Subir Roy: The tale of safe water

OFFBEAT

I never had boiled water in my life, that is, until I got married. In our south Kolkata home, the drinking water first came from a hand pump that had always been there. Its water was so tasty that the neighbours also got their daily pitchers of drinking water from it, carried on the shoulders of their servants.

Then one day the hand pump went dry. We then relied on the tap water, which was collected from a ground floor tap during the high pressure supply hours. It came straight from the corporation's famous pumping station at Tallah, in north Kolkata, where it came straight from the Ganga. And that happens till date, with most of the family drinking the water without boiling it. In the past three decades nobody has fallen ill from drinking that water.

I realised the usefulness of this upbringing when in the early 1980s, I had to extensively tour parts of Assam in search of riots to report. Whatever civic service there was in normal times had collapsed in riot-hit areas. And those were days when bottled water had not arrived. I didn't drink water out of stinking ponds but made do with whatever was available, without asking too many questions.

The watershed in my life came when I got married. My wife was horrified that we had the corporation water straight off the tap. My attempts to explain to her that I had nothing against boiled water, except that boiling it killed all taste, had no impact. She was quite democratic: you do what you want to, I will play safe. Most of my friends were on her side and our children have grown up only on boiled or bottled water. When we eat out, we prefer to carry our water and when it is a posh restaurant, we pay through our nose for bottled water.

The water problem has become a bit acute for our son ever since he has moved to his college hostel in Chennai. Chennai's water problem is well known, no one knows when his hostel water cooler was last cleaned, though there is an Aquaguard contraption attached to it. So he was told not to touch anything other than bottled water or water that comes in large jars that a local supplier delivers occasionally. The result is he spends a fortune on water.

After some time I suggested to my wife that he live like most of the other boys, off the water cooler, but before I could win her over, came the tsunami. My wife was convinced that all Chennai's water had become polluted (though his hostel in Tambaram is miles from the sea) and my son's lifestyle did not change. When I again began marshalling my arguments, came the successive rains and flooding the city has known this year. So our son continues to add a massive water bill to his pocket money and mess bill.

When I had given up trying to convince my wife that a little exposure to germs helps people develop resistance to infection and prepares them for life's unknown challenges, I was elated to read this interview of a Swiss Nobel laureate that said exactly the same thing. I took it triumphantly to my wife, knowing that I had won the argument. But with supreme confidence she said, "If you think that will make me expose my children to all the germs, you are mistaken."

You cannot argue with such certitude. All I can hope for is that our son is making an ass of his parents and growing up robust and enjoying the extra pocket money drawn under the bottled water head.