A rainy day in the life of a Saraspur Ahmedabad Citizen

It hasn't rained for weeks now. You know that rain is badly needed - for crops to grow, water to come unhindered from your tap. You pray for rainfall whenever you kneel down in front of the Almighty. Suddenly it starts pouring from the sky...you feel overjoyed as if those prayers have been answered. The rainfall continues and you feel like going out and dancing in the rain expressing your joy to the skies above.

After two hours, suddenly the emotions of joy slowly turn into emotions of fear and anxiety. The roads outside your house start getting flooded. You cannot help but notice that the colour of the water is not as pure as what was falling from the sky. This is deep green and blue, with all the dirt from the street and more, mixed into the water. The water inches up on your footsteps slowly but steadily. You are well aware that the soil where your neighborhood stands is at low sea level, so if the rain continues soon this dirty sickening water will be inside your house.

Once the fear has taken hold you start taking counter measures to save your valuable belongings which you have taken so much effort to accumulate over the years. You have just finished fasting and after a long and tiring day you just want to be in bed and relax. Instead you start putting bricks below your sofas, refrigerator, furniture, picking up rugs to save them from the wrath of the dirty water outside. The rain is falling at a slow pace but the water outside is rising much faster just as the heartbeat inside your chest.

The phone rings and on the other end is your son who lives outside the country. You explain the situation to him and there is no telling on how anxious he becomes. Partly because he knows that there is nothing he can do to help and you have to bear this all alone. Both of you pray that the Almighty will command the skies to hold the rain for a while just so that the flooding outside recedes. Inside your heart you feel a strange contradiction, you want the rain, still at this moment you just want it to stop. Suddenly the electricity goes out and you are left in the dark of the night with a few candles wondering what is to happen next...including the fact that you may miss your fast for the next day.

Over the years, a number of your friends have moved out of this neighborhood - one of the reason maybe just this constant flooding every monsoon with dirty deep blue and green water. They have cajoled you into moving out as well but circumstances have not allowed you to do so. In that same time you have seen Ahmedabad develop constantly, new roads, new multiplexes, shopping malls. The Government is pouring money into the infrastructure everywhere...everywhere except your neighborhood. Even the basic gutter system is not in place to route the monsoon rain. On top of that the surrounding textile and chemical plants take the opportunity of the monsoon rain to dump all their dirty polluted water into the gutters thus flooding them even more, which explains the colour of that water. Of course, the Government has done nothing to stop them either.

You hear that there is a gutter system that is being worked on after more than 35 years but it will not be ready this monsoon. Maybe next monsoon...but it maybe too late for tonight. If the Government does not find providing basic hygiene of clean water and soil a priority for the citizens of Saraspur, Ahmedabad it may not happen for another 35 years. After all, it is more important to build new and clean malls than to let this dirty water flood houses and potentially cause epidemics which can endanger lives of many.

So you ask - Is the solution only to move out of here and pray for whoever is left behind? Or is it to demand from your Government that this issue be fixed right now, right here. Is it too much to ask? Is your Government so incapable, so incompetent that it cannot fix this simple but important problem. It has been a long night already and you are tired after a long ordeal. Tonight you want to just go to sleep with the prayer in your heart that the water outside just remains at your footsteps and Almighty holds the rain for a few hours. Whether the incompetent rulers of your town listen or not, you still hope that you will live to see the day when there is no more deep blue and green water outside every time it pours from the skies...until then the contradictions that your heart feels tonight will remain...and the Almighty will not judge you differently for them.