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?”)