On the Corridor, the Households Watching the Meter Watch It Climb

MAKRAN CORRIDOR — In the Bhatti household, the meter lives on the wall by the door, and this week the family has taken to reading it the way older generations read the sky. Rashida Bhatti, who fills for a household of seven, has watched the delivered cost of her daily allotment climb across October in increments small enough to ignore singly and impossible to ignore stacked. She keeps a running tally in a school notebook — liters drawn, price per liter, the widening gap between them. "I am not an economist," she said, tapping the notebook. "I am a mother with a pencil. But the pencil does not lie." Her arithmetic matches the utility's to within a rounding error, which is precisely the point relief workers keep making to legislators: the people on the corridor are not confused about what is happening to them. Down the lane, families who buy by the jug rather than the meter fare worse, unable to average a bad week against a good one. The corridor delivered its water this summer. This week it is delivering, household by household, the bill.