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A block away, in my third-floor apartment, the fan is spinning, its pukkah-pukkah speeding up and slowing down as the electricity pops and jumps. My landlady, a thoroughly disagreeable widow who marches up every few days to ask if I can perhaps use the sink a bit less, is screeching downstairs at a servant who hasn't adequately drenched the orchids. Every morning when I step outside, the granite porch is slick with water, that same, overworked servant coiling up the hose, the parched trumpet vines and Persian buttercups guzzling the spray.

I'm upstairs waiting for the Bisleri man. Every week he comes by - usually an early Monday or Tuesday morning before the heat swells up - with an oversized plastic barrel of bottled water. We set it on the counter and take a glass to cool down. I put the cold metal cup straight to my chapped lips; he holds his a few inches above his mouth. Marco Polo was baffled by this. Eight hundred years ago, resting in India on his way towards the Gulf, Polo marveled at the country's drinking habits: "When they are drinking, they do not set the flask to their lips, but hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouth. They would not on any account touch the flask with their lips nor pass it to a stranger to drink out of."

Each week I pay sixty rupees - a dollar or so - for a tremendously large barrel of water. My coworker pays eighty for Himalaya brand water though we both have read just how polluted all the brands are with toxic pesticides and metals. All throughout the country, Bisleri, Himalaya, Kinley, Aquafina, and all the rest are sucking local aquifers dry and selling the very same water back to residents who now can't afford it.

The Delhi tap water is different -- no less contaminated, of course. The water usually doesn't last past ten or eleven in the morning and doesn't come back until late at night. It's harsher, loamier, and burns softly in the back of your throat. It's the same water that pours out of shower heads and gurgles down toilet bowls, the same water that flows in the street and swishes through overworked sewer tunnels, but for much of the country, it's simply what washes down rotis and rice.