The next day my mother was a little annoyed that I took a long nap in the afternoon instead of helping her clean the kitchen. I had been on pins and needles all day, and that stress in addition to not getting too much sleep the previous night had drained me.
Dad had warned me to come down by 7 am. I found myself awake at 530 am, with about thirty thousand birds chirping. When the sun started coming up and I saw my surroundings bathed in daylight, it really sank in. The full scope of what I had done. In the light of day the roof looked so.....visible, accessible, noticeable. I walked to the southern edge and as long as I did so, I noticed a couple of people walking on the road look up in my direction for a moment. The silence was giving way to noises of the Indian middle class waking up. The tinny music of All India Radio, random roosters crowing in the distance, newspaper vendors and milk men ringing their bicycle bells, and occasionally a dog barking. And of course, the damn birds still at it.
I went downstairs to our apartment. Everyone was already up.
"Look at Urja! Positively radiating energy!" one of the old ladies said as I walked in.
"Excuse me?"
"One day of sleeping out in the open and see how her skin glows." she said, pulling me down next to her and running a hand over my cheeks.
"Yes, ayurveda experts also say that we should all sleep in the open. It's the ozone in the morning." the other old lady said, without bothering to explain how ayurveda and ozone go together.
"Urja, come help me in the kitchen." my mom called out.
I walked in, uncertain if the supposed glow was a result of the ozone or residual excitement from my adventures the previous night. Like most girls in middle class suburban India, I didn't exactly lead a life full of adventure and excitement. Nor did I have the ups and downs of a budding love life that others my age had in more open societies. At Neha's place, her parents had gotten a cable connection. On which one channel, Star TV, aired American shows. The life of American high schoolers portrayed in those shows was so much more exciting than my staid life. So what I had done the previous night was far and beyond the most excitement I had ever felt.
That entire day I felt like some General in an army, going over the landscape and obstacles and dangers in my mind repeatedly, and making plans and counter-plans. At times I would get carried away with the extent of my ambitions. I caught myself thinking about how great it would be to walk on one of those roads, and scolded myself for even considering it. I was an 18 year old girl in a small town in India, not somewhere in the South of France where they apparently walk around naked in public and no one notices. It was a thrill to do what I was doing, but I always had to keep safety in mind first.
I have always been a very methodical goal-oriented person. It's an approach I take to everything in my life and has contributed to my success in academics, and then my career, and also for the most part in my personal life. I take risks but they are calculated risks informed by all the dangers and possible pitfalls. So that day, I chalked out detailed plans for the night. As the plans took shape, I also made a list of some essential facts I needed to be aware of. I did some homework and gathered as much crucial information as I could for my plans.
That second night, I listened to music on my walkman until about 2 AM. I decided that the previous night, I had been lucky getting away with starting so early. I couldn't repeat that mistake. Especially since I had decided to cross new frontiers. Also, putting an alarm on was foolhardy. Better to just stay awake.
At 2, I opened the roof door and stepped inside. Took off my flip flops that, like all flip flops, made a slapping noise when I walked. Clad in the four garments like the start of the previous night, I started slowly walking down the stairs. I made sure that I was walking very gingerly almost on my tiptoes so I wasn't making any sound. I walked down to the fourth floor. Stood there for a minute and strained my ears to detect any signs of activity inside the apartments on that floor. All was quiet. Then down to the third floor. A minute there. Then the second floor in front of my home, then the first floor, and then finally the ground floor.
At the ground floor of our building, there was a a short passage about 5 feet wide leading to the first flight of stairs. One one side of the passage were all the letterboxes for the building. On the opposite side next to the flight of stairs was a big switchboards. It had black rectangular electricity meters for all the apartments in the building, with the silver coils moving slowly. There were also a bunch of switches and buttons that controlled a bunch of things around the building. Like the water pump, the gear boxes, the lights around the outside of the building and yes, as I had found out by casually asking my dad, switches for the light bulbs on the roof.
I opened the gauze door of the switchboard, and gently switched off the two buttons I now knew controlled the bulbs on the roof. Then I walked back to the small space around the ground floor apartment doors. There was a tube light there with a switch on the wall. I turned it off and the ground floor went dark. I climbed half the steps up to the first floor and waited to see if anyone inside the houses had somehow noticed that the lights were off. Then I did the same on the first floor and waited. No signs of life. I slowly and quietly walked all the way up to the roof, turning off the tube lights on each floor.