The next time you lift up a seemingly clean napkin to wipe your lips at a restaurant or cover an ailing loved one with a sheet at a hospital, pause to think. For, the linen could have been washed in sewer water. This horrifying fact, with its worrisome health implications, was discovered by mid-day when we visited a makeshift shallow reservoir behind the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

Since the water remains stagnant and is made worse with the repeated use of detergent and washing of possibly contaminated hospital linen, the tank could, literally, be a reservoir of disease. A dhobi displays the clothes from a hospital washed in the reservoir. Pics/Nimesh Dave