Peter Popham: Asian diary

By PETER POPHAM

DELHI - There is something I am supposed to do this week that I am putting off. I am sitting here writing this article instead of doing it. I am supposed to go up and down the block of flats in the middle of Delhi where we live, explaining to my neighbours why, if they want to avoid being fried in their beds, they should get their hands on 30,000 rupees, about £460, and hand it over to the electricity board.

It's not a small sum, even in sterling. Here it is about three times the salaries of the professional people I will be talking to. More to the point, it is 60 times what they pay every month in rent. That's five years' rent down the plughole, supposing they are able to lay their hands on it. And for what? For some impalpable assurance that some remote disaster will not strike.

Frankly, I don't fancy my chances.

My only hope is to remind them that the disaster is not in fact remote. Less than three months ago it nearly came to pass. As chance would have it, we were away on holiday. One night, fire broke out in the filthy, unventilated cubbyhole under the stairs, immediately below our flat, where the electricity meters are located. Soon the stairwell was full of thick white smoke and a poisonous electrical stench, and everyone in the block held their breath and belted downstairs and stood outside to watch.

It burned for three hours. No firemen came to fight it: Delhi hasn't had an effective fire brigade for years. Brave domestic servants finally quelled the fire by dumping large quantities of earth on it.

No-one was exactly surprised, as we have had several smaller fires break out in the same place during the four years we have been living here. We have also had a junction box inside the flat burst into flames, and on another occasion smoke came wiffling mysteriously out of a cupboard in my study (but that was the downstairs flat's chimney cracking up).

This, however, was much the worst incident, and a few busybodies, including us, rounded everyone up for a meeting in our flat to try and decide what to do to stop it happening again.

The basic problem is simple. By Delhi standards, our block is an ancient monument: built in 1945 to a design of Lutyens, and with grand old Raj-scale rooms and quite a lot of now rather fraying presence about it.

But Delhi landlords don't care much about maintaining their properties. There seems to be an ingrained Brahminical reluctance to spend too much energy worrying about anything so obviously belonging to the world of maya, illusion, as a block of flats. And given that most people had their rents capped at 500 rupees ((pounds sterling)7.50) a generation or two ago, the financial incentive is no stronger than the spiritual. So the tenants pay peanuts, the block slowly falls apart, and everyone's happy. Sort of.

Except us. As we were the new guys, and palefaces into the bargain, the landlord did not blench from charging us 100 times what everyone else was paying - which in any case is closer to a market rent, given the flat's size and central location.

For similar reasons of religion/insolvency/apathy, no-one has done anything much about the block's electrical provision since 1946 either. In those days electricity meant half a dozen 40 watt light bulbs. Nowadays even in a modest middle-class home it means a television, a couple of air conditioners, a computer or two. Up and down the block we turn on our appliances and suck for all we're worth at the feeble trickle of juice coming down the tiny pipes. No wonder it blows up once in a while.

The solution is simple, as the electricity company's engineers patiently explained: have a fat new cable laid from the feeder under the main road to our block, a distance of 30 yards. Then re-wire the block, and we'll all sleep easy again. The catch: the residents are expected to pay for the whole thing.

No-one's going to cough up. I know it in my bones.

- INDEPENDENT