Tukaram went "to see what the fuss was about".

Electricity came to Kolhewadi on a Thursday in the monsoon, and for the first week nobody in the village slept properly.

It was not the noise. It was the light. Houses that had gone dark at sunset for as long as anyone could remember now glowed until ten, eleven, even midnight. People stood in their doorways and looked at one another's windows as if they had never seen them before.

Old Tukaram refused to have the bulb switched on at all. He said he had lived seventy-two years by lamplight and did not intend to change for a machine. His grandson Ganesh, who was studying for his tenth-standard exams, said nothing, but he took his books to his aunt's house every night to read.

On the fifth night, Tukaram walked over to his sister's house to see what the fuss was about. He found Ganesh at the table, bent over his mathematics, working out a problem in the bright white light. There was no smoke in his eyes. There was no flame to trim. There was only the boy, and the numbers, and the long quiet hours of the evening ahead of him.

Tukaram watched for a long time without speaking.

The next evening, when Ganesh came home, he found the bulb in his grandfather's house already switched on, and the old man sitting beneath it, pretending to read the newspaper upside down.