Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

Standing in front of my apartment door was a man with a large, blue, bulbous bottle of water, like the ones you see at water fountains in office cafeterias. "Is this yours?" he asked me.

When I first came to the Gulf region, everyone said the municipal tap water was safe to drink. "It's desalinated water, it's pure. Not like the water which turns your tummy to mush back home," said one long-time resident.

(Then again, some others said, the salt content in the water is what causes kidney stones. The desalinated water, they said was also the cause of the receding hairline of many expatriates).

I happily filled up empty bottles with the tap water and lined them up in the fridge, ready for a refreshing swig when I return home from a scorching day out in town. One day, the water tasted a little brackish and I guessed that the desalination plant must have backed up or something.

Then the water turned a brownish colour, and it was time to talk to the landlord. I found that while the tap water was supposedly clean, the overhead tank had turned a pretty, mouldy green over the years.

Peering inside, we found a dead pigeon floating. "Pigeon water. Good for health," said the 'haaris' or watchman, in pidgin English, laughing at the look on my face.

Incidentally, there is a sculpture on the Jeddah corniche made up of the pipes and a boiler of the city's first desalination plant. It is an unwitting, artful reminder that water, not oil, is the lifeline of people here.

When 1990 happened, the first thing that people hoarded was not food, not baby milk, not cigarettes, but bottled water. Long queues were seen at supermarkets and people pushed and jostled as they filled their trolleys with cases of water. Sweating salesmen tried to ration the cases of water to each customer, without much success.

For the first time in my many years in Saudi Arabia, I saw bare shelves in the soft drinks and drinking water aisles. It was just like the government-run markets in pre-Glasnost Soviet Union, where only the black market thrived.

After the pigeon incident, I bought bottled water. But friends said there were water stations in the Red Sea city, just like gas stations (which incidentally are called gas bars for some reason, in North America), where you can fill plastic jerry cans for a couple of riyals.

Here, I found the attendants wasted more water than they filled in the cans. First, they sloshed the jerry cans with hot water, then they ran jet sprays over it, and all the while the taps ran and water went down the overflowing drains.

(During an overnight stay in a hotel in Singapore, I found a polite note on my desk asking me not to waste water. I never found such a note in any of the hotels in the region.)

Returning one evening from these very busy water stations, I looked at my rear view mirror and found that a police car was cruising behind me.

Hoping that the cop was going on an assignment to beat up someone else in the neighbourhood, I turned right, and then right and right again. But there he was still in my rear view mirror, trailing me slowly.

When I reached my apartment building, this huge, burly, black cop, popped out of the car and asked me to open the trunk. I then realised that trailing behind me on the dusty road was a long wet line.

He reached inside with his huge hands, unscrewed the top of the jerry can, sniffed and then dipped his finger in and tasted it. Then, without a word, he turned and left.

Much, much later I found that a group of expatriates in a villa near the water station ran a hooch distillery.