Plumbing Lessons

Most of my time was spent on the roadside near my house during the last three days. The water pipe had broken somewhere below the road and water was wreaking havoc in its own slow but relentless way. Moreover, many people’s drinking water supply was also affected. Finally the concerned authorities took note and the plumber arrived with his assistant.

The job necessitated digging up the newly completed road. The necessary permissions were taken and the bulldozer dug its metallic claws into the newly tarred road. The contractor of the road construction happened to pass by and gave vent to his anger. The plumber said he would just cover up the dug up part and quit the job. The village people were as angry as the contractor and both shouted at each other. I took the contractor aside on the pretext of showing him the extent of the damage done to the road by the leak and explained to him that there was no way other than dig up the road and also told him that I could sense his pain on seeing his road, which was more ours since we were the people using it, mauled and disfigured. He relented.

When the plumbing was done I understood how much work the contractor’s labourers had to put in to bring the road back to its original condition. Without doing that the contractor wouldn’t be able to get his payment from the government. This repair work was done on the second day. That night the water pipe broke somewhere under the road once again!

The plumber had laid the line in such a way that the pipe could be pulled out from the side of the road without damaging the road again. But that required a whole day’s work again. The plumber and his assistant displayed immense patience doing their job and I admired that patience. It wasn’t easy to draw out a 7-metre long, 4 inch pipe from its cavity at a depth of half a metre below the ground surface. And then replace it with another one of the same size.

When that arduous replacement job was about to be over, as the last ‘coupling’ job was being done, the loose ground slipped and the entire soil fell on to exactly where the plumber was connecting the subterranean pipe to the supply line by the roadside. My hands went to my head instinctively and I cried out in utter sadness.

The plumber recovered instantly. “Such things happen,” he said as he asked for a shovel to remove the soil. No complaints, no grumbling. I noticed that the plumber always had a smile on his face. Once again he started cleaning the entire pipe ends and then applying the solvent.

It is the same plumber who had shouted at the contractor to get lost the previous day. He could not digest what he perceived as hubris on the part of a rich man who came by a luxurious car, sporting immaculate white dress from top to bottom, and questioned him rather too rudely. What happened in the moments that followed taught me that a few gentle words can mollify rising temperatures.

The ultimate lesson, however, was the plumber’s patience with his job and its hazards. I realised that the man was a wonderful specimen so long as his self-respect was not rubbed wrongly by anyone.

Perhaps most people are good at heart. We just don’t know or don’t care to learn how to deal with them.  The three days of plumbing were very instructive for me.

An hour after the plumber left having phoned to the waterman to pump water since people were not getting water for the last three days, I went to the roadside to check if there was any leak in the newly laid line. There wasn’t any. As I stood there feeling happy because I was a beneficiary of the water supply system too, a person who came by stopped his bike and said, “The pipe has broken there.” He mentioned a spot hundred metres away. I rushed there to find a whole fountain rising from the pipeline. The plumber’s smiling patience rose in my soul like a sad sigh.