Squeezing A Stone

It’s been a while since I spoke to this elderly gentleman, a nice, unassuming hard-working chap, with large spectacles and an avuncular air about him.  My ‘How-are-you?’ is a regulation question…..

The reply is an absent-minded, 'Fine'. But he wants to say more.....  

‘As you know,’ he begins, ‘my wife and I live on the ground floor and I have built three flats above ours for my three daughters.  The flats are all on rent.  We do not have a municipal water connection and get 8 water tankers every month.  That’s twenty thousand rupees.’

He pauses and takes his spectacles off, cleaning them meditatively.

‘Yesterday, the water tanker driver supplied his last tanker to us.  They have run out of water.’

He sees the expression on my face.  

‘The tenants are all moving out this weekend.  One young couple will return to their home town.   And my wife and I are looking to rent an apartment.’ He pauses, and then smiles, ‘Let’s change the subject, he says, but I must tell you that I never expected this to happen to me.’

I am silent and hopefully my look shows empathy, understanding, commisseration for it is the least he can expect from me.  Walking back, I think of our city, with its profligate, indifferent ways, where entitlement preceeds responsibility, of hotels with jaw-dropping luxury that tell you that water is precious so could you please reuse the towel but allow us to keep our jacuzzis running, of apartment complexes where a call to conserve is met with a howl of defiant protest and of cynics who believe that Economics will solve the problem, for as Oscar Wilde said, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  

It isn’t water that is in short supply…..

And I think of those fifty thousand hectares or so of sugarcane by the Cauvery river that are probably still being irrigated; the crop of each hectare will consume 12-15 million litres of water.  

Multiply that by 50,000.

Stories tell us more than facts do.

And, no, we do not need that sugar.