GANGA / Sharda Ganga
Dear readers, I have a confession to make. I show all the symptoms of being in love. I get up every morning and rush to my laptop, feverishly dial a number and wait for a message, my heart pounding in my throat: “Will he or won’t he?” Every hour I repeat this action, every hour I seek confirmation. Has anything changed in our status? Does he still like me or not?
I stare at the screen like a teenager in love. I know he’s hopelessly unreliable. He says he won’t come by and I base my planning on that: washing clothes, doing all kinds of chores, but then suddenly, boom, he’s there.
“You would almost think that the dry season sneaks into the country every year, without reporting to the authorities
But you said you wouldn’t come, I protest softly, but then he says casually: ‘Did you check carefully?’ And idiot that I am, I go to check and it turns out that he now reports that he would come by. Only, he only reports afterwards that the lights are going out. What good is that to me, you want to protest, but you don’t dare to do it so loudly, because imagine that you will make him angry and he will drop out even more often?
It’s a form of gaslighting, yes. You start to doubt yourself intensely; am I crazy or is he just playing games to get you to doubt yourself? Or does he really just not know any better? Or does he simply not make any effort to put himself in your situation, because he knows: ‘no matter how you look at it, no matter what he does, you are dependent on him and you can only leave him if you can put a lot of money on the table and disconnect yourself from him’.
I know it falls on deaf ears, but the fact that I am writing this story down is only because I hope against my better judgment that a light will come on somewhere. I also thought for a long time whether or not I should write something because I’m actually terrified of resentment. This is a small country and in the company that has to keep us in the light, there are some champion vindictives in the leadership. It doesn’t seem that difficult to me to find out in which neighborhood that annoying woman lives and then disproportionately often the ‘load there too shed’. (Yes, it is about the EBS).
What is so difficult to report well in advance which neighborhood will be without electricity? The loadshedding portal seems to have only one purpose: to relieve the EBS fault line. If the power goes out, first check whether it is load shedding before you call.
But I don’t see the benefit for the customer yet – not if I only know afterwards why I have no power. I want to know well in advance – and well in advance can be three or four hours in advance. Is that so much to ask?
You would almost think that the dry season sneaks into the country every year, without reporting to the authorities. They seem to be surprised every year by the dry season, by the low water level in the reservoir, by the greater need for electricity.
Actually just like school children. They always attack the Minister of Education on October 1 and – damn it – we don’t have enough classrooms and teachers again. Anyway, I have to stop writing. I haven’t checked to see if he left a message in an hour.
