The Ode I Wrote to My Broken Fan
In the peak of summer, my suffering achieved literature.
My ceiling fan died at 2:14 in the morning on the hottest night of June, and I know the exact time because the silence woke me like a gunshot. For four years that fan had made a small click on every third rotation, and my body had apparently decided this was the sound of being alive. When it stopped, some ancient part of my brain sat up and said, we are in danger.
We were. It was 41 degrees at two in the morning. Delhi in June does not cool down at night so much as it sulks at a slightly lower temperature.
I did all the standard rituals first. I flipped the switch off and on with increasing spiritual intensity. I stood on the bed and slapped one blade, the way you burp a baby. I checked the neighbour's window to confirm the power was on, and it was, their air conditioner humming smugly across the gap like a rich relative.
Then I lay back down in the dark and began, as one does at that hour, to compose insults.
You useless plastic buzzard. You three-armed traitor. Four years I have dusted you with a broom taped to a mop, risking my life on a wobbling stool, and this is my repayment.
But something strange happens to insults at 3 a.m. when you are too hot to sleep and too tired to be angry. Somewhere around the fourth insult, my heart was not in it... By the sixth, I was remembering things. The click on every third rotation. The way it stirred the smell of rain into the room last monsoon. The night I had a fever and lay directly under it like a patient under a ceiling of moving air, and it never once stopped.
By 4 a.m. the insults had turned, without my permission, into an apology.
By 4:30 they were praise.
I gave up on sleep, sat on the floor with my phone flashlight, and wrote the whole thing down on the back of an electricity bill, which in hindsight was the correct paper for it.
I called it Ode to My Broken Fan. It began: O beloved three-armed god of the middle class, spinner of the bearable, patron saint of the second-floor sleeper. It compared the fan's click to a grandfather clearing his throat. It ended with a line I was, at 4:47 in the morning, extremely proud of.
"Praise is just complaint that learned better manners."
At six I photographed the ode to send to Ramesh the electrician, so he would understand the urgency. This is where the story turns, because I was operating on ninety minutes of sleep, and I did not send it to Ramesh.
I sent it to the building WhatsApp group. All 74 members.
I noticed my mistake at 6:03 and spent one full minute trying to remember if you can delete messages after people have seen them. You cannot, not really... and Mrs. D'Souza from 401 wakes at five.
At 6:11 she replied with a voice note. She read my entire ode aloud, dramatically, rolling every R, pausing before the last line like a woman who had trained for this.
At 6:15, Sharma uncle from the third floor wrote, good effort, but your fourth line has one syllable too many, and suggested a fix. It was, annoyingly, a good fix.
At 6:40 the teenager from 502, who has never once said hello to me in the lift, set two stanzas to guitar chords and sent a recording with the caption, fan anthem.
By nine the ode was pinned to the top of the group, above the water tank cleaning schedule, which in our building is roughly equivalent to a state funeral.
Ramesh arrived at noon, because someone had forwarded him the poem along with my flat number. He replaced the capacitor in eleven minutes and charged me 250 rupees, and while he worked he asked me to read the ode out loud, properly, from the beginning. So I stood in my own bedroom at midday, sweating through my shirt, reciting poetry to my ceiling fan while an electrician conducted with a screwdriver.
"My father repaired radios," he said when I finished. "Forty years. He sang to them while he worked. He said machines are like uncles. They behave better in front of guests, and they last longer if somebody speaks nicely to them." He flipped the switch.
The fan turned, gathered itself, and on the third rotation: click.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because it is the part I did not expect.
The building group did not go back to normal.
Two days later, 304 posted Ode to the Geyser That Gives Exactly One Bucket of Hot Water. It was funny... and then, in the last two lines, suddenly not, because it turned out to be about his late wife, who used to bathe second and never complained. The group went quiet for an hour... and then filled with hearts. The next week came Ode to the Lift That Stops Between Floors, composed jointly by two aunties who I had believed were enemies. The teenager wrote one for the dead inverter. Someone wrote one for the pressure cooker whistle, timed to go off at line ten.
Our society secretary, a man who once sent a two-page circular about the correct angle for drying clothes, tried to ban what he called non-essential messages. He was defeated 61 votes to 4. A week later he posted, without comment, eight lines about the noticeboard in the lobby that nobody reads. It was stiff and rhymed too hard and I have thought about its last line at least once a week since.
I did eventually put my ode somewhere more permanent. I had been reading an essay on why safe poems lose, which argued that the embarrassing version of a poem is usually the true one, so I resisted the urge to polish out the sincerity and posted it, click and all, on a community wall for poets. A stranger from Chennai commented that she had read it under her own ceiling fan, at 2 a.m., in solidarity. Another said it reminded him of his hostel room in 2003. Nobody mentioned the syllable count. Sharma uncle would have.
People assume the summer taught me something about gratitude, and fine, maybe. But what it actually taught me is narrower and more useful: the distance between a complaint and a love letter is about four hours and one degree of heat, and everyone in my building was carrying poems the way the sky in June carries rain, invisibly, heavily, waiting for one excuse. All that hope was just sitting there behind the water tank schedule.
The monsoon finally broke on the last Sunday of the month. Real rain, the first in nine months, the kind that turns the streetlights into smudges and makes the whole city smell like its own childhood.
My fan was working perfectly by then. Click and all.
I switched it off.
Then I stood at the dark window in the noise of the downpour, letting the spray hit my arms, watching my own outline in the glass, and behind me the fan kept turning slowly on leftover momentum, once, twice... and on the third rotation, out of pure habit, it clicked. Like a grandfather clearing his throat. Like something that wanted to be included in the poem about the rain.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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