The day the taps ran dry, I finally understood Hormuz

The notice came two days ahead: the water would be off from ten at night until the following evening, for work on a main somewhere up the hill. I did what everyone in the building does. I filled the bath. I filled the big aluminium rice pot, the kettle, the two buckets that live under the sink, and then, because it seemed a shame to stop, every bottle I could find, lined up along the counter like a small and anxious congregation.

By noon the next day the whole flat had rearranged itself around that bath. I washed a cup and then stood there, looking at the grey water in the basin, wondering what else it could do before it went down the drain. I watered the basil with it. I counted the bottles twice. I put off cooking rice, because rice wants water twice over, once to wash and once to cook, and I had become, in fourteen hours, a person who thinks about water before she thinks about lunch.

Somewhere in the afternoon, sitting at my desk with a scoop of bath water standing guard by the door, I realised I had spent years writing about a city that lived like this every single day.

Around the year 1300, the rulers of Hormuz picked up their town from the mainland coast and moved it, people, goods and all, to a small island in the mouth of the Gulf. The reason was safety: raiders from inland could not follow them across the water. The island they chose was made of salt and red earth, fiercely hot in summer, and had no fresh water to speak of. No river, no spring worth the name. And on that island grew one of the great markets of the sea routes, where pearls, horses for the courts of India, pepper, cloth and porcelain changed hands, and an old saying held that if the world were a golden ring, Hormuz would be the jewel set in it.

Nearly every drop that jewel drank came across the water by boat, from the island of Qeshm and from the shores on either side. Later there were great cisterns to catch what little rain fell, but for much of its long prosperity the city was never more than a few bad days away from thirst.

When I was writing Strait of Hormuz, I read about the merchants and the kings, the ships waiting on the monsoon, the bales of silk. I wrote about them, too. But I am not sure I understood, until I was rationing a bathtub, who actually held that city in their hands. It was the water boatmen, who brought the supply across, load after load, and the people on the far shore who drew it and sold it and chose, day after day, to keep on doing so. Their names survive nowhere that I have found. They are not in the travellers' accounts, which prefer jewels. They are certainly not in the saying about the ring.

It changes how the island looks. A fortress town on a rock is a story about defence. A fortress town that cannot drink without its neighbours is a story about agreement, renewed with every boat that comes in. The safety the island bought from the mainland was paid for with dependence on the mainland, and a city that clever must have known it. Perhaps that is part of why the market worked so well for so long: nobody on Hormuz could afford to forget that trade runs both ways.

A fortress town that cannot drink without its neighbours is a story about agreement, renewed with every boat that comes in.

The water came back a little after seven. The tap coughed, spat out something the colour of weak tea, and then ran clear, and the whole building seemed to breathe out at once. I let the bath drain. I kept one bucket full, under the sink, for no reason I could defend. It is still there. Every time I see it I think of a boat crossing a narrow strait in the early heat, sitting low in the water, carrying the plainest cargo in the world to the richest town on the Gulf.