"Madam, *#@!$!!"

So the other night while Rich was at a meeting the kids were in bed, all was quiet, and I was chatting online with Nelee. "What's up?" she said. "Not much here," I said. "NuSkin is doing layoffs," she said, "so I better go." About two minutes later, the doorbell rang and I opened it to find the guard saying "Madam, *#@!$! [something in Hindi beyond what I've learned in my 10 classes]." And I (of course, as usual) looked at him blankly, and he, exasperated, motioned for me to follow him. We walked together to the electrical box which just happened to have loads of smoke coming out the top and a fire inside!

I called Umesh, our baby-faced electrician who comes nearly every day these days. I then tried to call Rich, got no answer, so I text messaged the following: "So there's a fire in the electrical box. Umesh is coming in 20 minutes. I may be in NZ by then." For those of you who don't know, NZ is New Zealand, where my Momma happens to live right now. It was one of those moments. Actually though, I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. It was immediately funny to me unlike other tense moments I've faced in India. This one was just so over the top it was all I could do to laugh! The gravity of the situation became a bit more real when the power went out (which made the fire finally stop!).

I wish I'd taken a picture of the actual fire. I thought of it immediately, but the guard was so upset I thought it might make him more distressed if I ran inside to get my camera. Anyway, when Umesh arrived I started shooting pictures.

This first one shows the blackened wall where the fire was burning.


Umesh the Electrician and Milap the Driver trying to figure out how to get the power back on.


This is how things actually looked without the flash. The power was out after all! Luckily the walls in the house are all made of concrete so the fire stayed contained! I'm currently on a quest to find a fire extinguisher, but it's slow going, as usual. . . After this particular power crisis we lived on minimal power (no water heaters, no microwave, no A/Cs) for two days.