rain rain everywhere nay a drop of water

water scarcity, Gangtok, sustainable practices, routines, itinerant life, privileges, deep questions, and Dervla Murphy the cyclist

Apr 24, 2023

Dear Reader,

Thank you for joining me. I hope the new week has started well for you.

One thinks one has all these great ideas and when one sits to write, nothing. I have been at this since seven in the morning. I woke up at 6:15 after three alarms of 5:15, 5:35, and 6. I needed sleep perhaps for I remember listening to the first alarm and thinking I will get up and then snoozing it at 5:30 again and saying okay I am getting up only to pause the alarm at 6; finally in fifteen more minutes did I pull myself out. Hah!

Gangtok (here in Sikkim state in east India) is having a serious water problem. A pipeline carrying water to the city from a river broke in a distance, and the citizens haven’t had water in homes for four days now. The government sends water in tankers that is then distributed in little quantities in buckets that families carry up and down the hills. How much toil! And the bucket only fills about fifteen percent when the guy distributing it stops the flow. Next, he says. Police accompanies him because otherwise people might fight.

In the guesthouse I stay I have had water twenty-four hours because a water tanker is paid for which then fills the tanks. But today the hot water didn’t run. When I called to ask, the staff said the automatic water heater didn’t switch on because the pressure is low. It cannot be turned on manually.

So the morning was one of the rare times when my routine of about seven months broke down: get up, shower, write. I stood in front of the mirror and wondered what to do with myself. Having no intention of showering at 6:30 with freezing mountain water on my periods, I played my morning meditation music, washed my face, and sat to work with coffee.

It is about nine now and that’s why I say I have been at it for two hours but not much progress has been achieved. Once a friend asked me — whom I met in Chile and who lives far far away on Vancouver island — how do I decide what to write in the newsletter. Do I always know what I want to share? No, I replied. I sit and look around and think how my week is going, what I wrote and read, check my internet history, see what I tweeted, and how I felt overall. Then I put some of this and a narration flows. A few words down and before I know a torrent gushes.

I expected that to happen today, too. But I was short of words. Would the water problem catch us here in the guesthouse, too? Would they still clean and provide fresh towels and fresh sheets? (The classic syndrome of worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and might never come about.) Then the images of those children and women queuing up in the sun on the city’s main square for a fifteen-percent bucket-full of water flashed in front of me. I was appalled with myself. Their water pipes have been dry for four days, kids are carrying washed clothes up a hundred and five stairs, none has water even for the toilet and I am thinking of fresh duvet covers and wet wipes. What a creature of routine and necessity and how selfish I am!

But I am a human being. We adapt quickly in any situation the universe thrusts us into. I have adapted into comfort. I pay the price for the facilities I need so I can write from morning until night seven days a week as long as this heavy project lasts. I have comfort along with a different kind of hardship. Today without hot water, I adjusted. If tomorrow there isn’t any water at all, I would make do with that, too. That’s how we are, else I would not have survived on the road for more than two years now. It was on January 31’ 2021 my partner and I left our little abode in Bangalore and got out in our car with utensils and books and yoga matts.

Of course, I safeguard my routine more than anything else. Without a schedule a human is lost, I believe. I like to be turned around with the ticking of clock without having to think what to do. And to say, I have stuck a black tape on my screen so I can’t see the time. My nine-year-old Mac even with the latest OS doesn’t allow me any means to hide the clock. So I don’t see the time but I flow with it.

Morning shower and coffee, write, walk to lunch, eat, stroll around, buy something I need, walk back, more work and a cup of coffee, play cards with partner, read, sleep. All day-long little stretches of stretching and meditations are embedded though I need to give those more devoted time. But so far so good as the purpose of these months is being achieved. It is all going well, I think.

I have to be kind to myself, too. Maybe I am not a horrible person. Maybe I am just thinking about what I need for no one else would do the same. Everyone has to look after herself. But on the way, we can have some compassion for others, remember those times when we didn’t even get fifteen-percent water from tankers, live with the awareness that things change in the blink of an eye, and not forget that on the road how many times we didn’t have water or food and slept with doors locked harassed by and afraid of the host.

Then we can also use some of our knowledge to build systems that harvest the abundant natural resources which for now go to waste. I’ve been wondering why isn’t rain water harvested here in Gangtok. In the last two months, it poured down every day for hours, sometimes all-night long. And it wasn’t just any rain. We felt as if the sky would come down on these sloped colourful roofs. Hailstorms at three in the afternoon are common here. Even now in the summer — thanks to global warming — when locals say the weather should have been dry and warm — rain still come bothering us on many days. We rush back from lunch, sometimes under an umbrella, sometime right before the downpour starts, trotting uphill. One day we got stuck in a pouring hailstorm and the first time in two months I took a taxi back home. In fact it is this rain that broke the pipes that bring the river water to a treatment plan along a rugged mountain terrain.

Where did all that water go? If we had harvested it, Gangtok would have had water for months. This is the only city in which I have rarely seen a solar panel. None of this abundant sunlight is being used. Except for the rainbow of clothes which hang out of every window, door, ledge, and even on roofs where people put them by clambering up.

While I can’t put in these solutions (at least not now), I can do my bit by using minimal water, not being bothered about fresh linen and towels, and showering less. I did hold upto my part a little by wearing the same clothes for as long as they didn’t smell and minimised water usage for laundry to as much as a human can do in civilisation before she is sent out of the city never to be seen even in its vicinity. I plan to hold up to that part.

So the week has gone in thinking of rain, writing, discovering an amazing thali — set menu — where I get unlimited ghee-soaked chapatis, vegetables, dal, curry, yoghurt, papadum, onion salad, chutney for one-seventy rupees. That is about two US dollars. The food is (almost) homemade and hot. I haven’t got a photograph of the plate yet so I am sharing of another Nepali thali which I was eating so far. But this one, too, I would share in the next letter.

the vegetarian Nepali thali I enjoyed for lunch. One can get refills of rice, lentils, and vegetables

Of course the irony that tourists have water because their guesthouses pay for tankers but the locals have only little is pretty clear to me. Not only by limiting the usage and wastage but also by thinking about and implementing sustainable practices can we humans come out of these conundrums for essentials we find ourselves stuck into more and more around the globe.

I promise to do my part by continuing talking about the sustainable practices, using sensibly, and reusing and harvesting what we already have rather than fetching more from the system in my own home when I have one.

What about you? How do you notice climate change around you? Is water pouring over from the heavens but not through pipes? What do you do on your part to help ameliorate the crisis?

Celebrating Holi in Gangtok. I wonder what would have happened if the water crisis hit Gangtok at Holi. I don’t even want to think about it.

For this week’s letter,

Some of my writing,

quotes I love,

things to read,

things to watch,

and

travel tips.

Articles From the Past

A Road Trip From Bangalore to Coorg [Quintessential Karnataka]

My travelogue of a road trip from Bangalore to the mountain valley of coffee-licious Coorg, along with notes on Kodagu culture, people of Coorg, and ideas on how to explore meaningfully.

Also: a special note on why Coorgis hold gun licenses.

Read the narrative now. Or Pocket it for later.

77 Deep Questions About Life [And My Answers]

Read the questions now. Or Pocket them to savor later.

Quotes I Love

I’m feeling rather miserable today, having left the Hindu Kush behind, yet the past weeks have given me something that I know will prove permanent. It may sound ridiculous, but I feel I’ve been privileged to see Man at this best – still in possession of the sort of liberty and dignity that we have exchanged for what it pleases us to call ‘progress’. Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help to understand what we are. Living in the West, it’s now impossible for most of us to envisage our own past by a mere exercise of the imagination, so we’re rather like adults who have forgotten the childhood that shaped them. And that increases the unnaturalness of our lives. So to realise this past through contact with a people like the Afghans should help us to cope better with our present – though it also brings the sadness of knowing what we’re missing. At times during these past weeks I felt so whole and so at peace that I was tempted seriously to consider settling in the Hindu Kush. Nothing is false there, for humans and animals and earth, intimately interdependent, partake together in the rhythmic cycle of nature. To lose one’s petty, sophisticated complexities in that world would be heaven – but impossible, because of the fundamental falsity involved in attempting to abandon our own unhappy heritage. Yet the awareness that one cannot go back is a bitter pill to swallow.
Dervla Murphy

If one had to live in prison for many years, with nothing to look at but the wild, a tuft of yellow grass perhaps with the southwest wind moving through it, a clump or two of heather and the sky, such a tiny view, so restricted and yet alive, would mean more than any artist’s masterpiece.
Freya Stark

We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
May Sarton

Don’t envy me, forgive me.
Don’t compete with me, walk beside me.
Don’t disdain me, educate me.
Yours Truly

What I’ve Been Reading

I’ve been reading short stories, books, articles, and so much more. I can’t possibly list all what I have read in the past week so I’m putting down the things I found most relevant and worthwhile.

Beautiful reads from the week,

Books

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy — This is an entertaining travel memoir of Dervla Murphy who bicycled from her home in Ireland to India in 1963. I recommend the book to all who love to read adventures, travel vicariously while knowing about other cultures, and want to be inspired to get out of their comfort zone. Also to know why one doesn’t have to be brave to travel.

What I’ve Been Watching/Listening

that’s worth mentioning

I watched Minari movie this week. In Minari, a migrant South Korean couple tries to build an agrarian life in the US. The movie shows the struggle of a young couple who are not only trying to live through agriculture but also trying to raise two children, caring for their parents, and learning to live with each other through mutual expectations. The almost meditative portrayal of the daily life of human beings fighting the odds of life is a must-watch from my perspective. I enjoyed the movie.

And for all my Wanderlusters

As I have shared many photos above today I take farewell here.

Thank you for reading.

I hope you have a great week. Get a lot of good food, work hard, and care for the planet and its people :)

Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Just press reply.

Yours,

Priyanka

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