The city went dark at 9:17 p.m., just as Sameer’s delivery app announced that his final order had been cancelled.
He was standing ankle-deep in rainwater beneath the rusted balcony of Shanti Mansion, an old five-storey building that leaned over the lane as though it had spent a century listening to secrets. Every window was black. The streetlights were gone, the shops had pulled down their shutters, and the monsoon had blurred the city into water and shadow.
Cancelled orders were usually good news. Sameer could return the medicine to the pharmacy, mark the shift complete, and cycle home before the flooded crossings became impassable. But the small paper bag inside his insulated box bothered him. It held insulin pens, glucose strips and a packet of batteries. The label read: Mr. Abir Chatterjee, Flat 5C.
The app flashed a second message: CUSTOMER UNREACHABLE. REFUND INITIATED.
Sameer looked up once more.
That was when a light appeared in the highest window.
It was not electric. It trembled—amber, narrow and unsteady—moving behind the glass like a candle carried by someone searching for a door.
Sameer rang the bell. Nothing happened. He pushed the iron gate and found it unlocked.
Inside, Shanti Mansion smelled of damp plaster, old newspapers and rain-soaked wood. His phone torch caught a row of letterboxes. Four had been taped shut. One carried a demolition notice. Another had a handwritten card:
LIFT NOT WORKING. PLEASE CALL BEFORE VISITING.
The lift, naturally, was dead.
Sameer climbed.
On the second floor, water dripped through a crack in the ceiling. On the third, a door stood open onto an empty room with squares of pale wall where photographs had once hung. By the fourth floor, his legs burned and the sound of rain had faded beneath another noise: a soft, regular knock.
Three taps. A pause. Three taps again.
It came from above.
“Mr. Chatterjee?” Sameer called.
The knocking stopped.
He reached the fifth-floor landing. Flat 5C was at the end of a corridor, its door closed. The amber light he had seen from the street leaked through the frame.
Sameer knocked.
“Delivery.”
No answer.
Then, from the other side, a girl said, “Is it the medicine?”
Her voice was controlled in the way frightened children sometimes sound when they have decided that panic is a luxury.
“Yes. Please open the door.”
There was a scrape, a chain sliding, and the door opened four inches. A girl of perhaps twelve looked at him through the gap. She held an emergency lantern against her chest. Its weak bulb made her glasses shine.
“I’m Tara,” she said. “Dadu is inside.”
The flat was warm and almost completely dark. In the bedroom, an elderly man lay on a wooden cot, his shirt damp with sweat. His eyes opened when Sameer entered, but they did not settle on anything.
“He took his evening insulin,” Tara said quickly. “Then he stopped speaking properly. I tried calling Baba, but the network went. The power bank is dead. I ordered from Dadu’s phone because the strips were finished. Then the order disappeared.”
Sameer placed the bag on the table. He was not a doctor, but every delivery rider knew the boundary between a late parcel and an emergency. He dialled the city ambulance number. No signal. He tried again near the window. One bar appeared, vanished, then returned.
The operator answered on the fourth attempt.
Sameer gave the address while Tara tested her grandfather’s blood sugar with shaking hands. The meter displayed a number so low that even Sameer understood the danger.
“The operator says give him fast sugar if he can swallow,” Sameer said.
Tara ran to the kitchen and returned with honey. Her grandfather swallowed a little, coughed, then took more. Sameer kept the phone by the window, repeating instructions between bursts of static.
“Ambulance?” Tara asked.
“Flooded at the main road. They’re coming on foot from the crossing.”
Her face tightened. “That can take twenty minutes.”
Sameer looked down at the lane. The water had risen over his bicycle’s wheel hubs. No one moved outside. From this height, the whole neighbourhood seemed abandoned.
Then he noticed the lantern in Tara’s hands.
“How did you know I was downstairs?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Dadu told me once that during the old blackouts, people put a lamp in the window if they needed help. I thought maybe someone would see.”
Sameer took the lantern and moved it slowly across the glass—left, right, left, right.
Three taps sounded from the wall.
Not from inside the flat.
From the neighbouring building.
A phone torch blinked in a window opposite. Then another appeared two floors below. Sameer waved the lantern again. Within a minute, voices rose from the lane. A shopkeeper came out carrying a rechargeable light. Two young men waded through the water with a plastic chair held above their heads. A nurse who lived around the corner arrived in a raincoat, guided by the lights people had begun placing in their windows.
The building that had looked empty was suddenly surrounded by small, deliberate stars.
The nurse checked Mr. Chatterjee, spoke to the ambulance team and stayed until his words became clear again. When the paramedics finally reached the lane, neighbours formed a chain on the stairs. They carried him down in the plastic chair, one landing at a time, while Tara walked beside him holding the medicine bag.
At the gate, Mr. Chatterjee caught Sameer’s wrist.
“Cancelled?” he whispered, glancing at the delivery box.
Sameer smiled. “Not everything the app cancels has to remain cancelled.”
The ambulance moved away through the rain. Tara climbed in with her grandfather, but before the doors closed she looked up at the fifth floor.
The lantern was still in the window.
“Can you switch it off?” she asked.
Sameer followed her gaze. Across the lane, other lights remained: a candle behind a curtain, a phone torch balanced in a flowerpot, the shopkeeper’s emergency lamp hanging from a balcony.
“Leave it tonight,” he said.
The next morning, electricity returned at 6:42. The official message blamed a flooded transformer. Sameer woke late to seven missed calls and one photograph from an unknown number.
It showed Shanti Mansion after the rain. In its highest window stood Tara and her grandfather, home from the clinic. On the sill was the same lantern, now switched off. Beneath the photograph, Tara had written:
Dadu says a light is not only for seeing. Sometimes it is for being seen.
Weeks later, the municipality repaired the transformer but did not repair the memory of that night. The residents formed a volunteer group for emergencies. The pharmacy began adding a printed card to medicine deliveries with helpline numbers and simple instructions for power cuts. Someone painted a tiny amber square beside the gate of Shanti Mansion.
And whenever the monsoon knocked out the streetlights, one window in every building along the lane kept a lamp ready—not because the darkness was frightening, but because nobody there wanted a neighbour to disappear inside it again.
Sameer still delivered after sunset. He still trusted maps, order numbers and battery percentages. But in every blackout, before checking the app, he looked up.
He had learned that the most important address in a dark city was often the one marked by a single, stubborn light.
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About Aditya Singh
I write content on Blogging, Digital Marketing, Tech, and Life- skills. I also write Poetry and Short-Stories in my free time.
