Blackout Nights
by Hafsa Manir
Montclair State University
Hafsa Manir is a Biology major and Creative Writing minor at Montclair State University, intending to graduate Spring of 2027. Writing is a hobby they have a complicated relationship with. It brings them as much joy as it does loathing and mania, but it's a wild wife they shan't divorce no matter how mad it drives them. This is their first time formally submitting any writing piece, ever, outside of the context of the classroom; it is their first time finding the courage to take the chance. They figured a nostalgic memoir would be a safe bet, something they liked writing enough to want to share, but they are not so sensitive about it that the worst-case scenarios their anxious mind cooks up can be that bad. They hope you enjoy this piece.
Patersonian summers of the late ‘00s were sticky hot right when we expected it. The change in weather would creep up steadily from late April onward, slowly escalating until early June. The roars of stampeding thunderstorms terrorized us between long periods of clear sky and unrelenting sunlight. The heat at its worst would bounce off the concrete and make waves in the air, the weight of the humidity beating down on us so hard we slumped and staggered. Everyone had a million fans going on at once—ceiling fans that were more show than help, large standing plastic fans brought out of storage, little fans connected to kitchen outlets, even handheld paper and sometimes battery-run fans from local fairs. With all the cooling devices running on top of the average daily instruments, electricity usage quickly shot up with the temperature.
Naturally, there were outages. They weren’t extremely regular, but by no means unexpected or unprepared for. The provider would send warnings with the turn of the season: due to a city-wide increase in electricity usage, blackouts are far more likely, make sure to prepare, please conserve energy, yada yada yada. There would be many small instances of the power going out for a couple minutes every other week across the summer, and maybe two or three big ones that would keep us hanging for at least a whole day before it was checked out. Everyone had a stock of flashlights and candles ready in the cupboard, and sometimes large gallons or buckets would be pre-filled with clean water. The outages would usually hit just after dark or so, when everyone turned their lights on at once. One minute everything was humming and buzzing, my mother bustling around the kitchen whilst my sister and I messed about, awash in yellow-white. The next, with a short and pitchy whine as the lines went out on us, we’d find ourselves in complete darkness, blinking our eyes into adjustment. It was those times that we’d find ourselves shepherded out the door to dawdle outside, our neighbors doing much the same with their children.
My mother was always very strict about when my sister and I were allowed to go out, day or not, and nighttime was always out of the question point-blank. Reasonable, given our toddlerhood and the area we lived in, but what do preschoolers know about that? I just knew that blackout nights were the exception to the rules. I suppose that, with the lights out, it’s easier to mind your brats when they’re sitting in one spot with half the kids on the block, instead of skulking about a dark house where they can do or touch who-knows-what. We lived in a different place then, across the river, in the neighborhood where the city Bengalis are most concentrated. I remember the address, a short walk from my Head Start. Turn right onto the street, and the place is sort of smack dab in the middle of a long block of multi-family houses. It was far from fancy or particularly large, but it felt roomy enough back then. There was a large asphalt area between our house and our neighbor’s, a shared driveway and parking lot that doubled as a play area. The house itself was essentially a simple brown and white rectangular prism, not all that much longer than it was wide, with an attic and two floors. We lived on the second. I don’t recall anything about a basement, but I don’t suppose I would have wanted anything to do with one.
There was a porch in the front, with a small set of steps to the side. A simple porch roof curved over the cement sitting area, connected to the ironwork border to provide a strong and constant shade in the day. A couple other Bengali families lived on the block, many of whom had decent sized gardens in the front or back of their homes, like my old classmate from across the street—I think he was house 22. Because of our driveway and parking space, we only had a small area of usable soil, and Baby Auntie from the first floor grew the handful of plants that could fit. She was an older woman, her children years older than me, with a smiley round face and a wardrobe consisting strictly of assorted sarees. During the years when my sister and I went to the same school as her sons, she would frequently pick us up together. Sometimes she’d stop at a Bengali grocer along the way and get us a treat. She grew the roses in the front. Their thick and thorny stems, not unlike vines in flexibility, would crawl up and curl around the ironwork lining the porch, decorating the borders of the roof like a tiara of prickly green and blush pink. Those nights, the roses would gleam and glow under the yolky yellow of the streetlamps, the sleek stems reflecting the light.
Baby Auntie had two grade school sons, and Nibedita Auntie from the attic had a little girl who must have been the youngest of us all. The boys, far too ‘cool’ and ‘mature’ for the ‘stupid girl babies’, would loiter in the doorway or run around the lot despite their mother’s warnings. My father was almost never there, coming home only much later into the night after working long hours, but the other Uncles would hang about behind the house where the cars were parked. They’d lean against the brick walls or sit on the back steps, talking just loud enough that I could catch their voices from up front, even if I couldn’t tell what they were talking about. Because everyone was Bengali—and thus deeply predictable to me—someone, usually Baby Auntie, would soon enough bring out a tray of chai and biscuits for the adults, served on matching ceramic plates and teacups with floral patterns. Woven in between the parents’ oh-so-very-grown-up conversations were the chipper clinks of cups against saucers, the soft crunch of teeth on biscuit.
It was primarily my mother who prepared the children’s snacks. My parents have always been persistent preachers about the importance of daily fruit intake and hydration, and so there was hardly ever a moment in the summers where we were without a watermelon or two. My mother would cut one up earlier in the day, then lightly salt it for a kick and stick it in the fridge to marinate in the chill for several hours. While Baby Auntie prepared the chai, she’d go upstairs to retrieve the plastic box of treasure that was cold red fruit. I was always especially excited for watermelon then, because they were triangular with the rind on, like in all the cartoons and the coupon newspapers. My mother would always cut them into squares and have us eat them with a fork from a plate for neatness and convenience’s sake. Having my own triangle slice to hold and gnaw on made me feel like a big kid.
I was most definitely incapable of eating neatly at that age. Between that and the sheer heat, it was only reasonable that my mother would have me dressed in cotton tank tops and shorts. My hair too was trimmed short then, somewhere between a pixie and a bob too close to no longer being a bob. Popular and a classic as far as local toddler styles went, if the photo albums are any proof. Short children in short clothes and short hair for a short clean up time; a bath is faster than laundry after all. As a child, I would not infrequently feel upset at how boyish I looked, but I couldn’t deny the advantages of short hair on the porch. My mother’s fashion preferences left most of my face and neck exposed to the elements—like the heavy summer air, or the dribbling rivulets of watery red that wound their way down the line of my throat as I worked my way towards the rind. Watermelon juice running down your skin has a slight grainy feel, bits of fruit sediment flowing down and stopping along a slow little stream. My hands and mouth would get sticky that much faster in the heat, stained pinkish with what I didn’t lick away. It was especially noticeable when a light breeze swept through, drawing cool protest from the sugary skin. The breeze would feel sweet on the back of my head though, bare nape pleased with the cool touch.
It took many years to perceive time as a measurable concept, so at that age I never actually knew how long we must have spent outside on blackout nights. I was convinced it must have been a gazillion hours until it was time to go inside, at which point I would change my mind and decide it had only been exactly three minutes actually. Realistically it was probably only a few hours. For a group of conservative and superstitious parents, there was a limit to how long they could handle their children being outside at night, and that’s without accounting for the early bedtimes. Once the parents had their fill of gossip and rowdy children, the conversations would peter out and wrap themselves up. Baby Auntie would stack all her teacups and saucers on her tray to take inside, and my mother would throw out the garbage and snap her watermelon box closed. My mother would harangue us until our mopey whining became mopey going-back-inside. She’d shoo us over to the kitchen sink to scrub down our arms and faces and have us prepare for bed. The bed in question would be a setup on the floor of the larger bedroom, not because we lacked any beds, but because my parents were wary of sleeping apart from us during emergencies. It was too hot to be comfortable on the bed anyway.
My father would only get home from work when it was already technically bedtime. Of course, the meaning of bedtime was different during the worst of the summer. The sheer humidity meant actually getting into bed happened hours before sleep came, and the sleep in question was actually sweating until even your eyes were exhausted. There’s really no way to make two preschool girls fall asleep short of waiting for it, and my little sister was a particularly energetic sort, so my parents indulged us with conversation and distraction while we all lay on our backs and stared at the ceiling. I liked to watch the polygonal shapes that would form from the headlights from passing cars—it was like cloud watching to me, but at night and inside and without clouds.
I recall my father being more lighthearted and amiable with us back then, at least relative to the present. He had just enough youth and cheer still to be poking fun and telling jokes, even so late into a sleepless and electricity-free night. Sometimes he’d buy basil seed drinks and persuade us into having some—some meaning more than one bottle, of course, since he’s like that. The drinks themselves would usually be made with coconut water or some light fruit juice, so the appeal—or distaste, for the picky—lay in the seeds. Basil seeds on their own are unremarkable, just very tiny and smooth and black all over. But when soaked, they expand somewhat and turn a bit slimy, gaining a pale border around a black center. A bottle of them looked like a dense colony of itty-bitty squishy eyes. There were many a time where I imagined them to be smaller-scale frog eggs. Rather visually unappealing to the unfamiliar. My sister fussed and outright refused to have any, whereas I was exasperatedly acceptant of my fate. I didn’t dislike the basil drinks, but I didn’t get the appeal either, more interested in the bottles. They were made of glass, entirely smooth except for ridges at the bottom of the bottle, round with a tapered neck. There was a quality of big-girl-ness to being allowed to hold a whole glass bottle and drink from it all by myself.
For all my father’s encouragement, my mother watched our drinking with a careful hawk’s eye, regularly sending us to the bathroom. She was very determined not to wake up to wet sheets. She would toss the finished bottles into the trash, stow the rest of the drinks in the fridge, and with one last bathroom break, herd us back to bed with finality. We would all eventually fall asleep at some point, and if it was particularly late when Morpheus finally paid a visit, then the next day would be for sleeping in and slumming about. There were times when my parents found sleep long before I was able to. One instance, that I like to refer to as Baby’s First All-Nighter, I found myself in all my preschooler glory completely unable to lose consciousness—and I actually tried my best to! It’s one thing to stay up all night in a mad rush to finish coursework as a teenager or young adult, it’s another to stay up as a very incapable and very bored four-year-old. Multiple times that night I would get up, circle the house, peer out the window, and then come back to lie down by my mother. Not even not-cloud-watching on the ceiling could hold my interest for hours on end. It was all-around very frustrating and irritating, and if my childhood motto hadn’t essentially been “it is what it is”, I likely would have been a cranky pain to put up with the next day. Instead, my mother slowly blinked awake the following dawn to see me pouting next to her, ready to complain about the incredible dullness of the past few hours, so very different from the fun I had before bedtime.
My family moved out of that neighborhood in May of 2012, the very tail end of second grade, to the house we live in now. It’s a two story with an attic and basement, mostly a light brown in color, but much taller than the old house. The current neighborhood is less densely Bengali, though there are still many of us. Our house is situated directly across from a tall Serbian church made of grey stonework. The bells ring with regularity, and shatter the silence of Sunday mornings. There’s a relatively large plot in the backyard, half paved concrete and half dense garden. The only flowers we grow are thick marigolds in the back and some other little blossoms I don’t know by name; no roses in the front. We don’t sit out on the porch, ever.
One night a few months prior, a blackout hit the block, and a few surrounding. We’ve had a few instances of the lights going out in some rooms or on a whole floor, but those were easily resolved by flicking some switches in the basement. Initially, my mother and I had thought this was another such case, but we soon determined otherwise. I checked the PSEG outage map to be sure, and sent in a report. From there, it was just a waiting game, as the earliest repairs could be done was sometime the following morning.
We lit a few candles and turned on phone flashlights. My mother called a few neighboring aunties to see if they were having any issues. Just a few calls, for a couple minutes, loaded with platitudes. She did not often talk to them, much less meet with them in person. For years now, it has been rare that she would talk to or entertain anyone at all, besides perhaps on holidays. My father was out for the night, working, but would not return anytime soon like he did when I was a child. It was entirely possible that he would be back after the electricity was already back. And he certainly wasn’t bringing home any basil seed drinks, no more than we had watermelon in the fridge.
Instead of one singular younger sister, there were a total of five younger siblings to manage, the youngest a first grader. My mother had them all brush their teeth and get into bed so they were out of the way. They left their doors open a crack, and I left a flashlight going so the littlest one wouldn’t get nervous. My mother told me to just go to bed too; there’s nothing to be done with the electricity gone, and no point waiting for it. Homework can wait for the morning. I peer at the TV before I go, where the views of our security cameras are displayed. The streets are as empty and silent as they have been for the past decade. The only person outside is the uncle from downstairs, who spends half the night pacing the porch and chain smoking like he’s trying to break a record. It reeks for ages when he’s out, and if we don’t keep the front door closed the smell travels all the way upstairs. My parents get irritated with all the burnt cigarettes he litters around the front and near our cars, and avoid his company where they can.
No one makes chai or conversation. There is no group of little children to mind. No cars drive down the street, no headlights make shapes on the ceiling for me to follow. My younger siblings think of our home as a place of seclusion and limited contact and play. I get caught up in the memory of a breeze on my nape and bare toes on the porch.