Reading by candlelight during load-shedding

A generation of Karachi readers learned to read in the dark, two hours at a time. I am one of them, and I am not sure I would change it.

The power went at nine every evening in the summer I was fourteen, and came back at eleven. We knew the schedule better than we knew our school timetable. At five to nine my mother would put three candles on the dining table, a box of matches beside them, and the steel jug of water that was supposed to stay cold for two hours and never did.

Everyone else in the family spent load-shedding on the roof, where there was a chance of a breeze and a view of the neighbours doing the same. I stayed at the table with a candle and a book. I read most of Dickens that way, from a set of cheap Indian reprints my uncle had brought from Delhi, and all of Ibn-e-Safi's Imran series, which I liked rather more.

The smallness of the light

Candlelight changes how you read. You cannot see the whole page at once. You bring the book close, you hold it at an angle, you read a paragraph at a time and then wait while the flame settles. The world outside the circle of light disappears completely. There is no ceiling fan, no television, no one calling you from the next room, because they are all on the roof. I have never concentrated like that since, not in any library or with any app that promises to block distractions.

I think about this when people tell me they cannot read novels any more because their attention has gone. Mine went too. What I lost was not the ability to focus but the conditions that forced it on me: two hours, every night, with nothing else possible.

Building your own load-shedding

So I build them artificially now, and I recommend it to every writer and reader I teach. Choose a fixed time. Turn off the router, not just the phone, because the phone is negotiable and the router is a walk to another room. Use one lamp and sit where it lights the page and little else. Give it ninety minutes. The first week is unbearable. By the third week you will find yourself waiting for it, the way I used to wait for nine o'clock.

Load-shedding is not romantic. It ruined exams, spoiled food, killed people in the heat. I do not miss it, and in parts of the city it never stopped. But I am honest enough to admit that it made me a reader, and that the best hours of my adolescence were spent in a circle of light the size of a dinner plate.

My mother still keeps three candles in the kitchen drawer. She says it is for emergencies. I think it is habit, and I think it is the same habit as mine.