Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

A Sunday under water
By Aditha Dissanayake
It rains non-stop the whole night. Being Sunday, no one wants to get up.
Everyone stays snuggled under the blankets hoping someone else will make the morning tea. Finally, when my thirst overcomes laziness, I stumble downstairs and step into a pool of water.

The entire ground floor is flooded. In degrees. The water in the sitting room barely covers my toes. The water in the pantry comes up to my ankles. The water in the kitchen where the gas-cooker and the provisions are, would have reached my knees had I stepped there.

“We should sell this house and move somewhere else,” says my mother, refusing to step down to assess the damage. My father clicks the channels on TV. “The paper boy won’t be able to come in this rain.” Both of them don’t want tea.

But, Nish, Rad, Madsy and I do. There is no way we can boil water. The hot water in the flask has to do. Our tea is lukewarm because we have to add cold water to fill our mugs to the brim. This is how life must have been in London during the Second World War, we tell each other. We feel as though we are living a chapter in Anne Frank’s diary. Breakfast is biscuits, half a loaf of yesterday morning’s bread with two frozen curries discovered in the fridge.

We assess the situation. We have the rice cooker, but the rice is in the kitchen. There are eggs in the fridge, but the gas-cooker and the bottle of oil are in the kitchen. We have tins of sardine in the pantry cupboards, but the tin opener is in the kitchen. We have packets and packets of milk powder and sugar but no hot water.

The phone rings. Flood relief? No. It’s Podi Seeya, from Pinkande, wanting me to ask my mother or father if they know the answer to five across in this Sunday’s crossword puzzle. I disappoint him by saying we are under five feet of water and have not received the Sunday papers yet. He says, “Oh, then I’ll ask someone else” and hangs up. It’s my turn to be disappointed. I had failed to convince him about the gravity of our situation.
“We are lucky the house has two floors. Otherwise we would have had to evacuate,” says Nish, the eternal optimist.

“Supposing we have to evacuate, what should we take with us?” I ask everyone around.
“The hard disk in my computer,” says Rad. “My certificates,” says Madsy.
“My wallet,” says Nish.

“The answer scripts of my students,” says yours truly. We turn to Mother. “So far as all of us are together, it doesn’t matter whether we save anything else or not,” she says giving the last word.

I have visions of being trapped upstairs for days. “The situation is drastic,” I tell everyone who would listen, enjoying every minute. “We’ll have to ration the food. Light a fire upstairs and boil water, we’ll have to eat raw eggs...” “In another half-an hour the water will go down,” predicts my father. He is right. To my disappointment, it does. I wish this had been so, all over the country too.

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