Like every other year, this time, too, we had planted our summer vegetables with great care. And now, we are getting the soil ready to plant vegetables for the winter season. However, a corner of the garden in which we grew ridge gourd refuses to yield to the new. The creeper is still luscious and green and continues to give us more than a kilo of the vegetable every day even in late October. But the number of recipes I know with ridge gourd is seriously limited and we were rather tired of gourd delicacies this season. So I took it upon myself to share our harvest with our neighbours.
There aren’t too many people in the same age-group as my partner and I in Santiniketan since it’s a place in which only retired people choose to settle down. Clearly, there aren’t enough unambitious “losers” like us willing to give up the good city life! Our gourd-giving jaunts, thus, were pretty time consuming since the elderly like to talk when they have visitors over. On one such visit, a couple I met seemed very distracted. The reason being that the water supply had failed.
The area in which I live is actually owned by the Visva Bharati University (leased to individuals for 99 years) and our water supply comes from the university. There are some other plots of land that do not belong to the university but have traditionally been supplied water by the university. The couple I visited happened to be living on one of these freehold plots.
The next day I went to another elderly couple’s house. They had come on a visit from Kolkata and the gentleman, who is a thorough city-bred, was quite critical of this small town’s shortcomings. That morning he was particularly livid. They, too, had got no water supply in the morning.
Even at 52 we are considered “young” in this town of the elderly and most turn to us in case of emergencies. So as the problem of water supply persisted, we started getting calls from people asking us for advice.
Since our supply had not been affected, we suspected that only the plots that the university does not own may have been facing this problem. We advised the couple to meet the university’s water supply authorities.
When they went there, they were told that the person responsible for turning on the valve that supplies water to the non-Visva Bharati plots had not been coming in the mornings. The supervisor – the errant valve operator’s boss – assured our neighbour, however, that he would make up by giving them more than adequate supply in the evening.
The elderly gentleman who had gone to complain was absolutely aghast at this “so what if you haven’t had a bath in the morning, you can have two in the evening” kind of attitude. He insisted on knowing why exactly the water supply failed. The supervisor was visibly irritated at the lack of gratitude at his generous offer of doubling the supply in the evening. “The gentleman responsible for your area has recently started a milk distribution business. Naturally, he will be a little busy in the mornings. In these days of rising prices everybody needs a little extra money,” he said. As it turned out, it’s not just him who is adjusting his routine to fight rising prices. When we met our neighbour later, he told us how he had rearranged household priorities to adjust to the new dispensation.