Water Water Everywhere

One of the strange things about Mumbai is that during the entire time I have been here there hasn't been a single drop of rain. I once thought that I heard some but I quickly realised that it was just the gardener watering the grass. In itself I guess it isn't that strange - the monsoon isn't due to start until June 10th (according to a hotel driver) and it was over well before I first came out here last October. The thing that is really strange is that there seems to be no sign of a shortage of water.

Everywhere you look there is water. In all the top hotels there are stupidly large ornamental water features and fountains. The gardeners water the flowers and the plants and the grass, both in the hotel grounds and in the reservations in the centre of the road. The people who live by the side of the road always have washing lines of clean clothes stretched between whatever is standing on either side of their abode, or draped over bushes by the road side. In fact, washing clothes is a bit of an obsession here - I read somewhere that the people of Mumbai are very proud of their washing system. And when you look around, it is clear that even the poorest people have really clean clothes - most of the beggers at the traffic lights included. Men you see walking on the streets always seem to have achingly crisp white shirts, which I thought wasn't the best colour to have in a place like Mumbai that is hot, dusty and sweaty...

A couple of days ago we past a small row of shacks by the side of the road when it was obviously wash day. Out of each of the shacks there was a hosepipe, spewing water out into the street or into brightly coloured plastic containers. This was then either used to pour over small children, scrubing themself clean, or over the washing that they are somehow pounding clean on the dusty, dirty pavement. It's amazing really how they do it.

But this still doesn't answer the question about the water. People are pouring it all over the place (I even saw someone watering the pavement the other day - no word of a lie). But where does it all come from? I was thinking that they must pipe it down from some glacier in the Himalayas. Until I looked round a bit more and realised how green Mumbai is.

Don't get me wrong - there is very little open space in Mumbai. A report in the Times of India last year said that Mumbai had the least public open space of any of the world's top cities. There aren't great parks like in New York or London because of the sheer weight of people crowding into the narrow strip of land which makes up the city. But against all the odds, trees and plants are shoe-horned in, much like the people themselves. Down the side of every road there are trees cemented into the pavement and bushes planted in the central reservations. I have even seen walls that have blantantly been built around trees - and I don't mean the walls have changed course to allow for the trees, the trees have literally become part of the wall and are bricked right in. In Mumbai, everything is crammed in together - people, cows, cars, dogs, dirt, rickshaws, beggers, trees, shacks, corner shops, 5 star hotels, high rise flats, two wheelers, taxis, shopping malls, newspaper sellers, handcarts, rubbish, cricket matches - pretty much anything you can imagine. And the trees are painted with red and white rings at the bottom.

Anyway, back to the water (finally). All the trees and plants are green and strong. Not brown and wilted as I would expect. Which leads me back to the question, "where does all the water come from?". Answers on a postcard please...