'Water Shortage' - A story by M Romail Khan (of class O’ Levels Final year) whose pen will never cease pouring out descriptions of newer and newer situations. He’s creative, pro-active when challenged --- with his restless mind always brimming with ideas and thoughts. Enjoy reading!

Water Shortage

"Mr. Kamran, your water tank is overflowing again...!" I informed my neighbour, shouting it from the roof of my house, hoping he had heard me. It was all the voice I could summon at that moment, seeing the lack of humidity in the air.

 It hadn't rained in months. Our city was suffering from semi-drought, and amidst all this, Mr.Kamran was letting his water tank overflow most negligently,  as he had always done.

"Ok. Thank you." I heard Mr. Kamran limping up the stairs to his roof.

"With all due respect Sir, you do know we are facing a drought. The whole neighborhood is portioning water to get by. I fear you may run out of your reserve." I explained to him.

"Yes, you're right. I'll be careful next time." He said as per routine, turning a deaf ear to my advice, albeit with politeness.

A week later, holding up his News paper dated 22/7/2018, I noticed Father gasp in sorrow. “There you have it. India has completed constructing another dam over the river Jhelum." he threw the paper on the table with his feet, “… now let’s wait for the biggest ordeal --- the inevitable drought.”

After about a month of treating water as an unaffordable luxury, I found myself looking at my colony. Brown, dry and... quiet. All I could see was houses and wood. The trees were barren, so were the roads and most of the houses. I  listened and hoped to hear the sound of my neighborhood kids playing, the sweet birds chirping, or any other sign of life, but in vein.  All I heard was an ear piercing scream from below.

" I can't take another day of this. I need to bathe. I stink of two weeks of sweat!" I heard a familiar voice shouting at Mr. Kamran. It was Nafisa, Mr. Kamran's eldest daughter.

After a brief second of utter silence, I heard footsteps from her house, climbing, or limping up the stairs.  "Mr. Kamran!" I  greeted to the dry face emerging next to me.

"Nauman, Hello!" I got a dry reply. Before I could inquire how he was doing, his dry lips seemed to mumble.

"You were right," He bid an overdue confession.

"Sorry?"

“About the water reserve, you were right," he paused to choke with his dry mouth." It's all gone, all of my water. Only a negligible amount left to boil for drinking."

It both shocked and pained me to see a lone tear trickle down his face. His dry, chapped skin seemed to twitch under the unexpected moisture of his tear. It was not just his family, but my family too. In fact, all the families I thought to constitute my neighborhood were suffering from water shortage. I had to think of my own family too. Knowing  my own personality, my sub-conscious pleaded my heart to show selfishness and try to take every bit of pity I felt towards Mr. Kamran and his family. After a few seconds of fighting it, I finally, reluctantly uttered  " I could lend you a little water from our own reserve."

"You would do that for me?....for my family??" I could sense the naive disbelief in his eyes. Come to think of it, why would he believe something like that? After a few seconds of standing numb, staring into the sky, I sighed "Yes, I'll do it for your family. Just don't tell my father." A part of me wanted to restrain from giving him even a drop of water, as he had worn out his whole reserve despite my recurrent warnings, but some part inside me wailed to help him.

A week passed and I kept on miserly smuggling water from our reserve to his home. Conditions of the city were getting worse day by day. Everyone’s reserves draining fast day by day. Sun baked Zombies, roaming the streets with dry mouths and parched tongues.

Our water reserve was drying as well, and now with twice the pace, as I had been betraying my family by smuggling our treasure, a bucket of it a day to Mr.Kamran's family.

Two weeks later, on a hot September morning, I woke up early to get ready for a boring day of repeated routine. Placing a bucket under the sink, I lazily crooked the tap to fill the bucket, drop-by-drop as the sink had always let go of our perishing reserve. As I waited for the sink to cough up liquid treasure, I could hear a different noise - a noise long forgotten. A wheezing noise filled the air.

WHUSSHH!!

The sound of water gushing out of the tap filled my ears. It was music to my ears. I stood stiff as I saw the entire 8-litre bucket fill up in half a minute.

Over joyous, giddy as a schoolboy, I exploded out the door and spotted heaven.

The water sparkles rattled into life, rhythmically dispersing water to the dead grass in the park. The sprinkles of water bombarded my face, refreshing my mind, my body. A new hope sparkled in my eyes, now being sprinkled by sweet H2O.

I rushed outside and saw the paper lying flat on the ground. The three headlines on Page one, reporting:

"MASSIVE FLOODS IN INDIA. ALL DAMS COLLAPSED."

"ALL WATER NOW DIVERTING TO PAKISTAN. PAKISTANI RIVERS OVERFLOWING WITH WATER."

"MASSIVE LOSS OF LIFE AND PROPERTY IN MAJOR PARTS OF INDIA."

Although I felt bad for the Indian lives lost, this sorrow was obscured by my own discovery of life.

 

M. Romail Khan

O’ Levels Final Year

PakTurk International Schools

Islamabad

'Water Shortage' - A Story by Abdullah Nawaz Khan of O’ Levels 2nd Year at PakTurk International Schools, Chak Shahzad Campus, Islamabad

The year was 2020. Global warming was now a long forgotten myth, but the water shortage had decreased seas to puddles. Liquid water was now a forlorn thing. There was a water shortage on the planet earth. Seas were drying up. Now water was the most expensive thing in the world. People were calling it the Apocalypse.

I was then living in Karachi, a coastal area of Pakistan. The volume of the Arabian Sea was now half of what it was before the shortage, but still sufficient. I had thought that the Arabian Sea would soon fully dry up,  so I started saving water. I tried telling people to start saving water rather than wasting it, but sadly enough, they arrogantly ignored my advice. And soon I was proved right. The Arabian Sea was totally finished. There was no sign of water anywhere.

The rich migrated to other countries in search of water, and the rest were forced to find other means of surviving – which meant that they had to live a nomadic life in a constant search for water. I gave them all the water that I could. I was sure that the travelers wouldn’t make it, so I refused to accompany them, and soon I was the only life form left in the lifeless desert of Karachi. My reservoir was enough to fulfil my requirements for a year or so, but after that, I too was at the mercy of nature.

Days passed slowly. My huge reservoir started decreasing. I would take a daily walk through the streets of Karachi in search of a new source of water.

One day, while on my routine round, I found a man half-dead of thirst. I dragged him back to my reservoir and realized that I had only a few litres left. I could have ignored him and let him die, but I just couldn’t get myself to think that way.

I went outside and gave that man all the water I had. He slowly gained consciousness and told me he was a traveler. As soon as dusk fell, he left.

Now I had no water left and my body was going dehydrating faster than usual. I thought about what other options I had left. I soon started feeling weak. I grabbed my water bottle and went off once again in search of water. I knew full well that there was no one except occasional travelers. After a while of roaming, I slowly drifted to unconsciousness. It was peaceful, and blissful.

I saw lights. I opened my eyes to find myself in a helicopter. To my surprise, sitting next to me was the man whom I had helped. I learnt that he was a millionaire who had wandered into Karachi in search of survivors, but had almost died himself. Now, he was the one who was taking me to water.

He took me to the northern mountains where most of the world’s water was stored as glaciers. I was taken care of and was even given a home by the community there. I finally realized that the good does get rewarded.

Abdullah Nawaz Khan

O’ Levels 2nd Year

PakTurk International Schools

Chak Shahzad Campus

Islamabad

Let’s enjoy Muhammad Abubakar Mian’s response on a topic ‘Natural Disaster’ – a topic meant for story writing. There are many more worthy of getting posted here. The class was giving the challenge of following the theme of ‘sacrifice’ in their stories. So has this one. A very successful attempt, indeed!

Soothing balm on a weeping heart  .............. (Natural Disaster)

Progress in science and technology has now given seismologists (people who study earthquakes and related phenomena) the power to accurately predict where an earthquake is likely to occur. Unfortunately, they are not yet able to foresee when exactly it will happen. So when my wife, Amelia, and I bought our first house, it was not without knowing the danger of a looming disaster. We purchased a beautifully constructed Victorian style home in a small Californian suburb. Everything about it was perfect, except for the fact that it was in very close proximity to a fault line. “It’s nothing to worry about” we thought… oh how wrong we had been.

The earthquake hit without warning on the 15^th of August, 2004. It was an early Saturday morning and my wife and I had been enjoying breakfast. Suddenly, the house began to tremble with ferocious convulsions. With a burst of adrenaline pumping through my body, I took hold of Amelia’s hand and we made our way outside. I still remember very clearly the frightened look on her face as we huddled together in an open field. The tremors lasted quite a few minutes, and were followed by a false sense of tranquility. I knew there was something terribly wrong. Earthquakes usually only last a few seconds and rarely go past the one-minute mark. It was after the earthquake finally subsided did my neighbors and I realize the grave situation we now found ourselves in. This was a large scale earthquake that spread over a span of 1000 kilometers, according to reports on the radio.

Many would imagine the greatest difficulty coming from the lack of electricity. That was, however, the least of our worries. No one knew about the water shortage until the next day. Sunday evening, Mr. Jefferson, the widower living across the street, came running outside. The noise he was making piqued my interest, and I went out to see what was going on. “There’s no more water! There’s no more water!” Mr. Jefferson shouted. Slowly, as his words started to click in the minds of the people around him, terror began to fill the already heavy atmosphere. Aghast, I quickly ran back inside and locked the door. Behind me, I could already hear the others bolting their doors shut in much the same way. No one was willing to help Mr. Jefferson. Once faced with immense difficulty in such an unfortunate situation, people tend to help no one but themselves. From the window, I could see Mr. Jefferson sitting on the sidewalk. His face was already showing signs of dehydration.  

“Don’t even think about it!” my wife screeched. “We have to help him… he’ll die out there!” I retorted. “..But we can’t afford helping him.” She responded. “And we can’t let him suffer either.” I replied. Upon hearing this, my wife came to her senses and opened the door for me. I walked out onto the porch and signaled Mr. Jefferson inside. “Water…” he gasped. I can’t describe in words how very hugely relieved he felt. The expression on his face that my eyes photographed is still safe in my remote memory. I felt as if I had put a soothing balm on his weeping heart.

Once he was feeling a bit better, we started talking about how he had finished all the running water in his house. After a few minutes of deliberation, we concluded that the water in the neighborhood was disproportionately distributed. Some houses had more water available to them than others. This is when I took the liberty of explaining to him that, from here on out, we all have to be very careful with our water usage.

A radio broadcast later that night told us that the situation would not normalize for at least another four to five days. We were advised to stay inside our homes and to ration all food and water supplies. I had done my part in helping someone out, now if only other people started doing their part. If my neighborhood was any example, our community was suffering from a dire need of Good Samaritans. Without them, we may not be able to survive.

Muhammad Abubakar Mian
O' Levels 2nd Year
PakTurk International Schools & Colleges
Chak Shahzad
Islamabad