My last night in the comfortable ac room, and the electricity goes out early in the morning. After that, I could not sleep and the electricity did not return. It was hot and uncomfortable. I gathered my things and head to the hostel. The electricity was out all over, it seems. This did not bode well for my recording session. There were several groups of musicians coming in. I tried calling the power company, but there was no response. I think their office opens at 8:30am.What to do? Do I tell the musicians to not come? Some have come in from far away, so this is going to cost me. It was a bit early, so I could not reach any of the audio folks to see if we could run the cameras on batteries in some other space for this session. Perhaps the electricity would come back just in time. I tire of these constant obstacles…but I guess it could always be much worse.The day was spent at Sindhology, waiting as musicians trickled in. I felt very grateful for their patience and bad for this problem that was out of my control. They all seemed quite understanding and insisted on waiting for several hours to see if the electricity returned. There had been a major outage over night and our area was one that had not been fixed yet. Information was unreliable and tough to come by. People around talked about electricity being gone everywhere in Sindh and Balochistan. Where they got this information, I did not know, but friends in areas around us said they did have electricity.So, we sat. We talked. I got to see Jairam Jogi, the fantastic murli player I worked with on my short film Gul, as well as on the Girnari Jogi Group album. I also got to meet people I had only seen in the footage I edited for that album, like Anb Jogi’s father, Bhiko Jogi and Mawa Khan, the harmonium player.These musicians just want to come in and work. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, despite looking into various options, we really could not find a suitable way to make that happen. Instead, I consulted with Ustad Anb Jogi and we paid the musicians half their fees, with the rest upon recording the following week. We would try to finish all of our recording tasks in the first three days of the next week, just before the Eid holiday. It seemed possible, but I am surprised at the number of challenges at each step.Darya sahib and Sikandar sahib invited me for dinner in the evening. I was happy to take them up on that. I have several days to go before I can record again. I’ll have to work on some editing in the meantime.I felt tired after being at Sindhology for so long. After saying goodbye to the musicians, I head back to the hostel, saw my friend Hisam, hung out with Saqib for a bit and then went to sleep exhausted.I dreamt I was home. It was a good feeling. Then the phone rang and I woke up. The room was hot and there wasn’t much I could do, but lay on the floor and try to get through another day. Sikander sahib dropped by my room. I pulled myself up, showered and then we head over to Darya sahib. We went out for tea and Saqib joined us. They were very sweet in offering their help to me in any way possible out of a love and appreciation for Shah Latif and what I was attempting to do. That really meant a lot to me. It certainly boosted my spirits. Darya sahib also offered me a place to stay, to get out of the hostel room. We got my things and I shifted over there.Afterwards, Saqib and I went to Sikander sahib’s place for dinner. He is a talented artist with a lot of beautiful calligraphy pieces. It was a lot of fun to look at his work and chat about poetry. It was nice to see the little ones running around and being silly too. I feel humbled by such sweet people. These morale boosts from people that step in at just that key moment to help pull me through are vital. I stayed in my new found home, thankful to be out of the oven hostel room.