Water, Water, Everywhere

You know those Hindi movies of the 80s and early 90s where our main protagonist was mostly from a disadvantaged background? And how those movies used to spend close to half-hour of a good movie torturing us with some child actors in dubbed voices? Well, if you are with me till here, can you imagine those movie scenes where it used to rain and our poor Hero’s family would tremble in the cold as their hut leaked with water from all over? Imagine lightning effects and our Hero’s younger sister (there’s always a younger sister, silly) shouting “Bhaiyya!” and hugging big brother. Or do you remember seeing an ad recently on TV where they showed a family opening umbrellas and putting on raincoats as they went INTO their house, because their roof was leaking?

My flat is inundated with water. Ah, you say, now I see the purpose of the first paragraph in this post. Thankfully, the roof isn’t leaking, as yet, that honor is left to my office (more on that later). Rainwater is wading in from the cracks in the old window frames of the house. I am sure the ants and other organisms with whom I share the floor of the flat must be thinking that a Tsunami is upon them. Mum has been diligently trying to dry the floor since yesterday. I asked her why she was bothering with it (“Lets just wear chappals, we anyway sleep on the bed and the water isn’t going to come up to that level”). She gave me a look, which made me feel like a pet that had just peed on the floor of the house. It didn’t help when I suggested that we spread the carpet on the wet floor so that I could sit on my leather beanbag which was now perched on my bed. After some time, she gave up, when in spite of her efforts she could see no perceptible improvement in the condition of the floor and took the easy way out. Which is, to blame me, of course.

“Even when we were in Delhi, (that’s a span from 26 to 14 years ago), I ‘ve never lived in a house, which leaked like this one”, she said, as she sat in the chair next to me and pulled the small table from under my feet and plonked her own feet on top of it.

You may think it’s a harmless statement. But, its loaded. First point to note is that it was I who selected and rented this place while obviously my point of view was never asked for when we were in Delhi. Second point to note, me lord (don’t tell me you don’t remember those court scenes in those movies that I was talking about) was that even when we were poor (when compared to say, now) we stayed in better houses, at least they never leaked.

If you think this is funny (at least I do), come to my office, it just gets better.

As you enter the lobby on my floor, you will be greeted by a row of 6 buckets of different pastel colors, green, blue and pink being predominant among them preventing the leak from the roof wetting the floor. Yesterday, I even saw a red colored 50-liter drum where the leak was little more earnest than the other typical ones. That drum reminded me back to the Delhi days when we used to fill in our water needs for the day in a similar looking drum. Running water was scarce then and available for only an hour or so in that DDA flat, I remember.

Coming back to office, even the bloody elevators are leaking from the vents. I mean, there am I waiting, along with a female colleague, for the elevator doors to open when we are greeted with our own private monsoon enclosure. We are both taken aback, obviously (I think I even heard a small exclamation from her which sounded like, “ohowro!?!”) As I gingerly lead the way in, we inspect the leaking vent, the wet floor of the elevator and, you guessed it, the pink bucket between both of us, which was half full and struggling to catch the drops which fell out of its reach. They need more buckets in there, I thought, as I escaped out of the elevator when it reached my floor. But then there wouldn’t be much of a place to stand around. That would be funny. Only a bunch of buckets going up and down in the elevators the whole day filling themselves up with water.

This rain is also causing havoc on my weekly 9 km. run on Saturdays. I ‘ve been thinking about running the Bangalore Half Marathon, that’s 21 kms, on Sep 17th. That’s only 42 days away. How am I going to train in this weather?

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

Dad, who used to have a joke for every occasion, asked us when we were kids,

“Why is the letter ‘T’ like an island?!”

As we looked at him with blank stares, he would exclaim,

“Because its in the middle of W-A-T-E-R!”

And laugh.