The Water Tank

7:30 AM each morning and 6:30 PM each evening in our old apartment were tied by a special occurrence—an alarm blaring with the voice of a woman saying, in a funnily formal way, “Hello, your water tank is full, please switch off your motor”. She would say this twice, once in English and then in Hindi, unless you cut her off in the middle by switching off the alarm. A loud, catchy tune would also play in the background, so that everyone in a five kilometre radius would know that the water tank of 95, Nagin Lake Apartments was filled up to the brim. 

While I haven’t experienced much of the morning drama associated with the water tank filling up, since I was either at school or asleep, I have fairly vivid memories of 6:30 PM in the evenings. If it wasn’t a weekend, my mom would be teaching middle schoolers on our dining table, right beside where the alarm was housed. New students would often get scared or chuckle when the alarm sounded, but slowly got used to it. Initially, my mother had to tell the kid sitting right next to the alarm to turn it off, but slowly, the students didn’t need to be told to do so. 

The alarm had been turned off, but now the motor needed to be turned off. The motor being on is what fills the tank up, and my parents would turn the motor on each morning at 7 AM and each evening at 6:00 PM. I would sit in the bedroom while my mom would teach, and from outside, my mother would call out to me and say, “Gauriiiii, motor band karde”, that is, to turn off the motor. For some reason, she would say that each time even though she knew I could hear the loud blaring of the alarm. A sense of emergency would overwhelm me, and I would run to the bathroom. The motor switch sat on the wall, and I would flip it off.

I apologise for the amount of switches and machines such as alarms and motors in this anecdote, I hope it doesn’t get confusing. My family, on the other hand, worked like a well-oiled machine whenever the water tank would have to be filled up. 

Such water-tank-filling periods would also be accompanied by other activities, such as filling up all the buckets in our bathroom with the fresh water that would be supplied through a special tap (which would have water flow through it only from 7 to 8 AM and 6 to 7 PM, when the apartments would turn their overall apartments motor on). We would do this to be cautious, just in case the water tank ran low on water early. I became an expert at estimating the amount of time a bucket would take to fill based on its size, or what the sound of more water hitting the water already in the bucket would tell you about the amount of water already in the bucket. 

In the summer, we would also have to fill our water cooler (a giant machine with a fan and a pump that cools the whole house) with water. My family devised a clever way to do so, with a pipe attached to the kitchen tap and snaking through the house all the way to the cooler in our balcony. I would handle this too, since my mother would be teaching, and sometimes with the buckets and the cooler one of them would overflow with water. I lived for the days when each of them would attain the perfect level of water, with no water wasted. Otherwise, I would comfort myself by thinking about the pigeons, who would bathe in the standing water on our balcony in case the water overflowed. 

And this is it, a bit of the story of the water that would greet my family and the pigeons twice a day.