Utility
In Europe you are so used to the electricity coming on at the flick of a switch and water flowing at the turn of a tap you don’t even think about it. Even in Shanghai I had utilities 24/7. No worries. But here it’s different. Here you have to work.
The day begins at 6.30am, like or not, since the mains water only operates during limited periods of the day. Since it’s been 30 degrees all night and there’s no aircon as promised, (in fact not even an aircon brochure anywhere to be seen, despite my father’s assurances) you haven’t slept anyway, so it’s no big deal.
Turn on the motor via the switch in the bathroom, assuming electricity is functioning. Run downstairs to the bottom water tank, where there are three valves which must all be turned in the correct direction for the tank to fill with water. Once the mains shuts off, you can then pump water up to the top tank on the roof, which provides the majority of day-to-day water use.
This is assuming that you have even half a clue about how the system works. If you don’t, and it hasn’t been demonstrated to you, there is nothing for it but experimentation of the all the different combinations of the valves and motor, none of which work leaving you without water for washing up, showering or flushing the toilet for the rest of the day. Discover at a later date that one of the valves was bust anyway, making all of the above academic.
This is not impoverished rural Bihar; this is a middle-class suburb of New Delhi, the national capital.
At least there is a solution to the three-to-four times daily power cuts: each household possesses an invertor, basically a battery that charges up if the electricity is working and runs the lights and fans if it is not.
However, this invertor is not strong enough to keep the fridge going, so anything within is in a permanent flux of thaw and cool which in 40 degrees of heat can’t be good for sanitation.
I can’t live here. There’s a difference between being a whinging softie and just failing to accept that things need to be this way. I don’t accept that it needs to be this way, not here, not now in 2007. It was like this in the 80s and nothing has changed at all.
The images of India you see on TV are false. The only way to live comfortably here is to be incredibly filthy rich. The rest suffer in uneasy silence – and that’s not even including the billion poor for whom conditions are infinitely worse. If this is shining India, then there is no hope.
