For the last few days, I’ve been sleeping past 4 am. ‘Morning-mare’ doesn’t sound like an apt made up word to define disruptions to the mind in the early hours of the day.
So today, I went to bed at 4.20 am and was woken up by a blast like sound, followed by loud hissing noises made by water. It was coming from the bathroom.
The bathroom door is less than 2 feet away from my bedside. I open the door, only be greeted by a spray of hot water, leaking furiously from the huge-ass geyser mounted on the wall. I immediately shut it again, rattled by it all, wondering ‘what the hell is happening?!’.
Husband went in to check on the geyser, which seemed to have burst somewhere, continued to spew water like a crazy jet spray on drugs.
“Is the switch on?” he asked me from inside the bathroom. The geyser switch was outside the bathroom and it was clearly off.
“It’s off” I said.
“The switch must have malfunctioned” he said and went out of the room, leaving the bathroom door open.
“What are you doing!!!” I asked, irritated, confused and still dazed. The warm water splashing over to our room.
He came back with a giant umbrella and went back into the bathroom, where water continued to hiss like angry snakes.
With the umbrella to protect him from the onslaught, he tried to meddle with the knobs attached to the geyser to see if they would stop the water from leaking.
“Is there another switch inside?” I asked him, remembering that our other bathroom geyser had two switches.
When he meddled with the first knob, the hiss like sound increased to a roar, and more water splashed ou of it, like a malfunctioning fountain.
Husband finally managed to stop it. All he had to do was remove the plug. Took us a few minutes to figure out such a basic thing because we were still in a stupor.
The hot steam from all the water had made the temperature in our room oppressive and unbearable. I headed out to the balcony to get some fresh air. Completely upset over the out of turn events.
“Why did it have to happen right when I fell asleep. Now it will take me forever to sleep,” I told myself, my head aching from all the unearthly noise that had rudely jolted us from the comfort of our bed.
“Thank God it happened when Kartik was around though,” I thought next.
Husband explained that a pipe had burst. Possibly from the overheating, since the geyser was on for a long time, despite the switch being off.
“Why is all of this happening to us during the lockdown? First the fridge. Now this,” he said.
Our fridge had malfunctioned and we couldn’t find anybody to repair it, so we went without it for a month. Silly first world problems eh?
Well, at least now that most essential services are up and running, finding somebody to fix the geyser wouldn’t be a problem.
Finding something to fix my sleep? That’s an irreparable malady.