"The geyser doesn't work..."

"The geyser doesn't work..." 

...mom had told us all. This was when I was around 6-7 yrs old & we had stayed in that new house for as many years. So, as a middle class family, we always heated bathing water in a large vessel on the gas stove. This continued for 20 yrs.

Then, when I was around 20 & studying engineering, I once asked mom "Why is this geyser not working? Why did the builder provide it then?" "That's how it came when we bought the flat. The builder forgot to give a connection to the geyser,'' she said. "Let me try atleast" I suggested. "No!! Don't ever touch that switch, you could get a big shock!" she warned me in a stern voice. This is what she had always told us over the years & we were always scared of that heavy looking switch. 

A few weeks passed & I still couldn't understand why the builder had given a non-functional geyser. So one day, without asking mom, I took a belan (the wooden roller used to make chapatis) & went to the bathroom. I was aware that the wooden belan would protect me from a possible electrical shock. I pushed the dreaded switch on (the dangerous red light glowed) with the belan and voila! A miracle! Steaming hot water started flowing from the tap & I screamed "Mummy, come here, quick!" Mom came hurriedly & I told her what I had just done & we both kept staring at the hot water flowing. The feeling was no less than witnessing a Godly miracle unfold! "How can it be!" my mom asked in disbelief. "I was told this geyser doesn't work and that we should never touch that big switch!" she said, still shocked at the sight. Definitely not the kind of "shock" she had warned us about.

So finally we started using that geyser. Eventually, after a few years, we renovated the house & installed a new one. Earlier today, I was at a neighbor's place & saw the same geyser and clicked it. "It's still working as it was 40 years back,'' he claimed with pride.

I came back home & told mom about it & we discussed how we had suffered for 20 long yrs, enduring uncountable mishaps that had occurred while heating the water on the gas! Ignorance is not always bliss. Mom, dad & us 3 siblings had not dared to turn that dreaded switch on even once in all those years. I still do not know who told Mom that it was not working but what is unbelievable is how all of us in the family never touched that switch believing the geyser was not working as Mom had told us so. The story is so unbelievable that I am sure some of you reading this might really feel that this is a fictional story, but no part of it is fiction. It's as unbelievable as it sounds.

That's life. So often the things we are looking for are right in front of us, hiding in plain sight, the way we want it to be, but perhaps we are living in disbelief or not looking at them because we were told/conditioned to not look/think about them. We will often endure inconvenience & pain for a long time than think about what's available readily and easily to put us out of our miseries.