For three years the tap in the courtyard of my building dripped. Everybody walked past it. Somebody would fix it. It belonged to the building, which meant that it belonged to nobody.
Last month I finally did the arithmetic. One drop every two seconds is about forty litres a day. Over three years, that small sound had poured away more than forty thousand litres of clean water, treated, pumped and paid for.
Only then did I notice the bucket. Standing under the tap, half hidden by a rosebush, was an old blue bucket. It belonged to Nodira opa on the ground floor, who is eighty-one. For three years she had been collecting the drip and watering her roses with it.
I told her, with some admiration, that she was the only person in the building who had treated the leak seriously. She looked at me as if I were a slow pupil. "I'd rather you fixed the tap," she said, "than praised my bucket."
She is right, and it is not only about one tap. Most of this country's water goes to the fields, and much of it is lost on the way, through open channels and old pipes. Our homes use a smaller share, yet we behave as if the supply were endless: we wash cars with hoses, leave taps running while we brush our teeth, and ignore drips that we would never ignore if each drop cost us a coin.
It's time we talked about water as what it is: a resource that runs out. It's high time buildings had someone responsible for their shared taps and pipes. And I would rather the city spent money on fixing leaks than on another fountain.
A plumber came on Tuesday. The repair took eleven minutes and cost less than a taxi ride. The courtyard is silent now, and Nodira opa waters her roses from a jug.
She told me yesterday that the roses do not seem to mind. Then she asked me when I was going to write about the pipe behind the school. It drips too, she said.