A family I know has devised a neat trick for saving water. They wash their clothes by hand because they have an old suspicion of washing machines and the huge amounts of chemicals that must be dumped in. Then they save the grey water and use it to flush the toilet.
“It’s also rather nice that it’s soapy water in the toilet so mosquitoes can’t breed there,” says the lady of the house who admits to flushing when friends are coming over because most people are squeamish about peeing into grey water.
What she finds difficult to take is the attitude of the young man who comes to help around the house now that they are both a little older.
“When he does the dishes, he simply turns on the tap and lets the water flow. And it isn’t as if it’s a trickle of water. He turns it on and lets it run at the maximum. I keep telling him about it and then he will turn it on and off but if I’m not around, the water runs as he soaps and stacks.”
What makes this young man’s behaviour odder still is that he comes from an area of the country which suffers from endemic drought. For many months of the year, his family must walk to fetch water. “Perhaps it is a luxury for him,” she says reflectively. “But it isn’t one the world can afford.”
I remember a friend who got married to a very nice man who seemed to share all her ideals. Theirs was the only wedding that did not run out of hand. They had 50 guests, the families cooked, she wore fresh flowers and a cotton sari and he a silk kurta which he gave me afterwards because he would not use it in his corporate job.
Then she discovered the hidden flaw. Her husband’s way of de-stressing was to stand for an hour in a shower whose head produced a cascade of the kind that would have tourists stop on an Indian highway for a selfie with a waterfall.
She was horrified. “But it is my only extravagance,” he said. They were living then in Singapore where no one that I know has ever complained of a shortage of water. But over the years, he has got this down to 10 minutes — he is a nice man — and she has managed to get the shower head reduced to something that is ecologically sensible.
We often pride ourselves on being the nation that was recycling before recycling happened. I remember that each year my sister and I would wait for our report cards to come so we could be sure we had been promoted. Then we would take my old school textbooks for sale. (My sister’s would be saved for me.) After that, we sat down with the notebooks and tore out all the unused pages and took them to the binder to create a ‘rough book’. It wasn’t something we were proud of then. Everyone did the same.
Saving, desi style
There are still vestiges of this in this modern India’s behaviour. We will not take the plastic cover off the sofa because the upholstery underneath must be saved from stain or wear and tear.
This has the additional advantage that our friends and relatives get a core workout from trying to anchor their buttocks on the slippery plastic surface. (Eventually, this shortens visits because your back is sweaty too. This may or may not be an advantage.)
But with water, we are profligate. In the colony in which I live, everyone throws out their old water.
Old? It has been a day since it was filled. It is yesterday’s water and so, unfit for use. I don’t know how we came to believe this but we do.
A few people will take the water out to a nearby tree — although too much watering can kill a tree as surely as no water at all — but most simply pour it down the drain or throw it on the street. No, it simply can’t be used to wash the dishes or clothes. You have to throw it away.
Did grandma do it?
Perhaps this is cultural. Perhaps grandmother did that all the time. But then grandmother had servitors to go and fetch fresh cold water from the well but here’s a flash. A Cola company has sucked up all the groundwater that fed the artesian spring that fed the old well.
And the supply of servitors has dried up too. How often have you heard a variation on this theme: “Just can’t get good servants these days!”; “Things are not like they used to be; our servants were like family members”; “You can’t trust them these days. My grandmother had such a level of trust, she would take off her jewels and just give them to Old X.”
We all know instinctively how central clean water is to human existence. Ten minutes of thirst is all it takes. We can all think up lovely slogans for Chunnu and Munnu to paint on chart paper for EVS class. But what we need to be doing is turning that into action, getting the dripping tap repaired, carrying your water bottle so you don’t have to buy plastic bottles and add to the load on the oceans, rinsing your mouth with a glass of water instead of a running tap.
I’d love to end with a slogan, a crisp clever line that would say it all. But really, what I hope is you’re going to look around and think about the ways in which you could do something for the world we have dirtied.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
