Let there be light

By Fayza Hassan
Most children fear the dark and when mine were small, I never refused to leave a night-light in their room. My parents however did not have the benefit of modern pedagogic research and at the time when I was a toddler this was one of the mistakes educators warned against in no uncertain terms. Consequently I was firmly encouraged to sleep in stark darkness. Early in the evening, I would begin worrying about bedtime, inventing all sorts of excuses to gain a few minutes of respite. I was thirsty, needed to go to the bathroom, developed various pains, but unfailingly I ended up tucked up and obscurity took over.
I just lay there cold with terror, my eyes tightly shut, until I could stand it no longer. I knew that the night people had arrived and were surrounding me. I had to look at them, because I was certain that they only grabbed children who were unaware of their presence. Words of a prayer that one of my nannies tried to teach me about dying in sleep and the soul going to heaven, confirmed me in this belief. I did not feel like dying and had no wish for my soul to go anywhere. All I had to do therefore was keep my eyes open until dawn. With the first light of day, the night people would withdraw and I would be safe for one more day.
I am sure that I was not the only child who harboured these fears. Mine however grew instead of disappearing in time. I remember distinctly that at the ripe age of 14, I finally discovered a subterfuge, which saved me once and for all from my nightly ordeals. I had to pass a state exam at the end of the year and by claiming that I could only concentrate on my homework when everyone else was asleep, I earned the right to keep the lights on in my room, until the wee hours of the morning. Going to school after my sleepless nights was no easy matter of course, but it was easier to manage than dealing with my dreaded nocturnal fears.
For a time, I believed that I had beaten the night people. I imagined them standing at my door, looking in sorrow at the lamp on my desk that was only turned out as the sun rose in the sky, an indication that they had to depart to wherever they came from. The thought filled me with vindictive joy. It is therefore with great dismay that I discovered that they could creep on me in daytime as well. At dusk, when the rooms were gradually enveloped with shadows, I began to feel their presence, albeit subdued, almost forlorn, as if they had wandered by mistake in an alien world and were trying to flee. It filled me with a peculiar sadness, the same that I experienced every time I won an argument in real life. I ached to tell them to come back at night, that I would no longer fight them, in the same way that I was prepared to back-pedal if my opponent in a quarrel conceded that I was right. My compassion however waned rapidly as the shadows became thicker.
I became obsessed with lighting. Shutters, which my grandmother used to pull in summer after lunch, to keep away the searing heat, were my enemies. I hated the way bright rays came through the slants, bespeaking of happiness only to fade a couple of hours later, heralding darkness and -- as I imagined -- doom. At that very moment, I would hysterically run from room to room turning the table lamps on. My father, generous in many other ways, was thrifty where electricity was concerned. Our light bulbs were always of a low wattage giving out an anemic grayish illumination that brought tears to my eyes. As soon as I could, I began to stay out of the house during those evening hours although the thought of my mother at home, waiting for me, reading in the meager radiance wrenched my heart.
I dreamed of houses continuously exposed to the sun and of majestic chandeliers that made rooms sparkle. It was never to be. My husband's electrical frugality equaled my father's. For a time, we played at changing bulbs. I would regularly replace the weaker ones with a hundred watt bulbs. He would say nothing but in a couple of days I would discover that he had sneakily invited gloom to share our lives once more.
We moved houses more times than I care to remember and every time the problem of lighting arose. I fought for every bulb, on the grounds that I stayed home more than he did. He never gave in, even developing a taste for black lampshades.
When my husband died I was shattered and for a long time could not bring myself to do any redecorating. When I finally emerged from my state of stupor, my first concern was to put the lighting of the apartment right. I sometimes wonder about what he would have said, if faced with my present monthly electricity bills.
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