Three days
The last three days have been annoying: I arrived home from Bombay at 12:30 in the morning and found that the power had been cut. Turns out that the bill had been delivered on the 7th of October, when I was in Singapore, and the Kerala state electricity board sent someone out to pull the fuses from the junction box to my apartment five days later, which is pretty efficient considering that it can take 2-3 years to fill a pothole. At the same time, I had not renewed my prepay cellphone while traveling (because you can't do this while outside the country) and so Airtel canceled my minutes and contract as it does every thirty days (mind you, I added minutes in the Bombay airport when I arrived but there was a misunderstanding and the service guy thought that I just wanted to add minutes but not actually use the phone so he did not validate the minutes, which meant, of course, that they all had to be erased when I got the phone re-validated yesterday). Also, the internet depended on the power so no internet. This was expected. Unfortunately, Sunday was also a holiday so nobody was available to fix the power and Airtel was closed & etc (and the wireless was down at the local hotels and the wireline was only for people who had purchased a room- it goes on...). I re-read the last Harry Potter volume by flashlight the night before last while thinking about cleaning out a fridge full of food which did not keep terribly well in the intervening 1.5 weeks of Kerala warmth. There is something about reading by flashlight, with no phone power or internet that made me feel as if I were in summer camp. I wanted to roast marshmallows on the gas stove but lacked marshmallows. The landlady came by yesterday and we drove to the electricity commission to pay the bill and get the fuses but then they gave use the wrong sized fuses so we had to make a second trip back. Just like living at elevation...everything is just fractionally more difficult. Enough complaining, though. The trick is to get over myself in the periods where everything works smoothly and to handle everything else with a sort of resigned approach. Various people here tell me that this is the official, national coping method.