I Wrote My College Essays by Candlelight
Power cuts scheduled my ambition, and wax stains dated my drafts.
You can date every draft of my college essays the way scientists date trees, except my rings are made of wax. Draft one has a single drip in the margin. Draft four has a full amber puddle over the word "leadership," which, looking back, was the universe editing.
This was Bettiah, Bihar, the winter I turned seventeen. In our town the electricity department did not really supply power so much as visit it upon us occasionally, like a relative from abroad. But the evening cut was reliable: seven to ten, every night, so punctual that we set our lives by it more faithfully than by any clock in the house. Dinner before seven. Homework arranged in order of eyesight required. And at 6:55, my mother would take down the steel plate with the candle stub and the matchbox from above the fridge, a fridge that at that hour was just a large white cupboard.
The families on the other side of the market had inverters. You could tell at night, walking home: their windows glowed steady and white, ours flickered orange like the whole lane was celebrating a very small, very poor festival. An inverter cost eight thousand rupees. My father drove a jeep for the block development office. Eight thousand rupees was not a number, it was a season of arguments we were careful never to have.
So when I decided, with the full unearned confidence of a boy who had topped his district once, that I was going to apply to a Delhi college and to every scholarship with a form I could photocopy, my study hours were not chosen. They were assigned. Seven to ten, me and the candle, at the dining table, in a house gone so quiet I could hear the wick.
What the dark teaches you
People who study under tube lights can afford to wander. The light will wait.
A candle does not wait.
A candle is a countdown you can see, and mine were stubs to begin with, bought loose from Gupta Stores at two rupees each, because full candles were for power failures, not for ambition. My mother rationed them to me like a quartermaster: two per night, three before an exam.
So I learned economy. I learned to think the sentence fully before spending ink and light on it. I learned that if you sit close enough to the flame to read your own handwriting, the left side of your face cooks gently, and that you should turn the page toward the candle, never the candle toward the page, a lesson that cost me half a physics notebook to learn.
The smell of those winters is still exact in me: kerosene from the stove, wax smoke, the cold-metal smell of a Bihar December coming under the door, and the Camlin ink I bought in bottles because bottled ink was cheaper per word.
And in that thrift, somewhere, I started to love the work. I would not have admitted it then. But there is a version of studying that is performance, done under bright lights, half for the marks and half for the audience.
Nobody performs for a candle.
Whatever you do in that small orange circle at nine at night, with your family asleep and the mosquitoes conducting their own examinations, you are doing for the actual thing itself. Years later I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I recognised the argument immediately, because the candle had taught it to me first: witnesses make you careful, and careful is the enemy.
The essay that died at Raju Cyber Cafe
The scholarship that mattered most wanted five hundred words, typed, on "an obstacle you have overcome." I wrote it the way every coaching guide in the market told me to. I picked a tidy obstacle, my maths marks in Class 9, and overcame it in prose so responsible it could have been a bank circular. Words like "perseverance" and "determination" stood in rows like boys at assembly. Six drafts, two weeks of candle stubs, my best handwriting, all of it aimed at sounding like the kind of boy who wins things.
Typing cost twenty rupees an hour at Raju Cyber Cafe, past the sabzi mandi, one of four computers and a ceiling fan that moved air from one side of the room to the other without cooling any of it. I budgeted two hours. I typed with two fingers, hunting each letter like it owed me money. Ninety minutes in, four hundred words done, the tube light blinked once.
Then the whole market went dark.
Unscheduled cut. The one kind our town never warned you about. Raju lit an agarbatti for some reason, as if the problem were spiritual, and told me the generator was for the photocopier only. The computer had eaten my four hundred words whole. No power, no file... no refund on the hour.
I want to tell you I was calm... I walked home through the dark market with my handwritten drafts rolled in my fist like a weapon, and I sat down at the dining table, and my mother, reading my face, put the steel plate in front of me and lit the stub without a word. Deadline was in two days. Speed post from Bettiah took three if you flattered the postmaster. It had to be rewritten that night and typed at opening time.
And by candlelight, furious, with nothing left to lose and no light to spare on lies, I did not rewrite the maths essay.
I looked at the flame and wrote about the flame.
I wrote about seven to ten. About two-rupee stubs and rationed light. About turning the page toward the candle. About the inverter windows across the market, steady and white, and how I had stopped envying them, because a boy who studies in borrowed dark learns something the bright windows never teach: exactly how much light one page actually needs. It came out in one draft, one candle, no crossing out. The wax drip landed near the bottom this time, and I left it there on purpose when I copied the final, like a signature.
The dark did not cancel my ambition. It scheduled it, and I learned to keep the appointment.
That sentence was in the essay, more or less. Seventeen-year-old me phrased it worse. Seventeen-year-old me also could not have known he was learning the first rule of all the writing I would ever do afterward: the obstacle you overcame is never the material. The material is the room you overcame it in.
Steady current
The scholarship committee, some strangers in Delhi I will never meet, chose the candle essay. Four years of fees.
My father told the whole block development office. My mother told the candle, I am fairly sure, because I caught her looking at the steel plate the day the letter came, doing private arithmetic of her own.
College was a new beginning in the plainest sense: a hostel room with a tube light that never once went out, current so steady it felt wasteful. The first week, I kept glancing up from my desk at eight, at nine, waiting for a darkness that never arrived. You would think unlimited light would feel like victory... It mostly felt loud.
It took me a full semester to learn to concentrate under it, and honestly, I never entirely did. For every difficult thing since, final-year project, job applications, the first real poems I wrote about that dining table and about hope as a two-rupee purchase, I have switched off the main light and lit a candle. My roommates thought it was superstition. It is closer to citizenship. That orange circle is the country I studied in.
There is a candle stub in my office drawer today, in a city where the power has failed twice in six years. My colleagues have never asked about it... and I have never explained.
Some appointments you keep long after the schedule is cancelled.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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