Up North and Personal: Water woes

Up north, the water situation is worse than I had imagined it to be.


Zahrah Nasir January 28, 2011

Hitler’s Wife looked hard done by as she toiled up the steep track with a huge basin of washing balanced on her head and three children in tow, the youngest howling as he held onto the back of her grimy kameez. It is unseasonably warm for January, yet the tiny tot’s hands were blue and mottled with cold, from playing in the water, I surmised.

The eastern sky is a faded misty blue where it slides towards the horizon beyond snow-capped peaks and jagged ice-covered crags. To the west, where a watery sun slides down behind bottle-green pines, the heavens are a translucent, powdery pink streaked with pewter grey. Overhead, flies a solitary Steppe Eagle, tracking the movements of my smallest dogs, both of which he fancies for supper.

The sight of Hitler’s Wife has worried me: she only resorts to doing the laundry in the rather suspect stream — ‘suspect’ as it is contaminated with sewage — in times of desperation. The water situation is obviously worse than I had imagined it to be. Olive Oil’s spring must have run dry otherwise her daughter-in-law would not have resorted to this back-breaking task. If her spring is dry, others will not be far behind and water wars will, once more, break out.

My own spring, once located conveniently behind the house, migrated elsewhere as a direct result of the October 2005 earthquake and since then, I depend on ‘Zafar water tank’ and families further up the mountain to supply me with household water through the 500 feet of extremely vulnerable plastic pipe strung through the trees. This spring water, paid for monthly, is in addition to the efficient rainwater harvesting system my late husband installed some years ago. The rainwater tanks, all six of them, hold a total of approximately 1,000 gallons but none of them are directly linked to the household supply. They will be, once I figure out how to use the recently purchased pump or get a plumber. The spring water — three tanks holding about 500 gallons — are generally more than adequate for household use, with the rainwater being reserved for the garden and orchard. But the five-month-long drought of late 2009 saw me hauling endless buckets of water from the rainwater tanks into the house when Zafar’s springs — he has at least two — dried up. It was hard, heavy work but at least I had water until the rainwater tanks too ran dry. As it is impossible to get a water-tanker anywhere near this particular mountainside, I resorted to hauling water by cab from miles away until, thankfully, the weather broke.

Since then I am more careful with water than ever. Washing up water is recycled for the garden; I shower standing in a huge basin and the water collected is used to flush the loo; hand-washing water is also recycled, washing machine water is reused until it is astonishingly filthy, at which time  it goes to irrigate the orchard; clothes are worn until they really must be washed; in times of stress, the number of showers taken per week is drastically reduced and, when at all feasible, shower water is first used to wash floors before being used to flush the loo.

These stringent methods have, over time, become part and parcel of everyday life and they mean that, largely because of the fallback rainwater tanks, I still have water when everyone else has run out — which is when repetitive hammering on the gate can become an annoyance! Being generous, I used to happily fill people’s buckets and containers from the rainwater tanks when they asked but I did draw the line when they demanded my carefully hoarded spring water. The other problem was that they went through my rainwater at the speed of light, wasting it terribly and expecting my supply to last forever. When it didn’t, I was left to fend for myself without other family members to assist me, as the neighbours have. I learnt my lesson the hard way, yet, still feeling sorry for their plight, I advised them on how to install their own rainwater harvesting systems at very little cost so that they could be prepared for the next time… which, apparently, is right now. Of course, not a single one of them took my advice and I now realise why ‘Fat Wifey’ has suddenly decided to make a point of calling out a greeting when she spots me out and about in the garden. She has her eyes on my water reserves!

Fat Wifey and family only acknowledge my existence when they want something. Otherwise I am invisible to them, even if we pass each other walking. I automatically salaam them but they don’t respond, suddenly finding something so magnetic to focus on that it deprives them of the power of speech. Fat Wifey’s husband, a brooding, untrustworthy character, is rarely seen outside, preferring to simmer malevolently in the dark recesses of their house. He did, to my utter shock and consternation, come banging on my front gate all of three weeks ago… and he was not alone. “I’ve brought these mazdoors to put my water tank in your garden,” he told me. He built his house all of six years ago and did this without any provision for water. Since then his children perpetually wander around hauling a length of hosepipe to connect to someone else’s tap for an hour here, half an hour there or, when someone is out, to an outside tap for as long as possible without so much as a by your leave. Investing in a water tank was a major step, but no way was it being set up in my garden, right next to my own water tanks. Not always being as stupid as I may appear, I knew full well who was expected to keep the damn thing full.

“Why not put it on your own land?” I queried.

“The children will interfere with it,” was his pat reply. “We need to put it on yours where it will be safe.”

“One of your children climbed into my garden last week,” I told him. “He and his friends stole my oranges, which means my garden is not secure either.”

Oh those oranges! It breaks my heart just to think of them. Oranges do not grow at 6,000 feet up in the hills of northern Pakistan. Neither do lemons but, after experimenting and nursing a handful of citrus trees along for years now, I was finally to be rewarded with two dozen oranges and three huge lemons and was really looking forward to picking them. I went and checked them over at least thrice every day, encouraging them along. But a few days ago, when I came to check on them in the late afternoon, they were gone and Fat Wifey’s son and his cricketing companions were running for their lives, clutching my oranges in their hands. The lemons were left behind unnoticed.

“My children wouldn’t ever climb into your garden,” he said in mock astonishment. He knew that I had had problems with them before, but I would need to check on my water tank, of course. I would also need to have a plinth built for it, and the blocks and cement would arrive in about an hour, I would close up the sides too and have a roof put on it to protect it from the weather as these plastic tanks don’t last if not covered properly. . .

Good grief, the cheek of the man! He wanted to build an eyesore on my land rather than on his own.

“No” I firmly told him. “You can’t put it here.”

“But…” he started.

“No,” I cut him off, and left him and his work gang to find another mug to take advantage of.

Apparently the other two people he approached weren’t taken in either. Now the horrible tank, inside its block and concrete shack, is on his own rooftop where it stands in empty splendour as no one has any extra water to fill it up!

The single day of snow and rain at the end of last month birthed a surge of hope that the weather guys had got their forecast wrong but within 24 hours it was back to being dry. The thick layer of ice that formed at the top of this particular link road managed to halt vehicular movement for five days. Now I, along with everyone else in the area, desperately scan clear blue skies along with daily, weekly, even monthly, weather forecasts in search of salvation. Hopefully, something wet will have arrived by the time you read this.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 23rd, 2011.

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