There was a rather interesting article sent to me this morning for the spirituality section of our newspaper that was titled ‘The Call of Nature’. For a moment, I let that title go; then, to my horror, I realised that it was a little suggestive in nature (Ha, ha! I actually did not aim for that one, but hit target!) and decided then and there that it had to be changed. It was, to something more innocuous, but for a moment it was a rather close call…and not too natural either.
And this is just what the situation at the office has been over the last week or so. The combination of a water crisis and a blocked and then broken pipe resulted in a ‘little inconvenience’, as the company administration tactfully put it. The consequence: everyone from this floor had to troop down to the ground floor to use the ‘facilities’, which were, in any case, over-stressed. Because of which, logically, obviously, the aforementioned facilities broke down, too, and those of us who had rushed down to use them had to rush back up, take a container of water into the loo with us and do what needed rather desperately by then to be done. It was reminiscent of the scenes from the past – which none of us had probably seen in real life – when you took your little lota filled with water from the well and went out into the fields when nature called.
That is a very Indian concept, as far as I know. I was brought up on properly installed western ‘facilities’, only occasionally using the more native and occasionally primitive version that was not just amazingly difficult to master, but somehow exciting as well. I remember one traumatic trip to Goa with a group of classmates. We all stayed in a friend’s family home and learned how to coexist, literally, with various creatures, including pigs. In fact, they were the sewage system, if you know what I mean. It was a ghastly experience – I came back home to Mumbai with a twisted foot (no, I was not avoiding the pigs, I slipped on a step and dislocated a bone), a head-full of nightmares and a bad case of constipation. And it took me a few years to get back to eating pork again.
That trip was indeed memorable. It was one of the few times I had a bath with other people sharing the same space which, for someone who values privacy above any other quality of life, it was truly horrendous. The first night we were in Goa, we had to draw water from the well in the yard and then use the dimly lit stone-flagged are to get on with our ablutions. Being rather a prude, I managed to take the fastest bath in the history of suds and forever after have believed that I was trying to lather up with a dead frog, not a bar of soap. I couldn’t look any of my classmates in the eye the next morning. That evening, and for the two that followed that we spent in the village, I refused to bathe outdoors; I did so rudimentarily in the regulation loo, a friend keeping watch at the door – I returned the favour when she washed up – as I squinted through the gloom to make sure I located the bucket of water when I needed to wash the soap out of my eyes. My first action when I got to my own home was to head to the loo and shower; my parents, who had been out to dinner, came back to find me fast asleep in a vast chair, one foot swathed in crepe bandage and a damp towel still wrapped around my wet hair.
Not having access to a proper loo of a certain level of hygiene sends my digestive system into a dormant state, a cross between a camel and a dik-dik, I am often teased. But what else can I do, especially if deadlines loom and the water if cut off in the office loo?
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