Imlisanen Jamir
A 10 MVA transformer at Dimapur's Supermarket sub-station failed on Sunday, and by Monday an 11 kV Indoor Vacuum Circuit Breaker had failed at the RESS sub-station in Kohima, carrying Jotsoma, Khonoma, Mezoma and Poilwa down with it, and taken together the two events, so close in time and so far apart on the map, demonstrate something about household life in Nagaland that ordinarily goes unnoticed because it never needs to be noticed, which is that the conveniences a family relies on each morning are not really separate conveniences at all but a single chain wearing several names, dependable only for as long as its weakest link happens to hold.
What followed the Dimapur failure makes the point better than any explanation of it could. Electric pumps stopped drawing water into household tanks at the same moment the lights went out, so that within hours families who had not touched a hand pump in years found themselves carrying water the way their parents once did, the modern method having relied all along on a single point that had just given way. Generators kept in reserve for exactly this contingency became, in some households, not a backup system but the only system still working. Electricity, water and evening light present themselves most days as three distinct comforts, yet a Sunday afternoon in Dimapur was enough to show that they had been one comfort under three names, and that the name written above all of them was the transformer nobody had thought to keep a spare of.
There is an old habit behind all this that predates transformers and circuit breakers by a considerable margin, the habit by which each generation, on adopting some new convenience, quietly keeps the older one within reach rather than discarding it. The hand pump in Dimapur was never truly retired. It had simply been waiting, much as a kerosene lamp waits in a drawer or a well waits under its concrete cover, for the moment when the newer system would need reminding that it too could fail. Progress tends to borrow the patience of what it replaces and call the arrangement modern living, an arrangement that holds only until an ordinary afternoon reveals how much of it was borrowed rather than owned outright.
Questions of responsibility, of spare parts and maintenance schedules and the age of the equipment involved, will have their own moment, and it will not be difficult to find one. What deserves notice first is simply the mechanics of what took place this week, the way an unremarkable grey box mounted in a sub-station yard turned out to sit at the exact centre of a neighbourhood's water, light and evening routine, without anyone in Dimapur having stopped, before Sunday, to ask what a single failure inside that box might quietly carry down with it.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
