Imagine a hostel of 3 storeys, with the nearly 700 rooms, immersed in complete and haunting darkness. That was how all the hostels looked on that day in our campus. I do not remember the date or the actual day but it was something related to conservation of electricity. Some geniuses in the college had thought it was a good idea to shut down electricity to all the hostels for 3 hours on a particular night.
When I first heard of it, I thought it was some joke that was being circulated around the college. But on that night, at about 8 pm, I was shocked when the electricity went out. I had been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on my laptop when this happened. Back then I was in my first year and I had a habit of plugging the laptop in charging everytime I played a game on it since games consume a lot of energy. Thanks to that, when light went out, I had a full 100% charged battery. But I knew it very well that playing a game would burn this out within 2 hours.
There was a lot of shouting going on in the hallway and so I stepped out of the room. Kartik and I had rooms on different floors in the first year. He was on the third floor and I on the second. I locked my room and proceeded to his, wading through a crowd of crazed first year students. People were shouting throughout the hostel. To anyone who was not of this college, it would have appeared to be an insane asylum. But I was familiar with this routine. Everytime the electricity would go out, students would come out and start shouting, sometimes hurling abuses at each other playfully and sometimes beating each other just to pass the time.
I walked through this mess and reached the third floor and found Kartik's room. I knocked on it a he opened. It was pitch black so we could hardly make out each other's faces. His laptop was on and he was watching a Naruto:Shippuden episode he had downloaded. In the first year, Kartik never played games on computer. He only watched anime to pass his time or sometimes meditated. He never takes his laptop of the charge and therefore had full 100% backup. I sat on his bed while he sat in his chair and we started to watch the anime. After about 45 minutes, we got a call from Sumit. He asked us to come outside the hostel as everyone was gathered there. We arrived outside 10 minutes later. There was electricity in the mess and all the street lights were on. I felt somewhat better. While I'm not scared of darkness, not being able to see anything and not having my fan running is a pain is the a**.
We started taking a walk around the campus. After about 30 minutes of walking, all of us were bored. Some of them sat outside on the footpath. I, Kartik and Sumit decided to go back to Kartik's room. We planned to watch Wolf of Wall Street. While walking on the stairs, Sarvesh and Anil also decided to join us. We were climbing the stairs when an idea stuck me. Sumit and Kartik were ahead and the rest of us were some 10 feet behind them. I told Anil and Sarvesh my plan. They all agreed. We called Sumit. We told him the plan and to say Kartik that it was his parents and that he shall catch up with us after talking to them. He followed the plan and took a different turn. When he was gone, Kartik turned to catch up with us. But by that time, we were hidden in darkness. There was a distance of 6 rooms between us. Kartik shouted to us and we didn't respond. We only laughed silently.
One thing I didn't tell you was that Kartik scares easy. He never watches horror films alone and even while watching with us, he covers his eyes whenever a horror scene comes. I had figured he was afraid of darkness too. It would turn out that I had got it right. Kartik stopped moving completely. We could see him well because he had switched on the torch in his cellphone and was waving it right and left to see where everyone was. It was lucky for my plan that there were no other people. I and Anil took up two different routes to reach him while Sarvesh kept watch on Kartik from the route we had been walking earlier. It took us about 2 mins to reach into our position, We didn't know where Sumit was but we were sure he was watching. I and Anil waited for some time. The moment we both came into Kartik's blind spot, we jumped up shouting Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa. In response, Kartik jumped up shouting. He was clearly frightened. Then I and Anil started laughing. It was followed by laughter from Sarvesh and Sumit who not came out of their hiding. Kartik was not laughing. He had a expression that told us he was not amused. But it had been funny as hell for us.
Laughing, we went to Kartik's room and watched the film. Next day, this incident was told to the other members of the group and we all had a laugh. Sometimes, we still talk about it and laugh. I am waiting for another such dark day to pull of something funny again.
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