Sundar Sarukkai’s ‘Water Days’: Water, haves and have-nots

The next day was a ‘water day’. Drinking water in that area was supposed to be supplied every day from public taps that were distributed across the locality. But there would be water flow in the taps only early in the morning. Most times, water would be sent on alternate days, although that never stopped expectant queues forming in front of the taps every day. At 3 am, the streets of Mathikere Extension were transformed into ghostly lines of sleepy, drooping bodies around every public tap. Sometimes the water came at four, and people would wait patiently, twisting and untwisting the taps periodically, in the hope of getting a faint stream of water.

Bangalore had grown chaotically. The urban chaos above the ground had transformed into dry lands underground, with the groundwater becoming less day by day. Almost every bit of land had a borewell drilled into it. Initially, water could be found after a few hundred metres of drilling but not anymore. In some places, it had gone past 1,000 feet. A new set of entrepreneurs arose around these taps: water diviners, those who rented borewell trucks, mechanics’ shops to repair and sell parts, hardware stores that suddenly had a supply of fancy taps (ironic, these fancy taps for pipes that carried little or no water) from Ghaziabad and plastic taps from Gujarat.

Water for Bangalore came from the Cauvery River, and Bangaloreans spoke with pride about this relationship. The Cauvery was a holy river in its own way, although minor in comparison to the holiness of the Ganga. The river was quite far away from Bangalore, and water had to be pumped through huge pipes from a dam near Mysore. Localities in Mysore close to the dam did not get water, but the powers in Bangalore never seemed to be concerned about this anomaly. It was the same with electricity, which came from a hydroelectric plant far away. It supplied electricity to the city while villages and towns near the power plant went without electricity for several hours each day. Bangalore was already becoming alienated from every other place in Karnataka. It was fast becoming the place that sucked water and power from other parts of the state. As the capital, political power had become centralised within the city, exemplified by the majestic legislative house, Vidhana Soudha. The city was fast growing out of its perceived traditional boundaries. It was already becoming famous as the booze capital of the country, with claims of making the best beer. Now, it had become the face of the country with its own version of the gold rush: the IT industry, which would soon transform the city into a shadow of what it had once been.

Mari seemed to be the only one in Mathikere Extension who had anticipated all this and more. He had begun asking anybody who bothered to listen to him: ‘Where is your water going to come from? What is going to happen when the apartments come?’ And the apartments would come, even in the crowded lanes of this locality. The Reddy Brothers used two garages for their office, and their tables had a scattering of models of high-rise apartments. Some of them looked like they were made of plastic and bought off the pavements outside the railway station. They symbolised the vision of these ever-warring brothers, who seemed confident that Bangalore was going to grow like Mumbai. There were already calls for changing the name of Bangalore to Bengaluru, just as Bombay had become Mumbai earlier. The brothers knew that even small-sized plots would be converted into multi-storey apartments with flats that squeezed light and space out of one another. The Reddy Brothers promised to transform Mathikere Extension into a network of apartment buildings. All they had to do was convince the owners of those plots of land to sell their land to them.

Pumping water to Bangalore through huge pipes was not an efficient way to distribute it. Some of the water was lost through leakage in the pipes; some of it was pilfered by villagers who found ways to tap into the flow. Water reached the southern part of Bangalore first, and then worked its way up north. Mathikere Extension was in the northern part, and once upon a recent time, was the northernmost part of the city. By the time the water reached there, the flow would have normally reduced to a trickle. The best time to ‘catch’ water at Mathikere Extension was around three in the morning. Poornima had once observed that any calendar originating in Bangalore would have to be based not on the solar or lunar cycle but on the water cycle of the Bangalore Water, Sanitary and Sewage Board. The acronym BWSSB was enough to raise the blood pressure of people in Bangalore.

The need to store drinking water meant that somebody in the family had to get up that early. Poornima used to do it earlier, when Raghavendra was working at Paul’s Security Firm. But after he left the job, he had offered to take on this responsibility. ‘What if I lose sleep?’ he said with a flourish. ‘I can afford to sleep in the afternoons.’ As if being an entrepreneur necessarily implied having the freedom to have an afternoon snooze.

It had not always been that way. Five or six years before, they used to get water all through the day. On the days it didn’t come, the well water was a sweet substitute. But with more buildings and borewells, the level in the wells had fallen. Now it would fill up only when the rains came in plenty, but the water always looked suspiciously green. Down in the bowels of the land, sewage and water had mixed together into one common government department—BWSSB.

Inevitably, the change in the water timings also introduced changes in lifestyle. The foremost being the introduction of the alarm clock, which Raghavendra bought on BVK Iyengar Road. Never before had Poornima got up to the sound of a machine, however small. Her waking moment was an alarm in itself—suddenly she would pop up, invariably at half past five in the morning. But after three years of waking to the sound of the new clock, she had lost her internal rhythm. Her time had coiled into the eighty-rupee clock. The clock soon found its own rhythm: irrespective of the time the alarm was set for, it would, of its own accord, ring at 3 a.m.

The alarm had also been the initiator of technological change in their home. Their old wall clock from Udupi, so lovingly polished by Raghavendra’s father, had needed an overhaul. When it stopped ticking, Raghavendra took it as an excuse to make a trip to BVK Iyengar Road, where time could still be bought and sold at wholesale prices. He found no one who dared to repair that old clock, so he bought the alarm clock instead. The battery price was extra but his persistent bargaining got him the batteries for free. He never said it aloud, but he knew that the alarm itself was a free bargain for time.

Now Poornima wanted to buy a washing machine. She told her husband, ‘Once you have an alarm clock in the house, why not a washing machine?’

That night, Raghavendra was up before the alarm, woken by the sound of water flowing in his neighbour’s house. Swiftly he got up and went to the kitchen. He took a big steel vessel and tiptoed his way to the door. As he opened it, the first of the dogs stirred and ran past the house. The rain had vaporised into a cool mist that formed shapes around the tube lights on the road. The road itself looked as if bathed in a fine spray of milk.

(Excerpted with permission from ‘Water Days: A Novel’, Sundar Sarukkai, Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland Books)

Features