THE GOOFINESS OF LIVING ALONE

This has to be documented. Delhi summers have made me partially demented. Take a look at the events of the past few days.

Night One.

I am unable to sleep even after showering three times in the evening. My flat being a corner flat kept locked up throughout the sweltering hot day is like a furnace at night. Unfortunately, I can’t afford an AC either. It doesn’t matter that I spend all my money on shopping and eating, this is the only thing I am going to be miser about and suffer in pain.

Somehow late at night, I fall asleep with my Symphony Cooler so close to me that had I been wearing a wig it would have flown away. Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake up feeling extremely hot. The room is humid and heavy with the cooler’s constant thud thud.

In my sleep induced state, I imagine that the water in my cooler has finished. It lasts precisely for 3hrs in Delhi heat. Perhaps that’s the reason why the copywriter christened it Junior Jumbo, ‘Jumbo’ being the addition made by the client. I sleep walk to the bathroom and fix the pipe to the cooler. Opening the tap, I go outside to the balcony for some fresh air.

Not finding any respite there either, I turn back only to be greeted by a sound heard when water pouring from the tap hits the floor. I frantically search for the source of the sound and discover that my cooler has been designed with a hole to drain out the excess water automatically in case of an overflow. By the time I figure this out, my bedroom floor is a pool of water and my slippers and laptop cord is floating in that pool of water. Quickly, I throw the laptop cord on my bed and start disaster management.

After staring at the hole for quite some time, I decide to stick my finger into it. Luckily it works, and the water stops pouring out. I vaguely remember the Dutch story of Hans Brinker that I had read as a child and find great similarity in our situations. The only difference being that while he was rescued, nobody was coming to my rescue.

Few minutes pass. While still standing in a pool of water, and not too sure whether I was dreaming or not; I look around myself for divine inspiration. I see my bucket lying near the door. For once I am happy that I keep my buckets in the living room not inside the bathroom. But here too things cannot be simple, the bucket has to be out of my reach. Now I am calculating whether it would be wise to pull my finger out of the hole and let my room submerge in some more water or come up with some other plan.

Operation ‘other plan’ begins. I twist and turn my body, till I am almost lying on the floor, while my finger is still stuck in the hole. I try to widen my legs and push the bucket towards me. I can hear my mom saying in my subconscious mind ‘Keep your feet together. Sit properly’. Instead of the pulling the bucket towards me, I push it further away from me and fall almost flat on my face. Wide awake now, I resume once again. This time, I am able to stick my toe under the bucket’s handle.

With a sigh of relief I pass the bucket from my toe to my other hand and finally place it under the ‘overflow’ hole. Like a weirdo, I watch the excess water empty into the bucket, not daring to move an inch away, lest some new adventure begins in my absence. By 3 am it’s all done. There is still a lot of water on the floor. I tell myself it will all dry up by itself and proceed to crash once again thinking something about the concept of evaporation.

... to be contd.