Power Cut Night at Nani's House | Cozy Sleep Ambience, Lantern, Hand Fan, Soft Radio, 60 Min (Video)

Transcript

Before we begin

This is a quiet evening at a grandmother's house during a power cut. There is very little talking in it, and a lot of soft sound. Listen lying down, somewhere safe, never while driving.

Nothing here is medical treatment, and sleep trouble that returns for months deserves a doctor. For now, there is only a lantern and a hand fan and a house full of sleeping cousins.

Let your head rest. Let the bed hold you. You do not have to follow anything. The lines in this are far apart, and the gaps between them are the point.

The lights go out

Imagine it is a summer evening, and the lights have just gone. The fan slows, and slows, and stops. The fridge gives one last shudder. And then the house is quiet in the particular way that only a power cut makes it quiet.

Nobody groans. Nobody checks a phone. This is Nani's house, and the power goes here most evenings, and everyone knows what to do, which is nothing at all.

Somewhere in the dark, a match is struck. There is the small hiss of it, and then a lantern glass being lifted, and the wick catching, and the glass being lowered again. The room comes back, in a yellow, unsteady way.

The lantern is set on the floor in the middle of the room, where it has always been set. It throws the shadows of everything up the walls, long and slow and swaying a little, as if the house itself were breathing.

The hand fan

Nani is sitting on the edge of her bed with a palm leaf fan. You can hear it. A soft, steady whisper, back and forth, back and forth, moving the warm air across whoever is nearest.

She fans the way she has fanned for sixty summers. Without thinking about it. Without hurrying. The sound is as regular as breathing, and after a while you cannot tell which is which.

The breeze from it reaches you every few seconds, small and kind, and then goes to someone else, and then comes back. There is enough for everyone.

The radio

On the shelf, a little transistor radio has been turned on and left between stations, very low. A soft hiss, with now and then a thread of a far-off voice or an old song surfacing and sinking back, too quiet to follow.

Nobody is listening to it. It is just there, the way a window is there. A small sound to make the dark feel inhabited.

Through the open door comes the smell of the courtyard. Dust that was sprinkled with water at dusk. Jasmine on the wall. Somewhere, the smoke of a mosquito coil, thin and sweet.

Someone in the next room pours water from a clay pot into a steel glass, a long cool sound, and drinks, and sets the glass down with a small ring. Then the creak of a bed taking a body. Then nothing.

Cousins asleep

On the floor, on mattresses laid edge to edge, your cousins have already gone. One is on his back with an arm flung over his face. One has curled into the wall. One is breathing with a tiny whistle on every out breath that nobody will ever tell her about.

You came here every summer as a child, and the house has not changed. The same crack in the ceiling shaped like a river. The same clock on the wall that stopped years ago and was never fixed, because nobody here has anywhere to be.

The lantern flame leans a little when the fan passes and straightens again. The shadows on the wall lean with it. Then straighten. There is nothing to watch, and yet you watch.

Nani hums a few notes of something, under her breath, not a song so much as the memory of one. It stops before it becomes anything. The fan goes on.

There was a time when this room felt enormous. Now you can see all four walls in the lantern light and it is only a room, and it is still the safest place you know.

The house settling

Nani has stopped fanning. The palm leaf rests on her knee. In a moment she will begin again, or she will not, and either way the air will be fine.

The radio hiss is softer now, or you have sunk a little deeper into the mattress, and it is the same thing.

Far outside, a night bird says one thing, twice, and is answered by nothing.

The power may come back later tonight, with a soft click and the fan slowly turning again, and you may not even wake for it. Or it may not come back until morning. Nobody in this house is waiting for it.

The mosquito coil glows at its tip, a tiny orange point near the door, drawing its slow grey line in the air. It will burn for hours yet. It does not need anyone to mind it.

Resting

Your body is heavy on the cool cotton. Your hands have gone loose. Your face has let go.

The lantern will burn down slowly, and somebody will turn it off, and the dark will be soft and full of breathing.

You are one of the sleepers now, in a row of sleepers, in a house that has held sleepers for a very long time.

There is nothing you have to do. There never was, here.

The sounds will stay with you for a while, and then they will fade. There is nothing more to do.