And if a man lived in obscurity / making his friends in that obscurity / obscurity is not uninteresting.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, People

Electricity comes in half-hearted spurts when you're up to hand-cranking the diesel generator to life in Ali Masood's house. It feeds a few bulbs and the remains of a television, itself plugged into a massive dish antenna made out of bolted pieces under which a donkey helped itself to a bucket of water. Because they have no electricity, they have no refrigeration (if you mention an air-conditioner they will break out into grins). This means that meat cannot be frozen, but has to be salted and dried instead, massive chunks skewered on a musharra and left out in the sun till they crinkle — even the flies lose interest. Such meat can be kept for up to three months, reborn over the fire before the meal.

The fish seems to last even longer. Samak Awal is bought dried from the fishermen of the Batinah and is a storage dream that you can revive after a year. Of course, the romance of all these techniques are lost in the fact that the residents can now drive down to the foodstuff shops in the dusty recesses of Sahtan and stock up on cans of sardines they call kaasha.

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