Allah Megh De

“There will be no water from 1 pm to 5 pm and from 11 pm to 5 am”, the notice board at our apartment block announced on a hot March afternoon. I had just come back from a trip to Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata – boiling, baking and boiling some more – hoping to land into the cooling embrace of dear old Bangalore. To my horror namma Bengaluru was as hot, as stifling and to top that, the water crisis. I have been reading about the shortage of water in newspapers and for some time Margaret, my help at home had been telling me about her body aches from carrying water from a faraway tap to her home every day. She also told me that the crisis would only get worse because people were not being careful. I understood her problems from the distance of my class, concerned and caring but not really spending too much thought since the problem still had not touched me. So the notice was a sort of wake up call.
Anyway, we were storing water in buckets and tubs and reduced our consumption significantly. But on Friday when I reached home at 8.30 pm I realized there was no water in the taps. I called the security at the gate who informed me that there has been an acute shortage and the tankers are coming in but he did not know when the water would be released. I waited till ten and then walked down to the gate to see what was happening.

At the gate I found a group of ten –twelve residents talking to the secretary of our association, an old man in his sixties who was sitting there in the little office room ticking off in a book as the tankers rolled in one by one. He was explaining to the group why this shortage and what the association was doing about it. He seemed to be an old Bangalorian and was explaining how this was the first year, he himself was affected. Most years the drought prone areas are normally the slums and the busties but this year it was different. I was listing to them talking and suddenly the power went off. The people standing around had started chit chatting with each other. A young man asked the older guy next to him for a light and lit up his cigarette. Another gentleman asked me which block I lived in. I explained I lived in R block and my parents in T. He said his parents were also in the same block as me. They were originally from Delhi but last year they shifted to Bangalore so the son could look after them better here. We discussed about our old parents, their needs, their idiosyncracies and laughed. Someone said that his mother had a problem of wanting to wash her hands many time a day and the water not being there was good. She now wanted to use a bottled sanitizer. Our secretary, the old man who was listening to us chat, got a call on his cell and he sounded quite stern on the phone. He was speaking in Kannada which I don’t understand so I asked the gentleman standing next to me to translate. He smiled, he did not understand either. So we did a quick look around to see if anyone standing there understood. Our secretary was smiling realizing our plight as we found one person who translated the phone conversation for us. He was speaking to the guy from the water company who was giving excuses for being late with the extra tankers we needed. Our secretary was trying to be stern with him and told him that he must keep his promise or else we would look for another vendor. Our secretary told us that he was hoping by eleven he would be able to release water. A couple of people looked at their watches, swore under their breath and started leaving for the lifts to their apartments when a young boy arrived with a kettle of coffee and some plastic cups. I recognized him. He worked in the tea shop across the road. He had seen this group of people hanging around her, chatting, sitting around and decide this might be a good time for business. Everyone had a cup and our secretary very magnanimously told us not to pay. He bought us our coffees.

I had my coffee, said good night to the people there and started walking back to my flat when our secretary called out to say, “Leave your taps open so you know when the water comes, but don’t go to sleep leaving them open”. As I was walking back, I was feeling very strangely happy and light hearted. I was thinking, today because of this water crisis, I came down and met twelve people from this community. These are people I have never met before. Well, I have not met my neighbor either actually. And I had a lovely time chatting, drinking coffee, talking about things. This was what middle class community life was in Asansol where I came from. Hwne there was no water, no power, people would saunter to the roads in front of their houses, chat, drink chai, criticize the government, talk about cricket. This was how it used to be. In our modern day living, we needed crisis like this to get a sense of community life. I felt happy that I was in this crisis and this brought us together, here, in a sort of shared common space. While I did not know their names, or what they did for a living or where they came from, I would smile at these faces if I saw them in the corridors or in the lift or in the parking lot. I felt a strange connection to them and to this fifteen year old apartment block that did not have enough water for its residents.

The next morning when Margaret came to help with my domestic work, I asked her about the water situation at her home. She complained as usual and I did too. Driving to office that morning I saw a group of women chatting in front of a tap next to the road carrying multi coloured plastic pots. Unconcerned about the Modis and Tharoors of the world, they were standing around probably discussing the latest Kannada film or what to cook for lunch. I felt a strange sense of calm seeing them bundled together, knowing there are still some things we share in common. Knowing that nature often has a weird way of bringing everyone down to the same point. As our political concerns, social agendas, cultural spaces get further and further away from a large part of the population, there are still some things we can think about together.

As I am writing this, I understand how awful that might sound. How much do I understand about their daily issues, their problems, their lives which are tough and hard? Am I glorifying the water crisis because end of the day I don’t have to stand in line for water? Am I looking at this as a sort of getting rid of my guilt trip for belonging to my class? Am I looking for an excuse? May be I am. But I still have to say this that after many days of fuming and fretting about the IPL trauma, this seems more real, more close at home, a feeling I have been wanting for some time. And all of a sudden I want to listen to a song I had heard years ago,

“Allah megh de pani de chaya de re tui.
Asman hoilo toota toota jomin hoilo phata
Meghraja ghumaiya roichey megh dibo tor keda.”

(Allah give us clouds, give us water, give us shade,
The sky has broken into bits, the earth is cracked,
The kind of clouds is asleep, who will give you clouds?”)

The Cast Away

In this country we are hypocritical about many things. We pray to goddesses and ill treat our women, we donate golden palms to stones in temples and refuse to sign up for charity shows, we reap the fruits of a secular nation and praise Modi for enriching Gujarat’s wealth quotient, we crib constantly about the traffic in our cities and are the first to break the red lights and we learn, preach and feel unduly bloated with a superiority complex talking about how we respect, care for and love our senior citizens and yet ignore them completely in our society.

Last Saturday, I went to buy shoes for my mother who is 65, short sighted and has recently developed an unsteady gait due to age. I looked at five different shops, brands ranging from Bata to Liberty to Woodlands and finally Reebok and Adidas just to amuse her and found exactly four pairs of drab, black, flat heeled shoes. That’s all the choice you’ve got in this consumerist economy, a liberal-market-full-of-options-economy, if you want no stilettos, no high heels, soft, comfortable, good for your back and posture, affordable, steady, decent coloured footwear. The friendly guy at Bata suggests I get my mom to a cobbler since I won’t find what I am looking for, simple, nice looking, good quality shoes for an old slightly unsteady woman.

It struck me suddenly how our thousands-of-products-ready-at-your-doorstep retail has so little to offer the senior citizens. We still shudder at people who look for old age homes for their parents but when it comes to thinking, designing and selling products, we still cater to the young and the restless. It’s not just shoes, its clothes, bags, furniture, books, telecom, magazines, bars, restaurants, financial instruments – what have you. Even spectacle frames are fluorescent or shiny, ‘fashionable’ and glitzy, according to the smiling sales lady, “Young people are preferring this only, times have changed no?”

And why retail only, look at our auditoriums and film theatres? Except for Rangashankara in Bangalore I can’t take my old folks to any place where I am sure they wont have to rush in with the youthfully spirited lot to stumble over unlit stairs to reach their seats. Roads have no pavements where the elderly can walk quietly; jogging tracks are full of young health freaks taking their final dash to lose that extra inch; there are no special queues for them at service counters. Restaurants now come with “child-free” labels; soon they might want the elderly out of their bounds too. There are no special schemes for people my parent’s age from mobile phone companies or internet service providers, nor packages that might interest them from our Direct to Home television brands. And yet everyday I see and hear of schemes for young people, college students, mid career professionals and even children. On the roads we honk twice as much if we happen to get stuck behind a slower elderly man or woman at the wheels, our parking lots have no reservations for them either. We grudge the slightly extra time taken by an elderly person at a public restroom and often get on the hand phone to complain about these ‘oldies’ quite within their earshot. We might call them over to take care of our infants when they are born but pack them away right after their nanny jobs have been done. Even the Union Budget 2010, has washed their hands off after slightly increasing the tax exemption scale for senior citizens. The only guys, who seem to have some products available for the aged or rather the ageing, are wrinkle removing cream companies!

Basically, no matter what we say and how much we propound the philosophy of how much we Indians take care of our elderly we do nothing for them. If not for human decency, I wonder why we are blind to the market potential of the increasing well to do senior citizens. I also wonder what standards we are setting for a space where we will all get to be someday!