When the water finally stopped gushing from the perfect little drill-sized hole in the bathroom tile, we all stood there, Archie, Kishor and I, and considered our bad luck. It was the screw that never was that did us in. The last screw of the night. An otherwise useless screw whose sole purpose was to keep one otherwise useless toilet scrubber suspended off the floor.
The drill just happened to pierce the main water line for the entire house. Archie wasn't smiling now. His bloodshot eyes were no longer betraying an otherwise carefree disposition. Now, in the harsh light of the washroom, he looked every bit like a beat-up Terminator in a grey-blue tank top and soccer shorts, stone-faced, surveying the damage and recalibrating his own internal subterranean pipeline detection system. He was still winded from having crawled across the roof to cut off the main water supply. It was slippery up there and the ladder had barely reached the hatch. After two peaceful days of drilling, cutting, gluing, fastening, tightening, mounting and remodelling, Archie had been felled by one screw.
He looked at me, then, with a look that said he had done everything in his twenty-plus year's worth of experience to avoid hitting the jackpot in the old shit-out-of-luck lottery. I smiled back. I had anyway felt my luck changing on the scooter ride to the ATM. This after one day's worth of writing had mysteriously disappeared from my Notes. I suddenly wasn't so interested to calculate the odds that one tiny drill bit burrowing for one tiny screw would have landed anywhere other than exactly where it did. Besides, he had given me enough smiles to warrant one back - this, in his time of need.
It was Kishor who finally broke the guilty silence. "Don't worry," said my landlord for maybe the hundredth time since I had met him. Words that had tested the limits of my patience suddenly rang anything but hollow. "Even God makes mistakes."
The drill just happened to pierce the main water line for the entire house. Archie wasn't smiling now. His bloodshot eyes were no longer betraying an otherwise carefree disposition. Now, in the harsh light of the washroom, he looked every bit like a beat-up Terminator in a grey-blue tank top and soccer shorts, stone-faced, surveying the damage and recalibrating his own internal subterranean pipeline detection system. He was still winded from having crawled across the roof to cut off the main water supply. It was slippery up there and the ladder had barely reached the hatch. After two peaceful days of drilling, cutting, gluing, fastening, tightening, mounting and remodelling, Archie had been felled by one screw.
He looked at me, then, with a look that said he had done everything in his twenty-plus year's worth of experience to avoid hitting the jackpot in the old shit-out-of-luck lottery. I smiled back. I had anyway felt my luck changing on the scooter ride to the ATM. This after one day's worth of writing had mysteriously disappeared from my Notes. I suddenly wasn't so interested to calculate the odds that one tiny drill bit burrowing for one tiny screw would have landed anywhere other than exactly where it did. Besides, he had given me enough smiles to warrant one back - this, in his time of need.
It was Kishor who finally broke the guilty silence. "Don't worry," said my landlord for maybe the hundredth time since I had met him. Words that had tested the limits of my patience suddenly rang anything but hollow. "Even God makes mistakes."
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