Then went home cooking, as there was no way to clean the pots and pans. Yet it wasn't until Cynthia Herath's 8-year-old son started letting his homework go, exhausted from the midnight jaunts to bathe across town, that she knew things were bad.

``Life has become a torture,'' said the 48-year-old Herath, who rose from bed at 3 am on Wednesday, like a sleepwalker with mop in hand, drawn toward the unexpected drip-drip of the kitchen tap.

``We never, ever expected to face anything like this in Malaysia,'' she said.Already suffering from a watered-down economy and bracing for another season of eye-stinging smog, 600,000 residents in the capital have suffered severe water rationing for weeks.

On Monday, another 1.2 million people in Klang valley will face sharp water cuts.

The new way of life -- the hunt for water, the running after tanker trucks, the jacked-up prices for buckets -- has set tempers on edge.

Thecity's water truck drivers, rumbling through the parched neighbourhoods, have been threatened with assault. Scuffles have broken out among those waiting in long lines, often for hours under the afternoon sun. In one neighbourhood, angry teens tried to run down a water official.

People in Kuala Lumpur have long accepted the dreadful traffic from torn up roads in Malaysia's rush to become a developed nation by 2020. They're resigned to pulling out surgical masks when hazardous smog from manmade forest fires sets in.

But the drought, in a tropical country where monsoon flooding is a more typical weather concern, caught them by surprise. Though water authorities blame the El Nino weather phenomenon for lack of rain, many residents accuse the Government of mismanagement.

``They should have built more dams. They should have seen to the water first,'' said Herath. ``Building, building, building there is no meaning to all this endless building.''

Herath lives in Brem Park, a middle-class condominium where3,000 people have gone without water for a month.

Tanker trucks have begun arriving daily, pumping water up to roof top tanks, so that residents have a blessed few hours of water, often in the middle of the night. But some have complained the water is oily or yellow and they're afraid to drink it.

But Puncak Niaga Ltd., which operates water treatment plants, assured them the water is checked three times for chlorine and PH levels. Company spokeswoman said she was more worried about quantity than quality. Heavy rains in the last week have done little to fill the 135 water-catchment areas in Selangor state.