Ultimately, it was the water that got us. For quite some time the wife and I had been discussing whether we should shift to a cheaper place in Bangalore, what with our income shrinking after retirement and our children having gone away allowing us to make do with much less space. But the pluses of the corner of Indiranagar in which we had made our home for close to five years always won the day. It was so peaceful and green, even while being near all the good shops. And so close to the new metro rail station.
I did a fun thing the other day, by briskly walking to the station at 6.30 a m, taking a near-empty train in the misty half light to M G Road and in five minutes finding myself in the incomparable surroundings of Cubbon Park. Then, after working up a ravenous appetite through an hour’s brisk walk, I strode into my club in one corner of the park and put back, through breakfast, all the calories that I had lost. Where else could I get such a life, I thought. It didn’t come cheap but wasn’t unaffordable either.
But the water supply kept getting lower and lower. These years have seen the inexorable progress of water tankers; beginning with the ordering of a tanker once a month, eventually having to do so once a week. Where would this end, I wondered? I consulted my neighbour, the ever helpful Mr Reddy, about the pros and cons of requesting the landlord to sink a borewell.
Money is beside the point, he replied, giving me a list of all the houses on the street where the old borewells had dried up. Then, to make it worse, he narrated another list of those who had recently called in the rig people to sink a borewell — unsuccessfully. The water table had now sunk, Mr Reddy concluded with all the suspense he could muster, to over 1,000 feet!
Hugely depressed, I still steadied my nerves and broached the topic to my landlord. He matched my concern with equal nonchalance and let me in on a family secret: there had been a borewell in the house, long ago, but it had dried up — equally long ago. Then what is to be done, I enquired, unable to bear the suspense any longer. The landlord replied with all the magnanimity he could muster: “In fairness, I should reimburse my tenant the cost of ordering water tankers.”
It’s not the money, I wanted to scream. It’s the psychological pressure, not knowing when the tanker people will actually send the tanker after you have phoned them, seeing the storage tank almost dry. It’s fighting the feeling of living in a refugee camp where thirst is quenched if and when a water tanker arrives. The thought of having to depend on ambulatory water tankers gave me a sense of unbearable impermanence, as if the static solidity that came out of living in a brick-and-mortar house was gone.
The first thing that we confirmed before deciding on our new home was that there was no water problem. You consumed as much as you liked, we were assured, and the cost was subsumed under the monthly maintenance bill that the residents’ association running the apartment block raised. Fortified with the sense of security that this assurance created, we moved in.
But not even a day passed before I had to call the wife in panic to the window and ask her if she saw what I did: a water tanker standing stationary on the driveway and disgorging itself into an underground tank. Fervent enquiries calmed my nerves, as I was told that the tanker was for the older, sister apartment block next door. It seemed that their borewell, after rendering yeoman service for well over a decade, had given up the ghost. All that my fatalistic comment – we shall also come to such a pass sooner or later – elicited from the association’s office clerk was a reassuring smile hinting that the secret to mental peace lay in crossing a bridge when you got to it.
I have not yet started waking up at night in a cold sweat after dreaming of living in a surreal world in which a built-up city and desert sand are all mixed up, and residents are going mad chasing the mirage of an oasis. But I am sure that, not very long from now, I shall see the deliverer in my dreams coming not in a golden chariot but a water tanker.
