At the start of the pandemic, my twenty-four-year-old nephew who’d come home from Los Angeles to check in on how my husband and I were doing (given our dangerous age bracket, he’d said) went out and bought two gallons of Arrowhead pure distilled water.
He is three months overdue for a haircut so that his hair looks like a black mop as he stands with his hands on his hips, and when he smiles, he looks almost radiant. I turn sparkling eyes on him, beaming a Tom Cruise worthy smile at his thoughtfulness. Inwardly, I cringe. My American nephew is used to purified water from a water filter pitcher. I’ve grown up with water bursting from a rusty tap in a kitchen with twenty-year-old appliances, the pictures of Guru Nanak and Pandit Nehru hanging on the wall, the remains of a cockroach that was pounded on the head still to be cleared from the gaping drain hole.
