This is going to be a long night for me. Time seems to have slowed down. I am looking forward to falling asleep and waking up to a normal world. I don't want to force myself into sleep. I want it to happen naturally so that I can dream.

To pine my hopes on sleeping and dreaming is a weird thing to do. This is the hopeful me talking. The practical me has always been saying this is my reality. I need to get to the bottom of this and solve it, like a puzzle. I will have to figure it out successfully for the world to be restored to how it was before, for the people to be back along with my Anna.

I walk into the kitchen and put the cup into the washbasin. I throw out the tea leaves from the vessel and keep it adjacent to the cup. I will wash them later on. The tea has made me hungry. I open the fridge once again in the hope of finding something new and exciting in it. But it doesn’t happen. The contents are the same as in the morning. I think I will have the rice and leftover curries. Not now though.

Our staple food is rice. I have grown up having rice two times a day. For breakfast, we do have things made of rice powder which has been made into a batter. Dosa and Idli are just that. They are rice products. Over time I have grown less fond of it. I have come to like rotis and chapatis more. A major part of this shift must be attributed to the food I got back in my college days. The rice that was served was of a different variety as compared to the one we had in our home. Brown rice.

In college, since they had to feed the masses, they resorted to cheaper white rice. I don't like that. I don't eat much but when I eat I want to eat something I like. Somedays when we used to go out to a vegetarian restaurant to have their meals, I would opt for brown rice.

After college, I had to leave the state and go to the northern part of the country for my job. Here it was predominantly wheat. They preferred wheat over rice. Chapatis and rotis are the staple food. When I had them, I liked them. It took me time to realize that the people here are very much conscious of the wheat products they consume. They won’t tolerate any impurity in it. Having seen the difference in the rotis that are served here and in my hometown, I realized the wheat flour we got was adulterated with cheaper materials. We were not getting the original stuff.

I decided to have what was available to me locally. I loved it. In fact, it was not something unfamiliar to me. Since our family had to move out of the state because of the transferable nature of the job my parents had, I have been subject to a culture different from our native one. My mom embraced it and it seeped into her cooking. She would make all kinds of stuff with wheat for me. I loved it back then. this just got rejuvenated when I moved cities.

I refrain from having rice at my workplace. I only have it at home. I don't consume a lot of it though. I take what is necessary and enjoy it. The switch in eating habits came about for the same reason.

The only thing I have learned to cook is rice. I learned it after coming here. When she leaves for her department, I cook the rice in the daytime so that we can have it for our meals in the following days. I don't make much of it though. She doesn’t like to store food for long in the fridge. She keeps them at max for a couple of days, after which she discards them. It means more cooking, but that's okay because they are fresher.

I want to learn to cook. It is just that I feel lazy and don't take an effort in that direction. I have been thinking of learning to make dough for rotis and chapattis. It is an easy process. But my laziness prevents me from starting it. I want to progress in a step-by-step manner. I made a Caesar salad once. It was easy. Salads are easy. They don't involve cooking. One day I want to make a meal for the two of us. Rice, curry, sautéed veggies, and maybe a chicken item. There is a long way to go for me to achieve it. Given the current circumstances, I think the process will be sped up if I want to eat something fresh.

I walk up to the sofa, pick up the bag and open it. I take out the chargers and the walkie-talkie. I need to put it for charging. The indicator in the charging station should tell me when it is fully charged. I am dependent on it. There is no other way to know the state of the battery. I take out the torch also. I leave the other non-electronic contents in it. I will have to charge the torch. It can't be trusted without being charged.

There is only one power plug that draws power from the inverter in the house. This is a neat ploy implemented to reduce the draining of the inverter battery by plugging in multiple things to charge. The objective of the inverter is to provide enough power for lighting to get by the night and into the day. Fans are also added to it to give you a better sleep. Otherwise, the heat would get to you at night. You need fans for the 365 nights you intend to sleep peacefully.

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The backup duration of the inverter solely depends on the amount of power you are using and the number of batteries hooked up. It is normally a single battery. You can add more to it, thereby increasing its capacity. I think connecting extra batteries in parallel would do the trick. I don't know much about it. I have seen the same setup in homes powered by solar energy. They have lots of batteries connected to the solar grid. They are powerful enough to run the house entirely on solar energy. They are gaining traction throughout the country. Some states have even started to buy the electricity being produced by the solar grid in the house. It is a novel idea that should propel the way we power our homes in the future. In the current scenario, I feel it is not worth the initial cost of investment required. The batteries also will need to be replaced after five or six years, thus increasing the maintenance cost it incurs over time. For it to be truly successful, the costs should come down along with some battery technology that makes them more powerful, more efficient, and less susceptible to maintenance.

I pick up the mobiles from the sofa. They are not showing any network. They are dead. I am considering whether I should charge them or not. They can come in handy though, like the flashlight. Anyways their battery percentage hasn’t decreased much. Her phone is in the nineties. Mine is in the seventies. I toss them onto the dining table.

On the study table, I see the power bank. I pick it up and check it. Half of its power remains. I need to change this too. I take the extension cable lying at the corner of the table and plug it into the socket. It is a five-socket extension. I put the walkie-talkie to charge in one of them and the power bank in the other. I go into our bedroom and take out the charger for the torch from the heap of stuff lying near the cupboard. I plug it in to charge the torch. The mobiles can wait. I don’t want to put too much load on the inverter. It might trip off.

The night has barely started and it seems I have nothing else to do. I can sit and sulk. It can go on for hours. Or I can lie down and sulk. That way maybe I might fall asleep. But there is a high chance of waking up in between. Now is not the time to sleep. I can't. She can. She need not be tired or sleepy for that. She can lie down and fall asleep in a matter of minutes. She has developed this skill for her lifestyle from her work. Having had no fixed schedule as to how her duty might pan out, she had to learn to get a wink whenever she could. Somedays she sleeps like a log after coming back from doing a back-to-back night and day stint. Then she finds it difficult to sleep at night. She then studies after I have slept.

Seeing the washing machine reminded me of washing the clothes that are in the laundry bag. There aren’t many, just a few of her clothes. I don't let them pile up. I wash them every other day. Sometimes I can get a bit obsessive about it. She likes to pull my leg on this. She calls me washerman whenever I talk about doing the laundry. I laugh at it. When I am at home I take up the duty of washing the clothes. There is nothing to do about it. Just load the clothes into the fully automatic washing machine and put them out to dry after they are done. Easy peasy. If it was a semi-automatic one, I would run it when there is a good pile of clothes.

I think I am highly bored. Yes, I can feel that. My mind isn’t functioning properly. It is going a bit haywire. If there was internet connectivity I would have been on my phone for sure. Without it, I might be doing something else, like reading a book or doodling something. But that is not the mood. How can I sit and read a book when my life has turned upside down? It is just preposterous.

I walk into the bedroom and crash into the bed. I pull up the pillow and hold it tight. I really want to hug her. I really do. I want to hug her as tightly as I can, feel her warmth and safety, and be ensured that all is gonna be okay, that things will fall into place. I want to be comforted to a peaceful state. I want to remain in that state for as long as I can. I want it to permeate into my life and guide me in the coming days, cause I have no idea how I am going to survive ahead. I might seem all composed and okay but deep inside I know I am cracking up. Like the cracks developing on a snowy mountain. The avalanche can be triggered anytime. I am not prepared for it.

I curl myself and hug the pillow tighter. I really feel like things are slipping away from my hand. All kinds of questions flood me. Will I be able to find her? How will I do that? If not then what next? What am I going to do all alone in this city?

The answer to the last question can be to leave the city and go out to see the state of things elsewhere. But I haven’t seen any kind of vehicle on the road the whole day. If anyone had to come from anywhere else, they should have entered the city by evening. Given the length of the journey, one can reach Trivandrum all the way from Thrissur and beyond in this time. From the Tamil Nadu side, it can go up to Trichy or Salem. Trains aren’t running. I don't think there are any flights in motion. All of this points to the bleak truth - I am alone.

They say truth is always hard. I am pretty sure it hasn’t been this hard for anyone in the entire history of humankind. The puzzling thing is the reason for the truth is nowhere to be found. I can't find a single reason as to why this phenomenon has occurred. There are no signs anywhere. It is as if someone snapped his fingers and all are gone. Disappeared into thin air. Except me. Why was I spared? This thought keeps nagging me. Why was I spared and left alone? What did I do?

The pillow has become a squished-up ball in between my arms and chest. I take a deep breath and release it from my grasp.