Sleepless in the Secretariat

There’s nothing like staying up the whole night on work to throw your normal routine off kilter. Barely a week into the new posting and I was asked to be on night duty because of the flood situation. Only days earlier I was on similar duty on Sunday from morning till night. Since it was raining and what with the shopping frenzy I had decided to skip the Abids visit anyway so it did not matter if I spent the day in the office instead. But sitting up all night, though not new to me, wasn’t what I was prepared for. I had no choice but to agree. I was told to go home early and return by half past nine after dinner and a couple of hours of ‘rest.’


In one of my earlier postings with the cops, once a month we’d do what was called as ‘Route Checking’ all night. We’d position ourselves, a large posse of cops in mufti and officials, on one of the highways leading into the city and stop all kinds of vehicles, especially trucks. We’d check them if they carried any goods without paying tax. It was grueling work, being up on your feet all night and dealing with cranky truck drivers. The only saving grace was being in the company of one cop friend who demonstrated how cops dealt with drivers and others who did not fall in line. I saw him pick out particularly rude and surly drivers and slap them. I did not like it a bit and felt sorry for the harried drivers but I couldn’t do anything about it because I too felt like slapping them the way they sometimes behaved. The long night’s duty was something I did not particularly look forward to because not only was it back breaking it was also dangerous. But the night duty in the Secretariat was exactly the opposite.

All I had to do was sit before the television and make calls to a lot of officials in the districts to ask them how the rain or flood was. Then I could do all the net surfing I wanted. I did not know what to do all night so I took along my notebook. I also took along Alice Sebold’s ‘Lucky’ but I did not get much time to read it. It was the day before Ramzan and from the window of the room high up on the seventh floor I watched the traffic zoom past even at midnight. I was supposed to be awake all night and remain so until eight in the morning. But a little past one thirty in the night I lay down on the sofa to stretch and slipped into an uneasy sleep. When I opened my eyes it was a quarter to four in the morning and the news on the television said the river Godavari had risen upto 56 feet at Bhadrachalam.

That day I was probably the only one in the world to watch the sunrise from his office window. It was quite a beautiful sight as the sun rose into a clear sky in the early hours of the day. I wished I had my camera with me. I had also not remembered to bring along a tooth brush and had to drink my tea without brushing my teeth. For those who haven’t been through this experience, the tea tastes the same.

I’m told I have to be prepared to do the night shift whenever there is heavy rain or flood in the state. I’m wondering when next I would be doing it again.