The colony meeting was the second Tuesday of every month, in the ground floor flat of Flat 14, where Mrs. Pillai served excellent tea and maintained a list of grievances going back to 2011.
This particular Tuesday, the colony had a list of problems: the main gate's automatic mechanism was broken, three streetlights were out, the water pump timer needed calibrating, and the security guard's booth needed a new coat of paint.
"These all need professional contractors," said Mr. Shah, who was treasurer and always said things that were sensible and never quite enough. "We should budget—"
"No need for contractors," said Suresh from Flat 7, who had said exactly this at approximately fifteen colony meetings in the years since he had moved in. "I can fix all of this."
Suresh was a software engineer who had, over thirty years of homeownership, accumulated a significant collection of tools and a specific, deeply held belief that everything could be repaired if you approached it logically and watched the right YouTube video.
He was not entirely wrong. He had fixed many things. He had also, over the same period, created several new and interesting problems in the process of fixing the original ones.
The colony, which had learned this about Suresh and had also learned that turning down his offers would result in a twenty-minute explanation of why he could definitely do it, reached a silent consensus: let him try the gate.
The gate was the most important but also the most contained thing on the list. If it went wrong, at least the gate was already broken.
Suresh spent Saturday morning on the gate. He watched three YouTube videos Friday night, ordered two components online that arrived Saturday at 9 AM with suspicious speed, and had the gate working by noon. It was, genuinely, impressive.
The colony was encouraged. They gave him the streetlights.
Two lights were indeed blown bulbs, which Suresh replaced in thirty minutes. The third light had a wiring issue that was more complex. Suresh examined it with a voltmeter he'd borrowed from his brother-in-law and declared it solvable.
During the repair, there was a brief moment — later described from multiple witness perspectives with varying degrees of hyperbole — when approximately half the colony lost power. This lasted four minutes before Suresh found the tripped breaker and restored it. The third streetlight came on, working perfectly.
The colony was divided. Mrs. Pillai said four minutes of power outage was four minutes too many. Mr. Krishnan from Flat 3 said the light was fixed, wasn't it, and pointed at it.
They gave him the water pump.
The water pump timer was, as Suresh correctly identified, miscalibrated. He recalibrated it on Sunday morning. He had it adjusted to start at 6 AM and stop at 8 AM, which was what the colony wanted, and to start again at 6 PM and stop at 7 PM.
The pump started at 3 AM Monday morning.
This was discovered by everyone in the colony simultaneously, through the medium of a very loud mechanical sound at 3 AM, which turned out to be the pump starting, and then the subsequent sound of the pump struggling because the overhead tank was full and the pressure had nowhere to go.
Suresh was downstairs in four minutes in his pajamas. He fixed the timer in eight minutes. He went back upstairs. The colony went back to bed with the specific feeling of a group of people who had been woken up at 3 AM and have made their peace with it but have not forgotten it.
The security booth they gave to a professional painter.
At the next colony meeting, the list of things fixed by contractors was zero. The list of things fixed by Suresh was three: gate, lights, pump. The list of additional problems created during the fixing was two: brief power outage, 3 AM pump incident.
Mr. Shah, who had been keeping quiet since his sensible suggestion was ignored, said nothing.
Suresh said he thought overall the ratio was pretty good and asked if anyone had noticed the gate was working beautifully.
Mrs. Pillai served the tea with the expression of a woman saving her opinions for a private moment.
The gate was, in fact, working beautifully.