In 1986, following my father’s retirement, my parents and I moved out of our comfortable ‘sarkari’ bungalow into a housing colony being constructed on the stony, dusty and barren slopes of a hill on the outskirts of town. Being an upcoming neighbourhood, the infrastructure was poor at best.
The water supply was erratic, we were at the tender mercies of the local ‘gram panchayat’ whose first priority was the villages that came under its ambit, and not this lot of outsiders who had muscled their way into its territory. There was no piped water into the houses; we had to fetch our water in buckets, by standing in line at common taps situated at various points. The water was supplied to these taps twice a day for a limited period of time. There was no lack of water, just the infrastructure to provide it.
In the monsoons, the water that came through these taps was a muddy chocolatey brown. There was plenty of it but it was completely unusable.
Luckily, in those days, the rains used to be abundant and Punctual. The rain water would fall from the terrace in an unending stream and flow past the houses, going chatter-chatter like the brook in Tennyson’s poem.
We decided to fill our buckets from Nature’s tap. As soon as the skies would cloud over, we’d gather our buckets and wait in anticipation. A few minutes after it began to rain, the water would start falling from the terrace and we’d race around the house, placing buckets at strategic points. Within minutes, all buckets would be sloshing with clear as crystal rain water. In no time, every empty containers in the house would brim with water, even as the rain fell in torrents outside. There was no need to ration the water as we’d do in summer, or to despair that we’d run out of water. All we had to do was wait for it to rain again. And when it did, one could hear the sound of water falling from a height into metal pots and buckets from the houses around us. Evidently, our idea had caught on! How’s that for rainwater harvesting? We didn’t have to save for a rainy day, it was the rainy days that saved us.
Switch to the dismal rain-less present. We have all the infrastructure in place to store, process and supply water into the houses of this city. We know how to harvest rain water, but we don’t know how to make it rain. The rains arrive later and later each year. We wait in anticipation when the skies cloud over and sigh with disappointment when the sun comes through without even a drop having fallen. Our children will not know the thrill of splashing in puddles while cupping their palms to catch the raindrops, they will first wonder how long it will rain and when it will rain again.
And they certainly won’t sing ‘rain rain go away, come again another day’.
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