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Magazine
Posing a water hazard
RANJIT HOSKOTE
P.V. SIVAKUMAR
A part of street furniture or "public hero"?
DOES anybody under 21 remember what a hydrant looks like? At least in Mumbai, this venerable element of street furniture now serves a purely decorative function, as a formal punctuation mark on the margin of a road. And even then, this detail is often lost, an accent overwhelmed by the loud plastic awnings, hawkers' kerb-spreads and squatters' impedimenta that define the metropolitan street. Worse, many hydrants have now sunk into oblivion, both figuratively and literally, as successive generations of road-repair crews have banked high the layers of tar and tile, rendering these watering devices quite vestigial, their bodies hidden and only their spouts showing at about calf height.
Despite the best efforts of the road-repair enthusiasts, however, Mumbai's hydrants are rescued from their vestigiality by the personnel of an equal and opposite department of the municipality, who religiously accord these antiquated devices a periodic coat of bright mail-box red. Looking at them, occasionally, I find myself speculating on the underground network of water channels that feed/may have fed them; I ask myself whether a freshet might not, even now, burst forth if someone were to work the rusty mechanism.
Benches, railings, tree guards, lane dividers: these other genres of street furniture are periodically upgraded, reflected upon by heritage conservationists, town planners and the Collector's office; they are altered to suit prevailing fashion, their upkeep sponsored by building conglomerates and engineering corporations. But the hydrants remain neglected, unchanged in design, untended except for their periodic coat of paint. They look, today, pretty much as they did in the Hindi movies of the 1950s, which memorably captured the mid-century Mumbai street as a venue of romance, intrigue, business and play. Next in line to Guru Dutt, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor, as a claimant to the status of hero, is the hydrant. But these are the idle dreams of a momentary pedestrian; there is work to be done, believe it or not, and I can't stay to botanise on asphalt, in the flaneuristic manner approved by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. The lights change, the traffic comes to a brief and grudging halt, I pass on.
As a matter of fact, I can't think of a single hydrant in Mumbai that has actually been known to work. And there are three possible reasons for this peculiar situation. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I rather suspect that the hydrant has been tacitly allowed to lapse into obsolescence, precisely because it is no longer convenient. After all, it might actually provide water when it shouldn't. Such as on those occasions when parts of the colonial quarter of the metropolis, expensive real estate long locked up in warfare between landlords and tenants, are being discreetly made available for re-development through the simple expedient of fire. A curious and inexplicable series of fires took place in the Fort, during the mid-1990s, burning down heritage-grade buildings honeycombed with homes, offices and informal work-spaces. Functional hydrants might have saved the fire brigade a great deal of time and effort, and trawled something from the wreck. That's my first reason.
Second, if the hydrants were to work, Mumbai's street people would have ready access to drinking and washing water for which they do not pay. This, again, would seem lavishly prodigal to the city's governing class, a folly to equal Mahatma Gandhi's worst excesses. After all, the elite grumbles, Mumbai's street people should be happy that they can earn a better living in the city than they ever could in their dead-end, caste-ridden villages, without daring to demand normal human amenities as well. The knowledge that the informal economy keeps Mumbai up and running, that it provides Mumbai's legitimate, tax-paying citizens with a range of essential and ancillary services, doesn't translate into an obligation towards meeting the human needs of its deprived actors; among other things, their right to safe drinking water and a daily bath. Why go into the complexities of redressal when you can choke off the easiest source of free water, and leave the Great Unwashed to plumb the sewers?
Third, and most crucially, hydrants are insupportable because they are terribly inconvenient to those standard-bearers of India's future, the pogrom-makers. Far from being innocuous antiques, they pose a water hazard, bringing down a wet cloth on the righteous celebration of majoritarian violence that has become an integral feature of national life in the reign of the Right. Imagine how upset the Modis and the Togadias would be if there were actually water, with which to douse the flames leaping up from burning houses and shops; if there were actually water to comfort people who have been stripped and knifed, beaten and dishoused. The hydrants failed Mumbai exactly 10 years ago, when a coalition of ghouls trapped the city in a ring of fire for several months. If the charioteers of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad act on their threat to export their search-and-destroy methodology from Gujarat to Maharashtra, we are going to need water in the streets. We will have to retrieve those hydrants from the museum of superseded objects.
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