I lost my energy for storytelling well over a month ago. It’s all come down to my new apartment. We moved into our rented unit in Mumbai in mid April which, from a distance, is a glistening example of Mumbai’s emerging wealth. Tucked on the seventh floor of a skyscraper rising high into the city’s smog, the condominium is home to the country’s upwardly mobile classes. There is a manager of a chemical factory on the second floor and an owner of a textile mill living on another level. They have paid a New York price tag for their four-bedroom dwellings.

Beyond the wrap-around balcony and slabs of marble in the bathrooms, however, not much else in my apartment works to an American standard. Many of the accessories and appliances are quite old, possibly dished out of a pulled-down building, or sourced from the local market. Nothing much looks like it was procured from Macy’s. The owners of other units that I meet by the swimming pool are furious. They were promised a bit of New York in Mumbai.

As a tenant, I only have to deal with the daily disruptions of leaking toilets, dodgy electrical wiring and interruptions to the water supply. I can always move to another complex. Most housing in Mumbai, I am told, is just as unreliable. After weeks of supervising teams of technicians, I feel my apartment is just about livable. Why move now?

Corruption is an unrelenting thorn in the Indian economy. There are deals done behind closed doors and loose interpretations of contracts. My apartment is a micro-example of this rot of sleaze. There was clearly a lack of quality supervision in the building works, in combination with many corners cut for more profitable outcomes. Yet, when the construction is left with so many gaps in it, when the buck has been passed further down the chain, someone has to pay. In the case of our unit, I lost six weeks to supervising workmen for toilets that never stopped running or for wiring that tripped up when more than one air conditioner was turned on, along with paying many of the bills for the maintenance.

The earliest days were the worst. No sooner had our boxes landed in the apartment than two of the five toilets overflowed. There was brown water running, literally, through the apartment and out of the front door, roaring and foaming like the Mississippi River. The back toilet whooshed so much water down the lift well that two lifts were broken for a fortnight. I heard mutterings in the foyer from the other residents as to which apartment had caused this most unfortunate inconvenience. They knew it was someone or something to do with the seventh floor. I kept a low profile.

For a while I lost sight of what a normal day constituted in Mumbai. One of my major complaints was sleep. There is allegedly air trapped in the pipes which makes the whistling sound of a steam train. It’s quite deafening at midday; more than irritating when the big hand turns to midnight and I am woken up by the piercing pop of blocked gas. In one of my more sleep-deprived days, I considered hopping on a plane to Sydney for a good night’s slumber. Then, driving through the streets of Mumbai, I saw homeless people snoozing on the edges of the roads, curled into the cracks in the tarmac. Cars and tuk-tuks were hooting all around them and yet they seemed to be dozing soundly. I thought to myself: ‘stop whining, stop being an expatriate madam’. Over time, I’ve learned to snooze through many of the hollers of the night. I’m weary to it all, though. We’re paying New York prices and getting broken sleep.

Michael, my husband, has been mostly absent for the past two months. He’s embroiled in a work project in Kashmir and promises to be home for the weekend. Tired and distracted, he has his own issues to overcome. I must sound a bit dramatic on our evening calls when I constantly complain about toilets. Most of the appliances in the apartment are now working, thankfully. But I keep thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which I studied at university years ago. Without the foundations of sleep and shelter, how can anyone flourish in India? I continue to wag my finger at the culture of corruption here. My hairdresser told me yesterday that most of her Indian clients ask for the GST to be taken off their bills for their hair cuts and pedicures. If its citizens are reluctant to cough up to their share of the taxes, how can the government hope to pay for the infrastructure and education needed so desperately for this country’s progress? India will only ever fulfill its full potential when it addresses the ethos of corruption from the ground level all the way up to the top oligarchies. Otherwise, no one is working on a good night’s sleep.