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Home » A Comedy of Errors

A Comedy of Errors

Up with the baby at night, I had been lying in bed wondering, “What will we do if we don’t get any water tonight?” It had been three days already, and we were all desperate for a shower, needed clean clothes, and needed to treat our heads for lice again.

(Since Chinua and I have dreadlocks, we can’t use a lice comb, so we’ve had to re-treat several times to get rid of any lice that may have hatched. Finally, after several tries, we seem to have found a treatment that really works–the medications didn’t–so we’re on top of it now and are mainly being careful.)

I knew in the morning that no water had come. Why, why why did we not have any water? We get water from the municipality, which is piped into our huge tank. There had been a problem on our water line which resulted in days without any water coming in, but this was getting ridiculous. Something else had to be wrong.

The first thing I heard that morning was, “Mom! Leafy pooped in the bed!” It was a brilliant start to the day. How do you deal with things like this with no running water. Of course, we have the well. Chinua has so sweetly and uncomplainingly drawn up bucket after bucket of well water for us when the running water has given out.

But this morning was different. Jaya had drawn my attention the night before to a small animal, perched on a ledge corner far down in our Really Big Well. It must have fallen somehow. It was still alive, but we couldn’t keep using the well with it in there. Jaya and I leaned out of the window and tried to figure out what it was. A kitten? Awww, poor kitten! But then it lifted its pointed nose. “Is it a RAT?” I asked. We both jumped in horror. If it was a rat, it was gigantic. Ewwwww.

So, I got up and cleaned Leafy up somehow, and then turned to making breakfast. Jaya came in. “You need to call this man this morning,” she said, and I nodded.

“At eight,” I said, stirring the oatmeal and throwing some raisins in. “I’ll call him at eight.”

The man I needed to call was our landlady’s handyman. We wanted to ask him about what on earth was going on with the water, as well as ask him for help with getting this, uh, creature, out of the well. His name is Matthew, but Goan people pronounce it, “Madhue.” Madhue obviously thinks we’re a little cracked, but since he doesn’t speak much English, he only tells Jaya, and she is polite enough not to let it on too much. Renee has made the observation that he has a Biblical face, and she is right. He’d be the perfect casting to play Joseph, or maybe John the Baptist, if his hair was a little longer and he was snacking on locusts.

Madhue came a little while later. Frustrated and stressed out from trying to do eight things at a time, I had eventually handed the phone to Chinua to call him. He took a peek in our well, and then asked if we would like a tanker of water to come to fill the tank. This was a new option. We said, “Heck yes we do!” or something of that nature. Madhue left and came back with three people; a couple of men and a young girl, to see about getting the animal out of the well. The house was just full of people walking back and forth, and I was helping the kids with their math, and it was just chaos.

Renee wandered into the big room where the kids and I were. “They’re going to kill it,” she said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth as she realized she had just blurted it out in front of the kids. Kid A looked up.

“They’re going to KILL it?” I explained that sometimes when an animal is hurt, it can’t get better, and you need to help it by stopping its suffering. These were new concepts. The people left to get more supplies or something, and Jaya corrected my assumption.

“These people want to eat this animal.” Kid A looked up again, his eyes huge.

“They want to EAT it?” We all wanted to see the little guy survive, so we tried to think of ways to rescue, Chinua and our other friend C (who has arrived to join our little community, hooray!) and Jaya putting food in buckets to try to get the little guy to climb in. Meanwhile, the tanker had arrived, and water was being pumped into our tank.

Oh, how stoked we were. Now we could move to the next phase of hair treatment. As people continued to parade through the house, I gave up the school morning entirely, and decided to slather the kids’ heads with olive oil. Yum. It needed to be on their heads for the rest of the day, smothering anything that might be on their heads, before we could wash it off. Kid A was the only one that we were sure about- treating the other kids was mainly out of paranoia. But olive oil was simple. When we were done, the kids looked like this.

And we kissed them, because they were oily and adorable.

So far, there was no luck getting the animal out of the well. It seemed doomed.

Jaya came in with bad news. “The pump is broken. And the water is gone.”

“WHAT?” We had done two loads of laundry and one sink full of dishes. The water from the tanker, 5000 liters, had leaked out of some hole in the tank. This explained our water problem a little more clearly. There was a tiny bit left, but now the pump that brought the water from the tank outside into the tank in our house was broken. We all groaned.

But the little animal had been climbing! He was part way up, in a little hole in the side of the well.

It was obviously time to tie bedsheets in the well, Rapunzel style, to help him along. (Have you ever thought about the fact that Rapunzel is kind of a cousin word to Rappel? Do you think that’s purposeful?)

Madhue came back and made the diagnosis that there was a hole in the tank. Thanks, Madhue. We needed to plaster it. It would take about three days. This was too much! (That’s a Jack Handey quote, by the way, I just needed to throw that in there.) It was lovely that we also all had olive oil on our heads, lulled into safety by the promise of a tanker full of water.

Our neighbor from across the street, a delightful British hippie guy, came by at about this time. He and Chinua put a ladder into the well to help the animal a little more. By this time, he was only about ten feet from the top.

And he offered his house for showers in the evening. Oh sweet kind neighbor. He had also filled us in on the fact that what was in our well was a Palm Civet. They are rare and protected in India. We were glad that we hadn’t let the people eat it. Now if only it could climb out! Since they are nocturnal, we hoped it would climb out at night. They eat Chiku fruit, so it had probably fallen out of our Chiku tree and into the well.

So we trekked down to our sweet kind neighbor’s house to take our showers, rubbing dish soap in our hair to get the olive oil out. YaYa and I were accompanied by a lovely butterfly, who hung out with us in the bathroom while we showered.

The next morning? The Palm Civet was out. Another crazy day here, another small animal out of a well.

(The pump is fixed. Water is sporadic, but we are conserving and making the best of it. We put another pump into the well for emergencies. Life is good.)