When The Building Came Alive
The lights would go out without warning.
For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt.
“Yayyy!”
It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission.
Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside.
Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades.
My earliest memory is of living in a vatara—a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vysya Bank. My uncle worked at the bank’s head office in Karur, and whenever he visited the Bangalore office, he would stay with us.
We lived there for a few years before moving to another vatara on 17th Cross, right next to the MSIL Apartments.
That house gave me one of the most important discoveries of my childhood: the circulating library.
Cynosure Circulating Library was barely a hundred feet from where we lived. A group of us children would run there almost every day to pick up a book. The rental was fifty paise per day, and I was under strict instructions to borrow only one book at a time.
Talk about value for money.
A large part of my reading habit was probably formed during those years. The library was close enough to feel like an extension of our home, and books became something I could reach for every day rather than something reserved for school.
We then moved to Dattaprasad Apartments. It was a beautiful three-bedroom apartment and probably the first proper apartment we had lived in. Strangely, my brother and I found it eerie. Moving from one room to another, especially at night, made us uncomfortable. There was something about the place that neither of us could explain.
We stayed there for only about a year before moving to Kasturi Dhama Apartments.
Kasturi Dhama was a one-bedroom apartment, much smaller than Dattaprasad. By then, our lives had changed in many ways. Yet there was something sacred about the building.
Some of the older residents told us that Jayendra Saraswati Swamigal of the Kanchi Mutt had performed the groundbreaking ceremony. There was also a small Ganesha temple within the apartment complex.
We lived there for close to two decades.
I completed my tenth standard there. Then II PUC. Engineering. My first job. Eventually, I left for the United States to study.
Almost every important milestone of my early life passed through that one-bedroom apartment.
Kasturi Dhama did not merely house us. In many ways, it raised us.
And some of my strongest memories of the building begin when the electricity disappeared.
The moment the power went out, children would come downstairs. We played hide-and-seek, wandered through the corridors, talked about nothing in particular, and simply enjoyed being outside together.
The common areas had generator backup, so an unusual reversal took place: the homes were dark, but the building was lit.
On ordinary days, the light drew everyone inward. During a power failure, the darkness brought everyone out.
If the outage happened on the day of a Satyanarayana Pooja or Sankashta Chaturthi, it was even better. The temple area would remain illuminated by the generator while the apartments stayed dark. The priest’s wife would prepare wonderfully spicy channa sundal, and all of us would wait impatiently for the prasadam.
During exam season, the common areas transformed into study halls. Children sat together under the emergency lights, working through mathematics problems or trying to understand refraction and diffraction in physics.
I am not sure how much studying actually happened. But there was comfort in struggling through the same problems together.
Sometimes, I would walk to the nearby Hanuman temple. At other times, I would meet a friend from outside the apartment and wander through Malleswaram in search of chaat. There was never any shortage of good food nearby, nor did we need much of a plan.
We did not have a table-tennis table in the building, so we created one. An office desk became our makeshift table, and we played round-robin tournaments on it. The dimensions were probably wrong, the bounce must have been terrible, and the setup would not have survived any serious inspection.
None of that mattered.
We had a table because we had decided it was a table.
Today, power failures are less frequent. And when they do happen, batteries, inverters, phones and mobile data quickly fill the gap. There is rarely a reason to leave the house. A screen remains available somewhere.
Progress has made our homes brighter and our lives more convenient. I would not pretend that unreliable electricity was something to be romanticized. It interrupted work, studying, cooking and sleep. For adults, it was often simply frustrating.
But childhood remembers selectively.
It remembers the cheer when the lights went out.
It remembers children pouring into the common areas, neighbors talking, prasadam being shared, lessons being discussed and games being invented from whatever was available.
We thought we were waiting for the power to return.
For a few hours, the apartments went dark.
And the building came alive.
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