Parched

Jharna woke up with a start. It was 5 am. She straightened her ruffled hair with her hands. It was the beginning of yet another dreadful day. Last night had been a hot night in the tiny, mouldy room. She looked up towards the plastered roof, that flaunted large stains of water, and asked imploringly, ‘Oh, God! What's the point of sending us to this planet? Was this the hell carved out for people who had sinned in another life? There's no water left. Everyone is fighting for each drop of it. The weather swings to such extremes that it is unbearable to live through the seasons. Is suffering the only motive to send us here? It is nearly the end of the twenty-first century, why don't you just end the world now?' she questioned.

Such thoughts occurred to her regularly as she pushed her way through the water queue in her basti to get enough water for her family to drink for the day. Her great grandparents had migrated to this sinful city called Delhi in the early 2000s, she had been told. That was all she knew of her roots. Before migrating, her family owned a little piece of land in the state of Rajasthan. But there had been a severe drought followed by salination of their field which rendered it useless for subsistence cultivation. For several months they had cooked and slept on the pavements of Delhi. Finally, they had found some distant relatives squatting on a piece of public land and had put up a shack near theirs. If they got evicted it would be together, they had reasoned. The settlement had two hundred families back then and now there were over four hundred of them. The people in the settlement served the nearby upper-class colony residents as their cooks, maids and drivers. Over time, the government had recognised their informal settlement and given them infrastructural facilities of piped water and sanitation.

Delhi had represented a city of great inequalities back then as it was now. There were more cars on the roads than people. Pedestrians had no space to walk. The air was thick and black with pollution. Smog engulfed the city every winter. There was a thick layer of dust mixed with pollution settled on all of the city's vegetation. Many people suffered from headaches and asthma. Doctors had advised people to leave the city if they wanted to live a long and healthy life. Things were different now. Jharna's parents told her that by 2050 (when they were kids), the petrol reserves in the world had dried up and all the vehicles running on petrol and gas were phased out. People had to shift to solar cars and bikes and the city had to be pedestrianized. Delhi which was only beautiful in its "New" or "Lutyens" Delhi parts in the mid—2000s looked much better in every other part now. There were gardens and pedestrian pathways everywhere now. But the gardens were full of cacti since there was no water left to grow any green plants. The landscape looked dull and brown. The children born in Jharna's generation did not know what trees looked like.

The sun shined brightly and there was intense and unbearable heat in the summers. People remained indoors in the summer. One could liquefy if they stepped outside. Even the solar vehicles had to be parked under sheds lest they melt away.

Many children perished every summer due to dehydration and infectious diseases caused by the intense heat. By 2075, when Jharna was born, all of the glaciers in the world had melted and there was a great flush of freshwater which ultimately got discharged into the sea and the sea-levels rose and submerged the coastal cities of India. With the drying up of most of the surface water sources and the heavy depletion of groundwater resources, India was now treating seawater to make it potable. But this was an expensive process and the price of water had escalated and made it an unaffordable commodity for most of the city's poor.

Every nuclear family in her basti now got only one bucket of drinking water per day. The bigger ones were entitled to two buckets. Baths were now a luxury that one could afford once in a few weeks. Food was scarce too. The stomachs of human beings had shrunk in response to climate change, she had read in her biology textbook. There had been huge famines in the last 50 years and food supplies across the world had declined. Jharna was told that people in her great grandparents' era were eating three meals a day. But in her generation people ate only once a day. Everyone was thirsty all the time. Human beings were more anxious than ever before in recorded history, it was believed.

‘But when were they less anxious?' Jharna wondered.

Four world wars had already been fought. The last one had been for water. It was no less than a miracle that life still existed on the planet. It was 2099 and the world's food supplies had shrunk by more than half from that in 2030. The main source of water was the oceans since the glaciers had melted and the rivers had dried. Delhi was parched. It was a necropolis and had been so for the last 100 years. In the early 2000s, people in Delhi were dying in large numbers due to indoor and outdoor air pollution and now they were dying of thirst, especially those in the basti which the government preferred to call slums. From one kind of a necropolis to another. The cause of death had changed but morbidity loomed large.

‘It is better to die than live parched,’ said Jharna looking up as she made another daily plea to the superpower who she believed, heard her.