It never rains but it pours - and in the case of our latest incident - through every fitting and fixture in Jasper’s bathroom, flooding it and rendering it unusable. For the past couple of weeks, while we have been nursing ourselves back to full health, we have also been dealing with a rather unwell apartment, and as a result, a never-ending stream of workmen (or Busy Bears, as Jasper calls them) stumbling through our living room, leaving a cloud of dust and BO behind them.
Jasper’s bathroom, it transpired, was the victim of poor plumbing. This came as no surprise to Dylan, as the more constructionally-minded of the two of us. Our landlord has always been relatively quick to act when something big has broken in the apartment, especially if the break is letting in water. During monsoon season two sets of windows had to be mended when the rain made its way through poorly insulated walls and window frames. But not before someone had questioned my understanding of the difference between an open window and a closed one.
In the case of Jasper’s bathroom, nobody could accuse the landlord of dragging his feet. The pipe burst as Jasper was trying to have his bath one evening, and by 9:30 the next morning, someone was ringing the doorbell wanting to come in and check. And then at about 10am, someone else was ringing the bell wanting to come in and check that the check was going OK. And then not long after, someone else appeared at the still-open door and invited himself in to check on the check of the original check. None of these people are in uniform. And none of them speak much English. Certainly none of them make any attempt to introduce themselves. So I stand there like a lemon, with my cleaning lady or Jasper’s nanny next to me as translator (although I doubt either of their specialisms is construction vocabulary), wondering when someone is going to tell me what’s going on. After three sets of people have come in to look, and each have, in turn, given a completely different assessment of what the problem might be, someone starts cutting a hole in the ceiling. From what I can make out from the broken translation, the plumber thinks it’s a building issue - a poorly installed feeder pipe to our geyser has broken. The building people think it’s a plumbing issue from the apartment above, despite my telling them that no water came from anywhere other than the pipe going into the geyser. Some other guy in a brown shirt thinks that he needs to cut through the marble on the wall to get to the root of the issue. At this point, I feel it would be prudent to check back in with the landlord.
The landlord says he has already given the nod. Marble is cut, broken pipe is identified, blame is apportioned, pipe is replaced and a gaping hole is left in the ceiling. The smell of workers and cut marble slowly dissipates from our apartment and we wonder if or when the hole will be fixed. And then the light switches go on the blink. And the geyser stops working. A huge, damp-looking stain appears on the marble floor directly outside the bathroom and some new cracks form in the plasterwork on the walls and ceilings in the hallway. Again, I decide that perhaps the landlord would like to know all this, but this time, my thoughtful communication is met with resistance and petty penny-pinching. His response is that we will need to pay for the switch and the geyser, as it’s not his problem. I gently suggest that while the money is not an issue, perhaps the fact that his apartment seems to be falling apart at the seams might be. He tells me otherwise, and less than 24 hours later, emails to say that he’s thinking of selling the place anyway.
What began as coordination of someone to fix a broken pipe has now turned into me effectively working part-time for the landlord; showing round potential buyers (making sure to give them to full, immersive tour of creaks and cracks), overseeing the people who want to fix the wall, the light switch and the hole in the ceiling. Rushing home to open the door to the man who needs to match the marble colour for the wall, and trying to find a supplier to sell us a new geyser so that Jasper can have his bath in his usual bathroom again. I watch every single one of these people pat and stroke the stained marble outside the bathroom to see if it’s ‘still wet’. After the fourth or fifth person makes their ‘oh, it’s dry now’, face, I feel the need to interject. It was never wet to the touch. The stain appeared after the flood, and by process of elimination, I’d say that since it didn’t come from above, or either of the sides, the water must be underneath. This sends a busy bear off to find (I learn through translation) ‘something or someone to cut the marble’ so they can look underneath.
I call the landlord again. This time, to my surprise, he is grateful that I have raised the alarm instead of letting an unauthorised marble cutter into the apartment. Ten points to me. He tells me he will send someone round to take a qualified look at the marble. This next person to appear pats the marble, strokes it, runs his finger along the joint between the wall and the floor and makes a phone call. My phone promptly rings and it’s the landlord. He’s happy to declare that the issue must be solved as the marble is no longer wet to the touch, and that he’ll send a stain remover guy. He doesn’t stay on the line long enough to hear me say that, at no point, was the marble wet to the touch. After all, he is the architect for this building, and if anyone should know where the water might be coming from, it’s him. I decide that if he’s not bothered, I’m not bothered on his behalf.
And then Jasper’s air con breaks in his room. It goes into spasmodic light flashing on a Friday evening and to my dismay, it happens to be the Friday before all the technicians in Mumbai take a trip out to another city. For 3 days and 3 nights, Jasper’s room is un-cooled. And so, for 3 days and 3 nights, Dylan and I live in the vain hope that he will sleep in his bed. Monday arrives, and we weary three drag ourselves through our morning routine. As soon I am back from depositing a tired, cranky, Jasper at school, two people arrive to service the air con. Of course, when I switch it on, it works perfectly. I begin to doubt myself - did I not test it again over the weekend? Did I push the wrong button on Friday and I’ve been punishing the entire family for my stupidity for over 48 hours with no reason? That it's due to my button-pushing ineptitude is the conclusion the service team reaches, and they pack up. It can’t be more than 30 minutes after they leave that Jasper returns home from school, nods off in his lunch, and is put in his bed by Seema. As she leaves his room, she says “Has nobody been to fix the air con?” at the exact same time as the cleaning lady Binu says “It’s good the air con has been fixed, right?”
My heart sinks. I call back the technicians who can't have got much further than the end of the street, and 5 hours later they reappear. They arrive right behind the team of bathroom menders who have commandeered the ladder, installed themselves in the bathroom and started cutting marble. The dust stings my nose, the noise burns my ears. The aircon men set to work testing and dismantling and cleaning the unit. At almost 7pm, it's time I started making dinner. There are 5 workers, two ladders (one borrowed from next door), an air quality index of ‘dangerously marbled’ and a pungent odour of glue or cement or filler in the apartment when Jasper comes up for his dinner. I am hiding in the kitchen, apron on, trying to tell myself that I look totally normal cooking my pesto basil chicken in the middle of a construction site, and that it almost certainly won’t taste like marble. The coughing from the bathroom suggests that the workman in charge of the marble cutting has just deposited half a lung in our sink. Jasper is enthralled. He wants to watch the busy bears as the work. I position his high chair so that he can at least see the aircon service show, although I refuse to open the bathroom door because of the dust.
It turns out that the aircon unit is flashing an error message and it’s not simply that I pushed an odd button combination. The technician says it’s water getting into the unit and collecting there. He looks at the marble stain on the floor, pops his head around to have a quick chat about ‘paanii’ (Hindi for water) with the men in there, and gives me a knowing nod when I ask him if he thinks it’s all connected. By 8:30pm the house is finally empty and silent. We still have a hole in the bathroom ceiling and at least two more days of noisy work to smooth the new marble patch and close up the ceiling and Dylan and my dinner is cold. The air con is fixed, however, so at least Jasper should be able to sleep in his room.
Should be able to. I don’t know if it’s all the mayhem of the workmen, or the smell of dust in the house, or the fact that he’s still recovering from his latest virus, but he will not sleep in his bed for more than an hour or so. The first thing he asks when he wakes up four times that night is ‘where the busy bear gone?’ It might be that he has picked up on the fact that I am now stressing about being made homeless at the end of the year. Despite all the recent problems with the flat, being told that we might be turfed out has made us reevaluate our enjoyment of the IndiaBulls compound and all signs point to the fact that we absolutely love it. Jasper is living his all-time best life here, and we are unlikely to find the exact same set up of people and facilities elsewhere. At present, Jasper’s week includes a soccer class, art class, gym class and music class - two without leaving the compound, and the other two less than 500 metres away. His friends are all here too - a gaggle of little people who appear at one another’s house unannounced on the off chance someone is free for an impromptu playdate.
The trouble with the unparalleled excellence of facilities and people we have here is that we can’t really afford it. Some snooping by a friend has ascertained that our landlord is asking a cool $1.6 million USD (or rather, the equivalent in INR) for our apartment, which suggests that either he or we are living in a dreamworld. Of course, my first search will be within the compound itself. Perhaps there is a spacious storage unit we can huddle up in while making full use of the sports facilities. Even if the landlord were just flexing his ‘it’s my house and I’ll sell it if I want to’ muscle to drive up either our rent or his sale price, it is unavoidable that we will have to go house-hunting later this year.
But that’s a problem for future me, sometime in July, I’d say. For now, I should probably focus some effort on writing and working, now that my job as interior works coordinator is almost complete.
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