My maid and one bottle of water

In all the last few decades, it’s this year:they say is the heaviest drought in Maharashtra

My taps & my washbasins however have a lot of water

Some I brush my teeth with, twice a Day. With some I take bath with exotic shower gels

And the rest flows out, non-stop & free-flow: as I talk on phone or one of the other 100 reasons

Now, if I can afford, why do I care? Anyways ‘water day’ and environment are all mere tokenisms...

 

The maid who comes to my place lives in one of those slums that dot the entire city

And every day she fills a bottle of water that she’ll carry back home.

(Her slum does not have regular water supply & some such story she’d said once)

My maid, the old and fragile lady we lovingly call ‘Bai’, often says ‘Babu don’t waste so much water’

And I teasingly reply ‘Bai, don’t be jealous. Take back as much water you want’

She doesn’t reply , smiles slightly and proceeds to other household chores...

 

But that day she said something very scary.

Her son works as a ward-boy in a large city-hospital

An insignificant job-profile, a meagre salary but he is learning a lot on the job she says.

A very rich man was admitted to the hospital...

And as he was breathing his last one night, my old and fragile Bai’s son was the only one by his side.

‘Get me a little water’ ‘Get me a little water’: the rich man kept panting

The last voice he heard before death was cold and unaffected

‘Sorry Sir, today the hospital has run out of the last drop of water’

 

These days I wake up at midnight, thirsty, sweating- hangover of a nightmare

As I drink a glassful, I get up. Check my taps and washbasins again, seal them tighter

Don’t know the water that I’ve started saving now: where it goes and who stores it?

But all that I know is:

Soon I will be old & senile and I will be dying.

And I don’t want to go to the same hospital, that same ward: the same ‘insignificant’ ward-boy.