04/11/2018
As I walked back from an event, I saw many mitti ke matke lined up against a wall. I had water in my bottle but it was almost over and I was thirsty. I thought how wonderful that this water has been made available to peopIe by someone. There was a pipe in one the matkas, coming out from one of the homes nearby. A lady was puttering about the pipe on the ground straightening the rounds of pipe that lay in a mess. ‘Yaha paani kaun bharta hain?’ I asked. ‘Main’, she replied. Her name was Gyanpati.
‘I have been here for 40 years. I got married in my village and came to Mumbai. We started keeping this water 25 years back when we started this small temple here. People used to be thirsty and ask us water, so we thought why not keep a paani ka matka out. That’s how it started.
First this Mandir was only a photo. My husband did pooja everyday. People said why don’t we make it into a pakka structure? So we constructed a concrete temple 20 years ago. My husband died 4 years back, so my sons do the pooja now.
We fill water twice a day. We use tap water for this. People come and drink the water. There is no charge. It's cool now so it's not so stressful but during summers many people come and take the water. We end up filling water atleast thrice.
On Saturdays we get atleast 100 people coming and drinking this water. On Tuesdays too we get more people as they come to the temple. During Ganesh Chaturthi, people come and drink water all the time. There is a school near by, kids also come from there too and fill their bottles.
In our home we all take responsibility for this job. Anyone who has got the time fills the water. I don't do it alone. We have two families of 20 people living in two rooms. Someone or the other always ends up doing the job. When we travel outside, someone always remains back home to ensure the water is filled.
We have never missed a single day of filling water in the last 25 years. If there is no water in our home only then we may not be able to fill the water. The only other time we don't fill water is during Holi. Kids come and fill balloons with this water. So it's wasted. We don’t want to waste the water.
We fill the water because it's public seva. If we don't fill the water we feel bad. Pachtava hota hain. So we do it. There is no water here on this road. So for many people who are thirsty this helps a lot. Yeh ghar ka paani jaise hai. Paani ekdum thanda rehta hain jaise ke fridge main rehta hain. There is lot of work that goes in. We wash the matkas every week with surf. We use acid to clean the floor. It collects moss so that also has to be washed every week. But every day we sweep the ground to keep it clean.
Log aate hain, paani peekey jaate hain. Hum yeh kabhi soch nahi sakte ke aaj hum paani nahi bharenge. This is part of our life now.
As she spoke to me, her family came out and then invited me to their matchbox like home for paying my respects to Lord Ganesh. As I entered their home, i saw it was filled with children running around, people doing things. I prayed to Ganesh ji. Gyanpati lived with some 21 family members in between two homes that were next to each other. And I thought about the happy faces I saw. While their homes were small, their hearts were pretty big.
Sharika Kaul
Humans of Bombay MumbaiMirror.com Water.org TheBetterIndia
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