I want to have a conversation with water. I have one every morning when it streams down my face. I have one at the end of a bad day when I submerge in it, skin against skin. But I don’t want an everyday conversation. I want to have the difficult conversation, the kind I have to brace myself to face. The one I had, bent over in the disused spa of my parents’ house filling up pails and laundry baskets and any vessel I could find with water, manic and terrified, because this is what we were taught to do in an emergency, and, up to my tilted scalp in misfiring neurons, this is an emergency. Because when I grew up we were taught that water could be turned off with a snap of Mahathir’s finger. Because our neighbour, the enemy we always fought in our imaginary wars, could always cut off our water. That we were in an eternal crisis of scarcity, a scarcity that refused complacency, a scarcity that made us so naked, so vulnerable. Countless propaganda posters, telling us every drop was a treasure, that not a drip of it should be wasted, or it would shame the nation. That in war, we would have to stock up, ration it, defend it, because it was not ours. How thirsty that made me feel, even though the country was rich. How precarious. How I know, even here, even now, the water wars are coming, because we will never in any lifetime ever run out of thirst.

 

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