From as early as I can remember, neighbours from around our ancestral home in south Kolkata came to get their drinking water from a hand pump in our backyard. What brought them to our doorsteps was that the water from that hand pump tasted so good.
My grandparents and after them my father and uncles did not dream of restricting access. After all, they did not own the water; they were at best custodians of what nature had put underground. In fact, they were proud that we should have been chosen by providence as guardians of something that all could share.
Over time that hand pump went dry. My father considered reboring but the expert advice was, you don’t know how far down you will have to go and how much that will cost. What is more, you don’t know what the quality of water from the new aquifer will be. It was then that we switched to drinking tap water, the stuff that came from the iconic pumping station at Tala in the northern outskirts of the city, where it came from further up the Ganga.
This water tasted, well not as good, but certainly almost as good, as the earlier hand pump water. It passed with flying colours a great quality benchmark: how good tastes the tea made out of it. Later in life I realised there was one other benchmark too: how good does a drink taste with it?
When I journeyed to Delhi in the early seventies with my first job, water out of the tap there was just like that in Kolkata. In fact, it was more. The Yamuna water gave you a fabulous appetite, hardly the right situation to be in when you are on your first job with little in your pocket to do anything and without a clue about how to cook the humblest of khana.
Be it in Kolkata or Delhi, we never dreamed of boiling the water. That will spoil the taste, my mother declared. When my wife came into our household in the eighties, she was aghast that we drank water without boiling it. Thereafter, the water in our household has been divided into two streams — boiled and as nature passed it on.
When we came to Bangalore, I found to my good fortune that the Cauvery water that came out of the tap tasted quite good but on the advice of all and sundry, I succumbed to what I had resisted so long — agreed to have all the drinking water boiled. But soon the two-stream approach revived. I was happy to have the tap water that passed through the purifier.
That was what it was for. But the wife, ignoring all my jokes, boiled the water out of the purifier before imbibing it.
But the final destruction of life came when we moved into our new apartment in east Kolkata. It is not served by the Ganga water as older parts of the city are. The water there, extracted from out of the ground by a deep tubewell, tastes foul. Despite a special attachment fixed to the attachment that is supposed to purify the stuff, there is more iron in the water than is good for anybody. What is most depressing is that a drink with this water is positively inferior.
I see all this primarily as an ill omen, a sign of the hard times that humankind has brought upon itself in the name of progress by misusing and disrespecting the good water that the good earth dispensed freely till not so long ago. Then in the rich countries they went in for bottled water even when their tap water was more than fit to drink. In the poor countries, without safeguarding the water that was fit to drink, the same false god of bottled water began to be worshipped. Now, even the water to put into the bottle is running out.
The biggest casualty in all this is losing sight of the timeless paradigm that it is bountiful nature that gives water for all to share and enjoy according to their needs. Insatiable and harmful technologies are both creating a shortage and polluting what was earlier as good as nature itself. In the process have begun fights over what was everybody’s to share and use.
The land from where my grandparents and parents came had more water than they knew what to do with. I have grown up on stories of how when my father went home to Faridpur (now in Bangladesh) for the pujas from Kolkata where he would come during college term; he would have to do the last leg of the journey by boat. The monsoon waters would not have subsided till then.
That land is a lot different today. A relative who visited Dhaka recently came back with this story. The rickshawalla was as friendly as he was simple. In his own way and within his means he extended all the good grace and hospitality that any visitor from the other part of Bengal is received with. Then when they got to talking he posed a question that was as simple as it was elemental. “Didi,” he said, “it is Allah who gives pani. So why does India not give us that pani?”
There was no point explaining to him what were the Farakka Barrage, river water agreements and the rights of riparian regions all the way upstream. All he knew was that his riverine land was seeing its rivers dry up. My grandmother, who never dreamed of excluding neighbours from our hand pump, would have been as perplexed as the rickshawalla was.
