On a crossroad off Broadway Road in Bangalore's busy Shivajinagar, a small, open door with a kolam outside reveals dark quarters. Kasturi, a middle-aged figure swaddled in a sari, emerges from within and greets the man in khaki overalls. The lights went out last night, she tells him, and she lodged a complaint a couple of hours ago. Will it be alright? Barely listening, the mechanic, S Varadaraju, gropes briefly inside the electricity meter-box before he decides the problem must lie in the feeder box at the street corner, or, to be precise, in the tangle of wires in a grey box hiding behind plastic and other rotting garbage. Varadaraju clears the trash away with a pair of pliers and after several minutes of peering at the mess, pulls out a nearly-severed white cable. "It's a loose connection," he says, intertwining the two pared ends and taping them up. The electricity hums back to life in Kasturi's apartment. It's a light bulb moment.

Varadaraju is one of 5,648 field staff employed by the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) to attend to public complaints 24x7, service electrical machinery, enforce bill payment and handle disconnections. A lineman or a mechanic can earn anywhere between Rs 8,000 and Rs 20,000, depending on his years of experience. "I have been doing this since 1983. I still have another 10 years," says 51-year-old Varadaraju, hopping into a blue BESCOM Maruti van. His elder daughter has just been hired by IBM and he no longer works for money, but the thrill of climbing electric poles and fixing faulty transformers never gets old. "Till two years ago, I was on the night shift and there was constant running around because there would be no local help or feedback available after dark. Now things are more relaxed," he says.

Our next stop is the Quality Milk and Khova Dairy on Charminar Masjid Road, a slip of a street, where the tubelights have reportedly been burning out in quick succession. A voltage check reveals an alarmingly high 350V on one of the three phases  one and a half times the standard household voltage. Varadaraju and his fellow mechanics, in hard hats and rubber gloves, tinker about in the feeder box and realise that the load is very high on the red phase and very low on the blue one. The nearest electric pole is promptly scaled and redistribution done, and then it's time for rest and some chilled soda at the dairy, compliments of the owner.

"When it rains heavily  as it did last week due to cyclone Nilam  our unit gets over a hundred complaints a day," says Subhan Baig, assistant executive engineer in charge of one of the eastern subdivisions of BESCOM. Under the tutelage of engineers like him, the mechanics have become quite the experts in electrical machinery. When sent to service a high-tension circuit breaker on Ali Asker Road that blew up in the rains, they know exactly what to do. They open it up, clean the carbonised parts with petrol or thinner, then test the insulation with the help of a green box that looks like a wind-up toy. Turns out that's not enough  a coil must be changed. "We learn on the job," says Pachaiappan, 59, a senior mechanic. "People say electricity is indispensable to them; fact is, we are the ones who cannot live without it."

On any festival, these foot-soldiers of the power sector work round the clock to ensure there are no interruptions in the festivities, their task as mundane as it is momentous. "We compulsorily work on festivals and get paid double wages for it," says Varadaraju. This Diwali, as on 29 Diwalis past, he will don his overalls and his yellow plastic hat and watch fireworks light up the sky. It's just another day for him, he says, another day of keeping the city running and the lights glowing.

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