Off-Grid

Shruthi Murali

The murder is back. They’ve gotten better at hiding the evidence, but I’ve gotten better at finding it – here it is, a crow’s nest under the solar panels on my roof. I yank it out of the wiring and fling it to the edge of my terrace, knowing that it will make no difference. The murder is back, and they will wreak the havoc they always do. 

When the huge billboards of the Prime Minister’s face next to generic Google photos of solar panels arrived on the highway near the village, we all ignored them. Billboards come and go, but nothing ever changes. In fact, the new signs had been pasted over the old ones from last year when they’d promised us AI-modulated irrigation systems that never arrived. We knew well enough that it was better for promises to be forgotten, and figured that the Rural Solarification Programme 2050 was no different. 

And so, we were all surprised when the trucks arrived a few months later, laden with wires, PVC panels, and wonky machines whose names I learned only later (charge controllers, batteries and inverters). For three months, the technicians walked around the village conducting site inspections and feasibility checks. They clambered up to our terraces and roofs, mumbled about sun exposure and load-bearing capacities, fiddled with the electric panels and wiring, and by the end of it all, the village was in a tizzy trying to guess whose house would be solarified first.

Mariam at the end of my street loudly proclaimed it would be hers because her husband had just had the place renovated, so it was only fitting that solarification began at the most modern house. Anu quietly told everyone (while, of course, beseeching us not to tell anyone else), that it would be hers, because the lead technician seemed enamoured with her college-going son. 

They were all wrong. It was my house that was chosen. The technicians said that the flat, large terrace was ideal to mount panels on, and that this off-grid installation could likely power all five houses on my street. 

The entire neighbourhood gathered to watch the first panels go up on my roof. The air was thick with afternoon heat and the curiosity and envy of fifty people. I kept up a steady stream of chai and biscuits, smug at the thought of being the first solar house in my village. No more power cuts at mine! And no more listening to Mariam drone on about her electric rice cooker (“my son bought it for me all the way from Japaaaaan”)! She would likely not dare to bring it up anymore knowing it was powered by the panels installed on my house. I slipped into daydreams of buying a microwave, or maybe even an airfryer. 

In less than a week, the panels had been installed, and my home electricals rewired to connect to the solar grid. The rest of my street was abuzz with excitement at the prospect of connecting their houses to my grid.

But then came the nationwide strike – it turned out the technicians’ salaries had been pending for months and they, their trucks and all their equipment disappeared overnight. We saw on the news a month later that their salaries had finally been paid after prolonged protests, and solarification had been restarted. But they never returned here. 

Eventually, after a few weeks of grumbling and a few of our representatives making more than a few rounds of the local electricity board office, our village resigned itself to the reality that it would not be solarified. Even when the government declared solarification a success and quietly took away the LPG subsidy in order to “incentivise people to buy electric stoves powered by solar”, there was nothing more than a few mutters of frustration and dissatisfaction. 

Everyone returned to their old routines, except for me – my house was solarified. But whispers of gossip and resentment began to swirl around the village. Some said I had bribed the technicians to choose my house, and others that I had bribed them to stop, so that mine would be the only house solarified. The vegetable vendor refused me my usual discount, and the milkman asked me to pay every week instead of at the end of the month. 

It all came to a head when one day, Vani burst into tears at the tea shop. She and her husband had both lost their jobs at the car parts factory. Heavy industrial permits to operate machinery using coal-powered electricity had expired, and the company had decided it was more economical to shut down its older factories than to have them solarified and upgraded. As she wailed and sobbed, I sat down next to her, putting an arm around her shoulders. She suddenly threw it off and screamed in my face: “Don’t act like you’re one of us, as if you know our struggles. You don’t have an electricity bill to pay any more, you don’t have to buy LPG, you with your fancy solar electric stove. You aren’t struggling like us, don’t pretend!”. People shuffled their feet, shifting awkwardly away from me. Others occupied my spot next to Vani, as I sat on the edge of both the bench and the conversation. 

A week later, I stood in Asha’s kitchen, watching her worry the tassels of her saree as she boiled tea leaves and ginger for our chai. She turned abruptly to me and said, “You’re my best friend, but… people are talking. Last week, Vani’s sister-in-law didn’t invite me to her daughter’s engagement, and Anu says it’s because… well, you know…” She looked away, shook her head, turned off the stove and strained the tea. As she added cold milk to each cup and handed me the lukewarm drink, she explained apologetically that LPG cost too much now and she didn’t even heat the milk for tea anymore. After that, I only went through the backdoor of Asha’s house for chai, away from prying eyes on the street. 

To make matters worse, my ‘power cut-proof’ house began having electrical problems. Bulbs flickered and dimmed, and the laptop took a full day to charge to 100%. Worst of all was the cooking – it took hours. My chow-chow took over an hour to soften for my sambar, and rice came out mushy and waterlogged from the pressure cooker. My dosas refused to rise, and the mustard seeds in my tempering wouldn’t pop. I stopped cooking meat entirely, because it was always raw in the centre. I spent all day in the kitchen, staring anxiously through the glass lids of my new induction-suitable, steel-bottomed utensils, willing the food to cook. My husband’s complaints became increasingly shrill, and when I went to the roof to scrub the panels, I found ominous dark brown lines that I couldn’t clean running through the cells. 

I became increasingly obsessive and desperate for an explanation until I finally found the truth hidden away in the corner of a news website. RTIs filed over the years revealed that the Rural Solarification Programme involved graft at a huge scale. We had received used and defective solar panels that had been discarded during Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities’ solar grid upgrades. They had already lost their efficiency. The brown snail trails I found were proof of low quality panels that allowed moisture to enter. These panels had hot spots and micro cracks from being damaged during transport and installation and across the country, they were failing. 

And now this bloody murder of crows. Like clockwork, my feathered nemeses left me offerings. Nests and half-eaten mice in the shade under the panels and droppings strewn across the reflective cells. When I wasn’t cooking, I was cleaning the panels for hours, removing stubborn splotches of shit. I used to feel sorry to throw away the crows’ nests and eggs, but with each passing day my frustration hardened, until I no longer even noticed what I had tossed. 

Today began much the same. I stomped up to the roof, with the filthy cleaning rag that I barely bothered to wash anymore and a bucket of sloshing, soapy water. Patches of sweat bloomed in the pits of my blouse as I dragged crow nests out from the tangle of wiring under the panels and scrubbed away streaks of filth from the cells. I watched Anu, Asha and Vani laugh as they walked down the street to Mariam’s for chai. They didn’t look up, not even Asha. As I turned back to the task at hand, I heard the tell-tale whine of a PDS (Public Distribution System) drone. And sure enough, there it was, making its way towards me like a drunken mosquito. 

The drones had replaced the ration shops, dropping temperature-regulated packages of rice, dal, meat and oil to our homes based on their own navigation systems and pre-programmed databases of what and how much to deliver to each household. Of course, as expected, the drones tended to run out of juice early during every delivery run, abruptly falling from the sky onto our gates, terraces and verandahs. Every month, we’d all meet at whichever house it fell at to collect our rations, though we’d only leave after a round of chai and samosas while the drone charged quietly in a corner. And then we’d take it back outside and it would set off, making its way back to the PDS office while we giggled to each other that even a passenger pigeon would’ve been better at its job. Of course, that was all before solarification. These days, Asha collected my rations for me if the drone missed my house and then handed them to me through the back door. 

The thump of the rations dropping onto my roof brought me back to the present. I tore at the seal of the rice bag, hoping desperately for white rice this month so it would cook in under an hour. It resisted my clawing until it finally burst open, spilling fat red grains all over the terrace. I sat back defeated, calculating how many hours red rice would add to my cooking time. Sweat soaked the folds of my saree where it had bunched up over my stomach and thighs. 

I ran the numbers in my mind coldly. Two hours to cook red rice meant that I’d need to start lunch by 10am, not to mention that now that the murder was back, who knew how much longer the rice might take. I don't know how long I sat there unmoving, staring at nothing. Eventually, my eyes focused again on the rations in front of me. I looked up at the panels, and back at the rations, as an idea began to form. I slowly tore open the meat packet and pulled out a chunk of chicken, feeling its slimy weight in my hands. 

Then I tossed it at the solar panels. 

It landed with a satisfying squelch. I dug both my hands back into the packet, dragging more chunks out, hurling them at the panels. I continued flinging the chicken, the rhythmic thwacking rising, until my hands came up empty and my shoulders ached. I stood for a few seconds, catching my breath. I walked over to the panels and pushed bits of chicken into crevices between the cells, pulled a few pieces down to stuff them between wires under the panels, and even shoved some into the box leading to the charge controller for good measure. 

Then I sat back and waited. Sure enough, in a few minutes, I saw them in the sky: a black raincloud of my avian friends. I smiled, walked downstairs into the house and started the shower, listening to the welcome cacophony of excited caws. I stepped out of a long, relaxing bath, changed into a fresh cotton saree and went into the room where my husband lay snoring. 

“The solar panels aren’t working anymore.” 

He startled awake from his nap, looked at me baffled, and pointed vaguely at the still-running stand fan next to his head. “Eh?” 

“Oh, well, they won’t be soon enough! Get the gas stove down from the attic and go get our LPG connection renewed.” 

I left and walked the few steps to Mariam’s house, the sound of familiar laughter reaching me. I marched into her hall through the open door, plopped down with an exaggerated sigh, and looked around the room, smiling and fanning my face with my saree. Asha’s hesitant voice cut through the awkward silence, “We thought you were busy… you know, cleaning the solar, so we didn’t think you’d come…” 

“Oh, they stopped working.” 

“What?” 

“The panels, they stopped working. Didn’t you see the news? Apparently they gave us useless panels, oof, I can’t tell you how bad it is, it took me three hours to make rasam yesterday! And you’ve seen me na Asha, just scrubbing and scrubbing all the time to clean the damn things. And the cost! My god, that electric stove and those fancy vessels, all for nothing. My fellow is going out to renew the LPG connection today. What’s the price of a cylinder these days?”

I poured myself a cup of chai as Mariam chimed in, “You know, that’s what happens with these cheap products in India. But my rice cooker, I tell you, never malfunctioned a single day! My son bought it specially for me from Japan…” 

I picked up a samosa and settled back into my chair. A crow alighted on the electric wire outside, with something its beak. I hope it was chicken.

***

About the Author

Shruthi Murali (they/she) is a queer, neuroemergent writer and play therapist. Their writing twists between longing and leeway, actuality and absurdity, mischief and rupture; threading queerness, community, grief, and joy into emotionally alive worlds. Their work is often insubordinate, asking who made the rules – and why we keep following them.

Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Outlook India, The Quint, In Queer Love (Daxayoni Publishing), and Kalavaram (Zinedabaad Collective). They were also a winner of the CREA Storytelling Initiative 2024. They are currently working on their first collection of short stories, and longform nonfiction exploring collective healing and disability justice.