water

I was living in India after finishing high school. I was there having an intense time - losing weight, teaching English to classes of 60 kids ten hours a day, etc. I only spent three months teaching, and I wish I'd spent longer. I learned what a bad pupil I was, for one thing. And I'm too impatient to teach young kids. But I'd love to teach undergrads. Anyway.

So the water supply in my apartment building - by far the fanciest accommodation in the area, given that opposite me were reed huts and an ad-hoc goat butchery, consisting of matting and a block of wood - was rather intermittent. Often it would run out for days at a time. When it did sometimes I'd leave whatever was in the sink there and leave the tap turned on, so that the resupply of water would be audible to us and we'd immediately wash all our clothes, shower, use the toilet, etc. I liked life a lot - I did a lot of press-ups and chin-ups, I wrote a lot of letters, did all my washing by hand, played cards and read a lot of Dickens and Hardy. In this sense, they were very good times. It was very simple. Anyway.

Each weekend we'd leave town and meet up with other volunteer teachers (there was a slightly unsettling neo-imperialist bent to it all, I know) at tourist spot all over south india - we'd take 10 hour buses just to see each other. There were about thirty of us in total, spread over an area the size of, maybe, western Europe. Maybe larger. Anyway.

One week the water goes about wednesday, and that week we go up to the north of Tamil Nadu to the small town of Pondicherry, where I fell deeply in infatuation and had a motorcycle accident - but that's another story. I lost a lot of skin. We got back late on Sunday night to find the whole area around our block kind of - smellier than usual. The chicken shop next to our block smelled less noxious, in some way, next to this new smell.

So we went up to our first floor flat, to find, weridly, the door off its hinges, and propped up against the wall. The lock had been cut out. We'd been burgled, we thought - only, the smell in here was even worse. There was this weird line around the room, about four foot up, like a very minimalist freize... in grey. The whole place stank. It was like a millpond - brackish.

I still shudder remembering how it slowly dawned on me. The water had come on over the weekend, and filled up the sink - I'd left a sock, a single sock, in there - and then over flowed the sink, and then filled the entire flat to a depth of 1.20m. The door was broken down in an effort to stop the flooding of the apartment below, to no avail, and by the time the tap was reached to turn it off, the entire apartment block's water tank had emptied ... into our flat.

Everything was washed out - books, letters, tape player, clothes, &c. Our host family who had loaned us the apartment were publicly ashamed.

To top it all, we'd - coincidentally- locked the bedroom door and sealed accidentally with a mess of dirty towels. But we'd both left our bedroom keys in a friend's rucksack from the weekend, and both sets were now 350 miles away. So we couldn't even go to bed.

We ate out a lot less after this.