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
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