The Big Thirst: Chapters 7–8

Who in the world would imagine a quilt of emerald green rice paddies here, in this semi-desert?

But after eight years of drought, he is too much in touch with the daily rhythm of weather, sunshine, and dry dirt not to have an almost elegiac view of the future.

“I do think the halcyon days are gone,” he says. “I think the days of big water are gone.”

But he has stopped paying the insurance on the copter—nearly $1,000 a month—“and I’ve put it on the market. Everything is expendable.”

In a sense, water envy is like class envy, or even racial enmity.

Partly that’s because Adelaide is in direct competition with the farmers for water, and water scarcity makes it quite easy to see others’ intemperance.

But even with something as vital and contentious as oil, we rarely experience oil envy.

“Perth had grown—people here are affluent. At Water Corporation, we felt all hell would break loose if we only allowed outside watering two days a week.”

It may be Arthur’s thirty years working the land that has given him a sense of calm in the face of a crisis no less urgent, no less potentially devastating than that Jim Gill faced. It isn’t fatalism—Arthur is working as hard as the lack of rain will let him—but he knows he can’t make it rain, and he knows that there is no one to rescue him.

Once the hundreds of containers are full and the tanker is empty, the handling of the buckets and pails and pots becomes a matter of great delicacy. Any water splashed overboard is water you can’t use to cook or drink, to wash or brush your teeth with.

The DJB runs a fleet of water trucks like this to deliver water to people in what are bureaucratically called “unauthorized settlements,” but which everyone in India calls slums, ad hoc communities that have no routine water service.

He is as unprepossessing as you’d expect a theoretical astrophysicist to be—his three-story home is filled inside and out with well-tended plants, the furnishings are comfortable but well used, and like most professional Indians, he has servants.

Just a car ride of 120 seconds away—1.5 kilometers, not even a mile—is a hotel called the Grand, an imposing granite edifice hidden behind guarded gates.

The contrasts in India are perhaps a little too facile, but this one is hard to ignore.

Nothing quite captures the dichotomy of modern Indian society like India’s twenty-first-century spacecraft finding water on the Moon. The Indian scientists and engineers who created Chandrayaan, at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore, don’t themselves have running water at home.

The Supreme Court’s order was more an expression of official vexation than it was a practical effort to provide water.

India’s roads are a cacophonous experience that verges on insanity. Drivers talk to each other in a ceaseless conversation, conducted exclusively with the car horn, and every truck in the country has a colorfully painted sign on the back reading in bold letters “HORN PLEASE!”

Chary knows something else, which drives him to insist on nothing less than 24/7 water for the cities of a country audacious enough to find water on the Moon. “It’s not rocket science,” he says. “It’s plumbing.”

The well itself was wide-mouthed, dark, vertiginous. It was a classic well, in the sense that it was a deep, round hole, lined with carefully placed stones all the way around, and as far down as you could see.

“I started out procuring buffaloes for them, then I was a trader, trading tea, coffee, black pepper.”

Rainfall is less than it used to be; groundwater levels and well levels have fallen; the water used on fields is brackish, producing less food and slowly poisoning the soil with salt.

Villagers used to sell their milk to itinerant brokers, at whatever price was offered, typically Rs 12 a liter.

Khan has started an orchard of fruit trees and perennials, and underwritten construction and start-up of a dairy farm.

Khan, who is white-haired at fifty-five, typically dresses all in white and wears open-toed sandals, giving him an air of ascetic focus.

He doesn’t do the work himself: He enlists young people, he gives them responsibility and financial incentives, and then he coaches, cajoles, runs interference with bureaucrats, and takes great joy in watching things move along.

But Khan brings a combination of qualities that illustrate not the possibility for success, but why failure has so much inertia.

But Khan is a product of the village culture he is trying to fix; he knows what daily life here is like, he knows how to win political support, he knows how to goad the bureaucrats who often mummify progress in India.

He upbraids the headmaster, because he knows that without working toilets, as soon as girls reach adolescence they will drop out.

The challenge is that the very villages that could benefit the most from Pentair products don’t have the wherewithal—the human infrastructure—to use those products.

He has had four wells drilled at his house, and three of them are dry. The one that works, he says, “is at two hundred and twenty feet, and it’s almost over. It’s erratic.”

Bhagat isn’t quite as sanguine as Sharma about the motivations of his Sainik Farms neighbors.
“Not everyone is with us, even now,” he says. “Only the people who are suffering are behind it. People don’t act until the time they can’t get their own supply. They don’t want to see beyond their own nose. That is the unfortunate part of our character.”

Then, all at once, the river’s flow is restored from the west bank—a vast cataract of water comes rushing in from the mouth of a tributary that is 60 feet across, and if you close your eyes, the volume and the sound of crashing water are such that you can imagine a wilderness river.

The smell is barnyard-organic fermented with chemical-plant acrid—manure and methane. At the point where the black tributary joins the Yamuna’s riverbed, the smell is almost too strong to bear.

The surface of the Yamuna is odd—it’s flat and shiny black, but pocked everywhere with tiny bubbles fizzing up, like the surface of a dark ale. Methane is bubbling up out of the fermenting river.

The venerated Ganges River is, if conceivable, dirtier.

In 1998, responding to pollution that was turning Delhi’s air into a toxic soup, the country’s Supreme Court ordered all public transit vehicles in Delhi, all taxis, and the entire fleet of small, ubiquitous, three-wheeled vehicles called auto rickshaws, converted to low-emission compressed-natural-gas fuel.

In both cases, change is hard at least in part because the rich have opted out of the public system, and the people who are left often have dramatically less money and political clout.

Navi Mumbai’s main thoroughfare, a modern, high-speed, four-lane boulevard that runs along the Arabian Sea, is called Palm Beach Marg (Palm Beach Highway).

Navi Mumbai has dozens of apartment blocks, but many are somber, sterile, Soviet-style concrete towers, un-Palm-Beach-like, in fact, utterly untropical.

For much of its length it is two meters in diameter, a single pipe big enough for anyone under six feet tall to stand inside, and it is painted the uninspired, flat green of bridge girders and boiler rooms.