Water Habits

I like to shower daily. My friend, Surdna, in the North of India, has a daily relationship with water too. She walks ten miles each morning, with two empty one gallon buckets that look a lot like an old Clorox gallon bottle. Round, firm, with that gritty grey sheen plastic gets when used a lot. She fills them up at a spigot, after standing in line a few and rests before returning to her home. She chats up her colleagues, giving new meaning to water cooler conversations. She walks back 10 miles to her home. After twenty miles, she has done her day’s work, fetching water for bathing her three children and cooking and cleaning their food and…