It was my second evening in Varanasi, and I had basically nothing planned. An early night, maybe some laundry, and definitely an early sleep before a sunrise boat ride the next morning. I'd already had a couple of brief power cuts earlier in the trip — a few minutes each, barely worth mentioning. This one was different from the start.
The lights went out a little after 8 p.m., somewhere in the old city, close to Dashashwamedh Ghat. The guesthouse owner didn't even pause mid-sentence — just reached for a drawer of candles like he'd done it a hundred times. Within twenty minutes I was up on the rooftop, and people kept arriving in twos and threes as the outage stretched on, until there were maybe ten or twelve of us up there.
Someone got a tray of masala chai up before the stove lost power completely — cardamom, ginger, a little cinnamon — passed around in whatever mismatched mugs people had grabbed on the way up, alongside a plate of plain biscuits that disappeared almost instantly. Below us, the Ganges had lost its usual electric glow from the ghats. Just boats drifting past by lantern light.
Someone had a speaker running on whatever battery it had left. At one point *Kesariya* came on and half the rooftop started singing along quietly, before the playlist wandered back into Bollywood tracks and a few songs nobody could identify.
A German couple staying two rooms down had been traveling for about fourteen months — Turkey, then Iran, then Nepal, before India. One of them joked they'd basically become experts at finding rooftops whenever plans fell apart. A solo traveler from South America pulled out a card game he'd apparently carried through several countries for nights exactly like this — matching colors and numbers, trying to be first to empty your hand. Simple enough to pick up by candlelight, though by the end nobody was fully sure we were scoring it right.
Nobody was checking the time. The blackout ran past nine, past ten, past eleven — and it didn't feel like waiting. It just felt like the night.
Then, all at once, the lights came back. I remember checking my phone, half-startled by the sudden brightness. The whole rooftop seemed to deflate in minutes — everyone blinking, drifting back to their rooms like someone had switched off whatever we'd all just been part of.
I asked the guesthouse owner about it the next morning. He said power cuts near the ghats were fairly common — depends on the season, the state of the local grid — most short, a few stretching for hours like ours had. I did the sunrise boat ride as planned, and it was genuinely beautiful, worth getting up for. But it's the blackout people hear about first when they ask what Varanasi was actually like. The boat ride showed me Varanasi. The blackout made me feel like I was part of it, even if only for one evening.
I wouldn't tell anyone to expect a three-hour blackout. But I'd tell them not to be surprised by a short one somewhere along the ghats — and not to be too quick to see it as a problem. The memorable part wasn't the outage. It was how fast it turned a random group of strangers into a rooftop full of people who, for one night, had absolutely nothing better to do than talk to each other.
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