Someday, I Believe

(This story is a work of fiction, set against the backdrop of a village in Maharashtra.)

Today was just another day in the monotonous passage of my life. I woke up to an argument between my father and the three women he’d brought home last week. My father is really aggressive, if you ask me. I felt bad for them because they’re such nice people. They even get me chocolates when they go out. I got out of bed to look for the fourth woman in the house – my mother. I found her in the kitchen and asked her what the matter was. She told me it was nothing – my father was mad at them because there was no water at home.

Apparently, it was their duty to fetch water from the village 10 kilometres away before the sun rose. My mother was scared of my father. I have often seen her crying after being yelled at by him, her face bruised. Whenever I asked her, she’d tell me that it was a small bump and nothing serious. I still don’t know how the three women were related to us. I have asked my mother a few times. All she tells me is that they are my new mothers. I find it pretty hard to digest, honestly. I’ve often heard my father refer to them as his ‘water wives’. I wonder what that means.

I remember dropping a glass of water some days back. My father beat me really hard with a rod. Another time, my father thrashed me when I dropped a pot of water by mistake. My back had been bleeding for two days. It still hurts. There have been times when my family had to survive without water for days at a stretch. My mother often speaks of elixir in the stories she tells me. I think she means water.

I am curious as to why water is a luxury for us. Last month when I had accompanied my mother to the nearby town, my eyes were met with several sights of taps being left open and water streaming down ceaselessly. Sometimes I am sent to do daily chores at people’s homes. I have seen a machine-like thing in their kitchens which dispenses water whenever they needed it. They called it an ‘aquaguard’. There was another time when Aunty had left the hot water tap running to fill a bucket. When the bucket was filled and water was overflowing, I tried to turn off the tap but couldn’t as it had heated up. I ran to her to tell her that water was overflowing, only to be told that it was fine and she would close it in a while.

Hopefully someday, we too will have water at our home, and my new mothers won’t have to come back home with swollen feet, marred by cut marks. Hopefully someday, my new mothers will not get yelled at for not being able to fetch water on time, and there will be no need for them to walk tens of kilometres to fetch water at all. Hopefully someday, we too will be fortunate and maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to hope anymore.

(Although the characters in the story are entirely fictional, it is based on a real village in Maharashtra. Faced with acute water shortage due to a drought, men resorted to marrying multiple times. The purpose of this was to divide the work among the wives. While one or more looked after the house, the others went out to fetch water for the household. They were called ‘water wives’.)

– Priyanjali Roychoudhury for MTTN

Picture by: Nandadeep Paul