of them had endured year after year. Raghav described growing up in Chandigarh, where the heat was harsh but somehow less cruel than Delhi’s humid furnace. Ananya countered with childhood stories of standing in long queues at ration shops with her mother, sweat pooling at her collarbones, everyone’s tempers fraying like thin wires. The stories made them laugh softly, their voices carrying in the otherwise muted apartment, but laughter turned quickly into something else. Soon, they were comparing notes on work—the chaos of her journalism, always chasing after deadlines and scandals, and the quiet monotony of his freelance projects, where loneliness often crept in unnoticed. Their tones shifted between playful banter and confessional honesty, each admission pulling them further from the safety of small talk. The more the heat pressed down on them, the more words spilled out, as though sweat carried secrets to the surface.
Inevitably, the conversation circled toward relationships—those that had failed, those that had left scars. Raghav spoke in a low, almost reluctant tone about the woman he had left behind in Bangalore, how the distance between them had grown heavier than love could carry, and how he still wondered whether he had given up too easily. Ananya, in turn, admitted that she had perfected the art of running away before anything could take root—flings that fizzled out, promises never made, her restless independence always a shield. The confessions lingered in the air like smoke, thick and difficult to ignore. Neither of them had planned to speak of such things, yet the blackout demanded it; the oppressive heat seemed to melt away layers of pretension until only rawness remained. In the silence that followed, their eyes met briefly, long enough for both to realize that the distance between them had changed. They weren’t just neighbors anymore, not after words that exposed their softest parts.
The flat was unbearably hot, their clothes soaked, their bodies restless, yet neither suggested retreating to their own solitude. They sat shoulder to shoulder against the wall now, their knees occasionally brushing, each touch accidental but charged. Outside, Delhi lay muted in its darkness, punctuated by distant horns and the hum of insects, but inside the small room the world had narrowed to the soft rhythm of two voices and two breaths. The blackout had stolen electricity, but in its absence, it had given them something else—an intimacy unplanned, uninvited, yet undeniable. Ananya tilted her head back, staring at the shadowed ceiling, and murmured, “It feels like the city’s holding its breath.” Raghav glanced at her, the curve of her face lit by the dim flame, and replied softly, “Maybe we are too.” The words hung there, suspended in the humid air, a quiet acknowledgment that the first night without walls had already begun to reshape them.
4
The living room floor became their reluctant refuge, a patch of cool tiles covered with thin cotton sheets that did little to shield them from the oppressive heat. The fan remained still above their heads, mocking in its silence, while the air felt like soup—dense, wet, impossible to breathe fully. Ananya stretched out first, her hair tied up messily, one arm draped across her forehead as though shielding herself from the weight of the night. Raghav lay a little distance away, careful not to intrude, his body restless against the sheet that clung to his damp T-shirt. Outside, muffled voices of neighbors drifted in through the open window: complaints about the blackout, children crying from the discomfort, someone trying to calm a barking dog. It was a soundtrack of frustration that only heightened their awareness of each other’s quiet presence.
Sleep was impossible. Mosquitoes whined near their ears, slapping away swats that always came a moment too late. Ananya rolled onto her side, exhaling sharply as if the very act of lying still was unbearable. She tried shifting positions, folding one leg under the other, but nothing helped. Her restlessness carried into the room, filling the silence until Raghav shifted as well, sitting up briefly to adjust his pillow before lying down again. Their movements became an unsynchronized rhythm, like two insomniacs dancing around the edges of discomfort. The longer the night stretched, the more the room felt alive with the sound of their breaths, shallow and uneven, punctuated by sighs that betrayed more than they intended. Neither spoke, yet words seemed unnecessary; the silence itself was heavy, humming with everything they weren’t saying.
At some point, their arms brushed—an accidental graze born of narrow space and shifting bodies. It was nothing more than skin against skin, slick with sweat, but it crackled with a force both of them felt instantly. Ananya froze for a fraction of a second, her eyes snapping open to stare into the shadows, her breath hitching in her throat. Raghav remained still, though the tension in his body was undeniable. The contact was fleeting, yet it lingered like a spark refusing to die. Neither pulled away immediately, as though hesitation itself had grown roots. The blackout might have killed electricity, but in that moment, something surged between them—raw, unspoken, and entirely out of their control. It was not desire in its full blaze, not yet, but the fragile tremor of something waiting to be acknowledged.
The rest of the night unfolded in fragments of half-sleep and sudden awakenings. Ananya found herself listening to the sound of Raghav’s breathing, steady but slightly strained, as though he too was fighting the weight of wakefulness. She wondered if he was aware of her every movement, the way she was of his. The mosquitoes, the heat, the sticky sheets—all of it became secondary to the awareness of proximity. At one point, she turned and caught his outline in the dim candle glow, his face softened in the shadows, his arm flung carelessly across his chest. She told herself it was nothing, just the delirium of exhaustion and heat, yet her pulse betrayed her, thudding louder than the muffled city outside. When dawn finally began to creep through the window, painting the room in a gray half-light, neither of them had truly slept. They remained there on the floor, two bodies caught between discomfort and something much more dangerous—the unspoken current running deeper than the silence of a powerless city.
5
Morning seeped into the flat like a dull bruise, gray light filtering through the window, heavy and unsparing. The electricity had not returned, and with it came the realization that the city itself was beginning to boil over. From the streets below rose the clamorous sounds of Delhi waking to discomfort: horns blaring longer than usual, vendors shouting louder, neighbors grumbling from balconies, their patience already thinning under the relentless heat. Ananya stood at the window, hair tied high to keep sweat from her neck, scribbling notes into her worn notebook. She was restless, her journalist’s instinct stirred by the unrest swelling outside. A city in blackout was not just an inconvenience—it was a story, and her fingers itched to shape it. Behind her, Raghav stretched lazily on the floor where they had spent the sleepless night, watching her with quiet curiosity. When she muttered that she needed to go out, to see it for herself, he surprised both of them by saying, “I’ll come with you.”
The streets were alive with a chaotic energy that only Delhi could muster. Rickshaw pullers cursed under their breath as they wiped sweat from their brows, shopkeepers argued over the price of melting ice blocks, and clusters of men had gathered on corners to blame the government, their voices rising like a chorus of frustration. Children ran barefoot, delighted by the rare freedom of traffic slowed by darkened signals. Chai vendors were doing brisk business, their kettles hissing angrily, steam rising like protest banners in the morning heat. Ananya weaved through it all with the ease of someone who had done this countless times—dodging, listening, noting, her pen scratching furiously in her notebook. Raghav, unused to such immersion, found himself falling into step beside her, mirroring her movements almost unconsciously. He carried no notebook, yet he watched with the keen attention of a man observing both the city and the woman who seemed so alive within it.
At first, their rhythm together felt accidental—his pause matching her pause, his stride quickening when she quickened. But as the minutes stretched, it began to feel deliberate, as though their bodies were learning to navigate the chaos in tandem. She would stop to listen to a vendor railing against the power cut, and he would lean subtly closer, shielding her from jostling shoulders. She would dart into a knot of people to catch a snippet of conversation, and he would wait just outside, his eyes scanning the crowd, ready to guide her back with a simple glance. Neither spoke much, but the silence between them was companionable, a shared awareness born of necessity and something quieter, more unspoken. The chaos of Delhi became a backdrop, a stage on which their proximity gained an unexpected intimacy. Ananya noticed it in small details—the way their arms occasionally brushed when they walked too close, the way his hand hovered as though ready to steady her without presuming. Raghav noticed it in her focus, the fierce determination that softened only when she looked up from her notes and gave him a quick, conspiratorial smile.
By late morning, the sun had turned vicious, hammering down on the city with white-hot insistence. The protests grew louder, tempers sharper, yet Ananya and Raghav moved almost effortlessly together through it all, as though the blackout had tuned them into the same frequency. Back at the flat, when they finally returned with sweat dripping from their brows and dust clinging to their clothes, Ananya collapsed onto the cool tile floor with a laugh that was half-exhaustion, half-triumph. She had her story now—anger, resilience, survival in the heart of a sleepless city. Raghav stretched out beside her, shaking his head, but his lips curved into a smile that matched hers. “You make chaos look easy,” he said, and she shot back, “You make following me around look easy.” It was a teasing exchange, but beneath it lay something truer: for the first time since the blackout began, the city hadn’t felt unbearable. Not when they had been moving in sync, learning each other’s rhythms amid Delhi’s endless noise.
6
Back inside the flat, the silence felt softer than it had the night before. The air was still heavy, their clothes still clung to their skin, yet the earlier restlessness had shifted into something almost companionable. Ananya dropped her notebook on the table and headed straight for the kitchen, her body moving with that peculiar mix of exhaustion and hunger. Raghav followed, leaning against the doorway with an amused expression as she rummaged through the sparse supplies. “You don’t cook much, do you?” he asked, noting the almost-empty shelves. She shot him a look over her shoulder. “I cook when I have to. Mostly I survive on street food and deadlines.” He chuckled, then offered to help. Together they began pulling together what they could: a few ripe mangoes, stale bread, a packet of butter softening too quickly in the heat, and water still cool in the earthen matkas by the window.
The small gas stove hissed to life, and soon the faint scent of toasting bread filled the cramped kitchen. Raghav handled the pan while Ananya sliced the mangoes with the clumsy precision of someone not used to sharing the task. The air inside grew hotter with the flame, sweat rolling down their temples, but neither complained. Instead, laughter slipped out more easily than it should have. She teased him for fussing over the bread like it was fine cuisine; he teased her back for cutting uneven slices of mango, declaring one piece “criminally thin.” Their voices carried, rising and falling in playful tones that pushed back against the oppressive weight of the blackout. By the time they carried the makeshift meal to the living room, their shoulders had brushed more than once, and the nearness no longer felt awkward—it felt expected, even necessary.
They ate sitting cross-legged on the floor, plates balanced precariously on their knees. The mangoes were soft and sweet, their juice sticky on their fingers, and the bread tasted better than it had any right to, crisped just enough to remind them of comfort. The cool water from the matkas soothed their parched throats, each sip earthy and grounding. Yet it wasn’t the food itself that made the moment feel full—it was the sharing. Each bite was punctuated by laughter, by small stories traded without hesitation, by the quiet rhythm of two people rediscovering the simple joy of eating in another’s company. Sweat trickled freely down their backs, but they no longer seemed to notice, too caught up in the ease of it all. For a little while, the blackout receded, replaced by something warmer, brighter, built out of toast, fruit, and unguarded smiles.
When the plates were empty, they lingered. Ananya licked mango juice from her wrist and laughed at herself, and Raghav handed her a napkin with a grin that held more softness than he intended to reveal. The light from the lone candle painted them in gold, blurring edges, making the room feel smaller, more intimate. Hunger had been sated, yet something else stirred quietly in the spaces between their words, a hunger neither had named yet but both had begun to feel. The city outside was still restless, still protesting, still sleepless, but inside this little flat the chaos dulled. They were full, not just from food but from presence—from the act of breaking bread together in the dark, of finding sweetness in mangoes and in each other’s company. For the first time since the blackout began, the night ahead didn’t feel daunting. It felt like something to share.
7
The night returned with a weight that felt even heavier than before, the heat hanging in the flat like a curtain that refused to lift. The candles burned low, their light soft and wavering, and the streets outside had quieted into an uneasy lull, broken only by the occasional shout or rumble of a passing scooter. Ananya and Raghav lay once again on the cotton sheets spread across the living room floor, neither pretending anymore that sleep would come easily. The heat had stolen rest from them, and in its place it offered something else: a strange, unguarded intimacy. Their earlier laughter from the shared meal had faded, replaced by a silence that stretched and thickened until it demanded to be broken. It was Raghav who finally spoke, his voice quiet, almost tentative, as though afraid the night itself might overhear.
He told her about Bangalore, about the woman he had once loved with a certainty that now felt foolish in retrospect. He described how their lives had slowly unraveled, not with betrayal or anger, but with distance that widened until they were strangers sharing the same bed. “She wanted more than I could give,” he said, staring at the ceiling as though the shadows might hold answers. “And I thought I wanted freedom. Turns out, I wasn’t ready for either.” His words were slow, deliberate, as if each one cost him effort, but when they finally settled into the humid air, he felt lighter. Ananya listened without interrupting, her body turned slightly toward him, her expression softened by the flickering candlelight. She could hear the strain in his voice, the undercurrent of guilt and longing, and for the first time she saw him not just as the quiet neighbor across the hall, but as a man carrying his own unfinished stories.
When she finally spoke, her words came with a rush, surprising even herself. She admitted how she had built walls around her life, how every relationship she had allowed herself to step into ended the same way: with her pulling back before anyone could get too close. “Commitment feels like a trap to me,” she confessed, her voice husky from the heaviness of the room. “I convince myself it’s independence, but maybe it’s just fear. Fear of needing someone. Fear of being needed.” She laughed softly at her own candor, though the sound was brittle. “My editor tells me I’m married to my work. Maybe he’s right.” The confession lingered between them, vulnerable and raw, and though the air was thick, she felt a strange relief, as if the heat itself had burned away her ability to hide.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty this time—it was charged, dense with the weight of everything they had laid bare. Their closeness was no longer just a matter of physical space but of shared honesty, of secrets spilled in the darkness that the daylight might never allow. Raghav turned his head toward her, their faces inches apart, the faint glow of the candle catching the sheen of sweat on her skin. “Maybe it’s not fear,” he said softly. “Maybe you just hadn’t found the right person to stay for.” She didn’t answer, but her eyes held his, steady and searching, as if daring him to believe his own words. In the oppressive heat, honesty had become a kind of relief, a balm against the sleeplessness. They lay there, not touching, not moving, yet closer than they had ever been—two bodies and two hearts cracked open by the night, finding unexpected solace in the confessions that the blackout demanded.
8
The night was restless, but in the flat it felt as though time had begun to bend, stretching into something softer, slower. Outside, Delhi murmured and shifted in its blackout haze—distant shouts, the whine of a generator struggling, the occasional bark of a dog—but none of it seemed to matter within the candlelit room. Ananya and Raghav sat close, their backs against the same wall, silence wrapping around them after the heavy confessions of earlier. The air was thick, clinging to their skin, and every movement felt amplified: the rise and fall of breath, the sound of shifting fabric, the faint brush of a knee against a knee. It was a silence that no longer felt empty or awkward—it was alive, pulsing with something neither of them had named but both of them felt pressing harder with every passing second.
The first touch was almost nothing: his hand brushing against her wrist as he reached to adjust the dying candle. Yet the contact lingered, neither of them pulling away immediately. Her skin burned under his fingertips, though the room was already suffocatingly hot. Ananya turned her head, and their eyes met in the wavering glow. It was not the look of neighbors or even new friends—it was heavier, longer, a look that acknowledged every secret, every restless thought the blackout had drawn to the surface. She should have said something, should have broken the moment with a joke or a deflection, but the heat made denial impossible. Instead, she let her wrist stay under his hand, and he let his thumb trace the faintest line across her skin, a gesture small but impossibly loud in the silence.
Hesitation blurred quickly, swept away by the weight of proximity and sleepless nights. His hand slid higher, tentative but unrelenting, and she shifted closer without thought, her body leaning into the gravity that had been pulling them together since the power cut began. The kiss was sudden, raw, their mouths meeting with the urgency of two people starved for relief—relief from heat, from loneliness, from holding themselves back for too long. Sweat slicked their skin, every touch damp and desperate, but neither cared. The blackout made the world outside irrelevant; there was only the press of bodies, the frantic need to hold and be held. Their laughter from earlier, their confessions, their silences—all of it dissolved into the physical language of touch, hands roaming, breaths colliding, the sheets beneath them wrinkling under their movements.
The city outside remained alive and unsettled, but within the flat, the chaos melted into rhythm. Their bodies found one another in the dark, not with the practiced grace of lovers but with the clumsy urgency of people who had broken through a barrier they hadn’t known how to cross. Every sound seemed magnified—the catch of her breath, the low rumble of his voice against her neck, the rustle of fabric as they shed layers too heavy for the heat. The blackout blurred hesitation into inevitability, and the line between comfort and desire disappeared entirely. When at last they stilled, breathless and tangled, the air around them seemed no less heavy, yet it carried a different charge. The heat of Delhi’s summer had merged with the heat within them, and for the first time in nights, the blackout felt less like a punishment and more like the strange, necessary darkness that had revealed them to each other.
9
The days bled into each other, the blackout stretching far longer than anyone had expected. What had begun as an inconvenience became a way of life, and within the flat, Ananya and Raghav found themselves falling into a rhythm that felt strangely natural. Mornings were spent leaning out of the balcony to catch the faintest breeze, afternoons sprawled on the cool tiled floor with slices of mango or bottles of lukewarm water, and nights tangled together on thin cotton sheets, their bodies restless and searching. The city outside grew more chaotic with each passing day—streets filled with protests, tempers flaring at water queues, children crying in the heat—but inside, their world had shrunk to the quiet intimacy of two people no longer pretending to be strangers. They laughed more easily now, touched without hesitation, and spoke with the kind of raw honesty that only sleepless nights could bring.
It was no longer possible to tell where necessity ended and desire began. They had stopped thinking of their closeness as a temporary lapse born of discomfort, and instead moved through the days as if they had always shared a space, always known each other’s rhythms. Ananya would scold him for fussing over the tea on the gas stove; he would tease her for scribbling furious notes even when her phone battery was dead. At night, the heavy air became both punishment and catalyst, sweat-slicked skin finding comfort against comfort, their bodies learning each other’s language in the dark. Yet, amid the closeness, a small unease began to creep in—a question neither dared to voice. Was it the blackout that had bound them together, or had the blackout merely stripped away what they had been too guarded to admit before?
The city buzzed with rumors that the grid would be restored soon. Neighbors exchanged hopeful whispers in stairwells, shopkeepers promised that normalcy was only a day or two away, and even the protests on the street took on a sharper edge of anticipation. Inside the flat, the news landed like a stone dropped into still water. They both smiled at the possibility of relief—of fans whirring again, of chilled water, of nights without mosquitoes—but the smiles didn’t quite reach their eyes. Power meant more than electricity. It meant the return of walls, of routines, of the distractions that had been stripped away. In the silence that followed the rumors, both of them felt the same tug of dread: would their connection survive when the city woke up again? Or would it fade like candlelight in the glare of restored power?
That evening, they sat together on the balcony, the city below restless with expectation. The heat clung to them as always, but their silence felt different now, heavier, laced with the awareness of something fragile at stake. Ananya leaned her head against the railing, watching shadows stretch across the street, while Raghav sat beside her, his hand resting close to hers but not quite touching. Neither voiced the question hanging between them, yet it hovered in every glance, every unfinished sentence. Was this closeness only a fever born of blackout and heat, or had something real taken root in the darkness? The answer was uncertain, but as the night deepened and the city held its breath for the return of light, they found themselves holding each other anyway, as if bracing against the inevitability of change.
10
The moment arrived without warning. One evening, as they sat together in the half-dark, a low hum broke the silence. The ceiling fan above them shuddered, then began to spin, lazily at first and then with steady purpose. A gasp escaped Ananya’s lips as the bulbs flickered and finally flooded the flat with a hard, artificial brightness. The sudden light seemed almost violent after days of shadows. Raghav blinked against it, shielding his eyes, and for a moment neither of them moved. The familiar whir of the fan and the harsh glow of electricity should have brought relief, and it did, but threaded within that relief was something else—an ache that the cocoon of darkness had been broken, the fragile world they had built torn open by the return of routine.
The silence between them in that moment was not awkward, but it was weighted, as if both were waiting for the other to speak first. Around them, the flat looked suddenly smaller and messier, every wrinkle in the sheets and every unwashed plate glaring under the unforgiving bulb. What had felt intimate in candlelight now stood exposed, the magic stripped bare by the return of power. Ananya felt a pang of loss, realizing that the blackout had created a different universe, one where inhibitions had melted with the heat and truths had emerged unguarded. Now, with the light back, there was no more hiding—no shadows to blur the lines, no darkness to hold them suspended in a timeless in-between. And yet, even as the brightness demanded clarity, neither of them shifted away.
Raghav reached for her hand, slow but deliberate, as if testing whether the connection forged in the blackout could survive in the glare of restored order. His fingers found hers, and she didn’t pull back. The electricity running through the room no longer came only from the wires—it was still there, alive between their palms, steady and undeniable. They stood together in the hum of machines springing back to life, hearing neighbors cheer and clap in the distance, generators shutting down one by one, the city roaring awake after its long silence. For everyone else, this was a return to normal. For them, it was a moment of reckoning. They knew they could no longer dismiss what had happened as desperation born of heat or accident born of proximity. The truth had been stripped bare in the blackout, and light could not erase it.
As they looked at one another in the brightness, the awareness settled between them: the spell might be over, but what it revealed was real. The blackout had forced them into closeness, yes, but it had also peeled away their defenses, showing them the hunger, the loneliness, and the tenderness they had carried quietly for too long. Now, with the city rushing back into its relentless pace, they stood rooted in place, choosing not to retreat into distance. The hum of the fan and the glare of the light were no longer intrusions but witnesses to a bond that had survived both dark and dawn. In that stillness, their silence was no longer the silence of uncertainty, but of understanding. They knew what had happened in the blackout wasn’t just the fever of summer—it was truth, raw and unhidden, revealed when Delhi went dark.
End
