the dark night

The lights went out across the whole kampung one evening, all at once, the way they do in the rainy season. One second the house was bright and the fan was turning and the radio was going, and the next second there was nothing. Just dark, and quiet, and the fan slowing down with a sad little winding-down noise as it gave up. And then the whole street going ohhh together through the walls, every single house at the same time, like one big animal noticing something.

A blackout is exciting for about a minute. Then I remembered the ais cream.

We had ais cream in the freezer. A lot of it, a whole stack of tubs, because it had been on offer at the kedai. And a freezer with no power is not a freezer anymore. It is just a box. And a box is warm, compared to ice. Ais cream in a warming box does not sit around politely waiting for the power to come back. It goes soft. Then it goes to soup. And soup that was once ais cream can never be made back into ais cream. It can only be drunk, sadly, standing up, in the dark. And it was not just our freezer. Every house on the street had a dead freezer right now, and inside every one of them, ais cream was quietly beginning to melt.

This was an emergency. I love an emergency. An emergency is just a mission that arrives without you having to think it up.

So I organised a rescue. The kedai has a big chest freezer, and Pakcik runs a little generator for it, an engine that coughs away out the back and keeps that one freezer cold even when the whole street is black. So the plan was simple. Get all the ais cream out of all the dead freezers, and run it through the dark to Pakcik's freezer, before it melted. A cold rescue. I gave everyone jobs. Torch-bearers, to light the path through the dark lanes. Runners, to carry the tubs at speed. I made myself the cold marshal, in charge of all matters cold. I named the whole thing Operation Cold Front, which I was very proud of, and which nobody else used even once, not even me, by the second tub.

Kavi was a runner. Kavi runs everywhere and has never once met slow, and in the dark, at full speed, with a torch swinging everywhere, Kavi is not what you would call a precise instrument. I sent him to fetch the ais cream from his own house. He came back at a dead sprint and slammed a cold tub down in front of me, breathing hard.

"SAVED IT," shouted Kavi.

It was curry. Last night's curry. He had grabbed the wrong tub off the wrong shelf in the dark and run it across the kampung at top speed. But curry cannot melt. Curry is already a liquid. We could not save the curry. The curry was beyond saving and had been since it was cooked.

The convoy got going anyway. Torches bobbing down the dark lanes, runners passing tubs hand to hand, me at the freezer end calling them in. For about five minutes it was the finest operation I have ever run. A tub of strawberry, saved. A tub of corn, which is a real flavour here and a good one, saved. A tub that turned out, halfway across the kampung, to be frozen fish, carried by a runner who would not believe us when we told him it was not ais cream. The dark made everyone braver and worse at exactly the same time.

Then we hit the real problem, the one I had not thought about, because I never think about the real problem until it is standing in front of me in the dark holding a tub.

Pakcik's freezer only stays cold if you do not keep opening it. Every time you lift that lid, the cold falls out of it, and the little generator has to fight to make it cold all over again. So every single tub of ais cream we ran over and pushed in, opening the lid, was warming up all the tubs we had already saved. The rescue was eating itself. The more ais cream we rescued, the more we put at risk the ais cream already rescued. The kids stood around the freezer in the dark, arguing about the science of it, opening the lid to check whether it was working, and making it worse by checking. Which is exactly the kind of silly thing our whole gang would do.

We tried everything our own way first. We tried opening the lid only a tiny bit, which lets out exactly as much cold as opening it a lot, only slower. We appointed a Lid Officer. The Lid Officer was me.

"One at a time," I said. "I decide who opens it."

"You opened it last," said Divya.

"To check it was working."

"Checking is opening," said Divya.

The queue at the freezer turned into a small furious parliament in the dark, everybody holding a melting tub and a strong opinion about whose turn it was. We were arguing so hard that none of us noticed the makciks come up the lane.

Mak's friends. The makciks, the ones who somehow know everything before it has finished happening. It was a weeknight, so half the fathers on the street were across the Causeway in Singapore and not back till Friday. So the ones who came up the dark lane were the makciks, and they did not arrive flustered, and they did not arrive empty-handed. They came with candles. They came with a box of matches. One of them had a tin of biscuits, already open, already being handed round. They were not panicking about anything at all. They have lived through more blackouts than anyone can count, and one more dark night did not rattle them in the slightest.

They did not give a speech. One makcik just put her hand flat on the freezer lid.

"Nobody opens this now," she said. "We open it once."

And she sorted it. She held up a soft tub, then a hard one.

"Soft ones in the bowl, eat them now," she said. "Hard ones in the freezer. Lid stays down."

The too-far-gone tubs went into one big bowl, to be eaten tonight, before they died. The still-hard ones went into the freezer, all in one go, lid down, done. Another makcik lit candles all down the street, so the runners stopped tripping over each other in the dark. Another sat the panicking little ones down with the biscuit tin, which is the correct and only treatment for a panicking little one. They did it all with more food and far fewer words than we had been using, like it was nothing, like it was a Tuesday.

The ais cream that was too far gone to save did not go to waste. The makciks would not hear of it. It went into the one big bowl, half soup and half scoop, all the flavours running into each other. The whole street came and sat out on the steps in the candlelight and ate it together with spoons, before it could finish turning to soup. All of it. The saved tubs and the lost tubs, mixed together in the one bowl, going round the candlelit steps spoon by spoon.

The power did not come back for a long time. The whole street was out on the steps, the candles going, the makciks in the middle of it with the biscuit tin, the little ones sticky and calm. Somebody had a radio going low on a battery. The one bowl went round and round, spoon after spoon, until it was empty. A little one fell asleep sticky on a lap. The candles burned down. The lights stayed off, and the whole street stayed out in the warm dark, and nobody got up to check the switch.