Most of my childhood memories revolve around my dadi (Grandmother). She is a very amusing and loving lady. Very commanding and dignified yet very humble and ignorant. She believed in following a proper routine as opposed to a typical Sindhi household. Probably, because unlike most of the people of our community my grandfather was not a businessman. He worked as a Line-Man in the Government Forest Office. An honest line-man! (Why that expression? That’s another story). To be in sync and serve as a perfect housewife she, like my dadaji (Grandfather) followed a time-table.
Every morning the first thing I wake up seeing is my dadi praying. And after our routine ‘Hare Ram’ (praise the lord) greetings her next sentence would be “Go take a shower”… well mostly! You see, when you have grown up in a small town in India you would realize that a few basic “necessities” are actually “luxuries” and ‘Water in summers’ is one of them. I would remember crying my eyes out and begging my mom to spare me a day of shower in winters since it used to be extremely cold but she won’t. But the scenario in summers was totally different.
The municipality will run the water-supplies for 15 minutes every morning at any arbitrary time and one person from every house-hold was supposed to sit next to the water tap to start the water-pump first when that happened. If you are the last or the second last from your lane (neighbor-hood) to start the water-pump then no matter what you do, you have to wait for another day. Of-course there were solutions like more powerful water-pump or water-tanker or borrowing a bucket from a neighbor, mostly you had to live with what ever little water you had stored for your family. People who couldn’t afford a water-pump would complain to the municipality head and there would be random “motor check raids” and confiscation of a lot of water-pumps which there after were used by employees of the municipality for their house-hold needs.
So mostly it was first come first serve. But there were actually two kinds of people. The one mentioned above who would religiously wait for the water supplies by the municipality and the ones who had a tube-well or a bore-well as it was called then. Those were the rich and powerful of the lot. They had water for the plants, trees, cows, dogs and their kids. They had water to wash, bath, cook, waste and sometime to lend. Well atleast some of them did. You also get to hear things like “We can only give two buckets otherwise our bore-well will dry out.” or “We have guests coming over!” or “You know how much electricity is consumed by the bore-well motor?” So from borrowing a bucket or two from the rich neighbors to standing in the queue near a municipality tanker to waiting for the ‘not-so’ regular water supplies, I knew for a fact that when the spring is gone and summer comes with that bright and hot sun smiling at my small town my dadi had to condense her morning greetings just to a ‘Hare Ram’ (praise the lord).
