Of course I sympathize with those who seek public relief. I don’t doubt that we are all expected to respect the privacy of those who have none. But the volume of personal-waste dumpers in a megapolis like Delhi is so great that there is no question of avoiding the sight of them. We must either learn to become selectively blind or else become forced witnesses to the hordes of depositors lurking behind trees, striking manly stances in front of walls, tucked behind the corner of a tomb or nonchalantly letting fly on the pavements along main thoroughfares.
And if we can neither avoid the sight of something nor prevent it from occurring, the only thing left to do, in my opinion, is to reset our notions of politeness and acknowledge open-air excretion as indigenous performance art. ‘Behold!’ the tourist guide might bellow to a group of goggle-eyed visitors from distant shores, ‘we see in front of us yet another local hero, watering the foundations of a public building. While here at your feet, is that man’s child, practicing the ancient art of Sphincter Relaxation—do watch out!’
Delhi has the abundance of public space which, I believe, inspires its citizenry to greater feats of al fresco alimentation than elsewhere. The streets are broader, better paved and more lavishly supplied with traffic islands and pavements than in any other Indian metropolis. There are fewer obstructions or constructions on either side of the main thoroughfares, enabling those who live on them to be more easily seen. There is even a matchless selection of historic monuments upon which to empty a bursting bladder. The lack of public facilities is compounded by dreadful conditions within the few toilets that are available. According to a friend who once attempted to use a public toilet in Khan Market, the floor was so dense with human waste that his only option was to stand at the entrance and aim for the pissoir from there.
Some men, of course, are wont to regard the use of outdoor facilities as opportunities for showing off their personal assets. I once saw a young boy at the corner of Ring Road, just before the turn towards Okhla Phase II, engaged in what seemed at first glance a routine bladder deflation. It must be a popular spot for these activities because there were at least five other boys of a similar age likewise occupied. This particular youth, however, was looking around at the traffic in the way of someone who wants to be watched. A second glance revealed the reason why.
He seemed no more than ten or twelve years of age, judging from his height. Yet even from a distance of some twenty metres it was clear that the instrument between his hands would have looked right at home on a stallion. His lack of maturity showed in the way he was flinging it about, as if he didn’t know quite what to do with it, like the newborn elephant I once saw in a Discovery Channel documentary, at the moment when it discovered its own trunk. The expression on his face was a mixture of arrogance and appeal, like an opera star yearning for applause after giving a brilliant performance. He made me aware for the first time how embittering it must be for a man who is unusually gifted in the appendage department to recognize that the world does not permit him to advertise his charms.
The sight of men waddling off in pairs to water a wall is so common that we must conclude it is a feature of male-bonding. The reason they waddle is that they are often tugging at their zippers as they go, like gunfighters striding towards a fight with their hands already fondling the handles of their weapons. Often, they chat as they darken a public wall in companionable relief. I am always wildly curious to know what they talk about. How much can there be to say? Are they sharing output analyses? Personal measurements? Inflow-outflow data? The comparative pleasures of this wall versus some other wall? The satisfaction of adding nitrogen to a tree, where trees are available? The joys of being uninhibited? The preference of Y-fronts over X-front briefs or bikinis—or no briefs at all? It’s a mystery to me.
Some men are apparently able to pee without extruding any body parts while others feel the need to haul out their entire tackle, bending their knees a little and bouncing up and down, as if winching anchors up from unfathomable depths. Some men gaze down upon themselves as if remembering with fond regret the keg of beer currently being returned to the elements. Some men stare away into the distance with glassy expressions like captains standing at the helms of their ships of Self, holding their steering wheels ever so lightly. And once I saw a man posing with his left hand on his waist and a cigarette in his right, with his fly open and his wee companion performing all on its own, looking quite sad and lonely as it did so. I was impressed at his confidence and sangfroid. Only when he was done did he finally look down, stowing his equipment away with his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Belmondo-style. So cool.
Women, meanwhile, are expected to leave their bladders at home when they venture forth into the world. I have heard it said that the reason women don’t irrigate the countryside as enthusiastically as men is that the female bladder is smaller. I would have thought this meant they got filled up quicker and hence needed releasing sooner, but apparently the opposite is true. Women’s bodies, being less hairy and better supplied with sweat glands than men’s, are more efficiently hydrated. Which is a good thing, because women neither have the social sanction to pee at will, nor do we have the physical equipment to exercise the water-cannon option described a couple of paragraphs ago when confronted with a user-unfriendly toilet. An added disincentive is that women wearing modern clothing require the skills of a trained contortionist to use the floor-level commode of a typical Indian public loo. Traditionally apparelled women score in this department. Unfettered by underwear, wearing full skirts or saris, they can stand and deliver over drains, ditches, gutters or any space at all. But the rest of urban womanhood must crouch down with panties stretched to breaking point at the ankles, high heels teetering dangerously, salwars tangled up in dupattas and handbags clenched between the teeth.
The sight of small children squatting down in formation is another Delhi staple. Perhaps their mothers set them out in company, so that each can watch over the activities of the other while modest pagodas of infant dung develop beneath all. Most young children are intensely curious about their bodily functions. Those who grow up on the streets are no exception. With the elastic joints and infinite flexibility of the very young, they can be seen staring down with rapt attention at their own rear ends, as if unsure whether or not there is more to come from the internal food processor.
Once I saw a young boy of perhaps twelve years of age in the act of voiding his bowels in the gutter by the side of the road running down the middle of Jangpura. It was late in the evening and the reason I noticed him was that the car in which I was a passenger was parked right next to the gutter. The gutter was alongside a food stall. The stall owner was winding up for the night. Two young men were cleaning out the cooking vessels, scrubbing hard with coconut husks and water, under a flaring gas-lit lantern.
The boy had just completed his task and was looking around, as if searching for something. One of the vessel-cleaners, glancing over to where the boy squatted, noticed that he was looking around and guessed what it was for. In a spontaneous act of recognized need, he paused in his vessel-scrubbing, scooped up a mug of water from the nearby bucket, and poured a steady stream down towards the boy’s rear end. His aim was perfect. The boy looked up over his shoulder and grinned thankfully. He washed himself off with his left hand, then stood up, adjusted his shorts and scampered away without a backward glance.
It wasn’t as if the boy needed any assistance. He was old enough to manage his personal sluicing on his own. The pot-scrubber did not appear to be related to him in any special way. Yet the deed was so gracefully done, as if the two principle actors in that roadside drama had been rehearsing on a daily basis, that I didn’t know whether to feel impressed or repulsed.
Another time, I saw a middle-aged woman, squatting down on the grassy embankment of a main road, with her rear end fully exposed to the traffic. She was dressed in the type of gathered skirt I associate with Rajasthani peasant women and it was impossible not to notice her, what w
ith the bright blue flounces framing her naked butt under the midday sun. If not for the fact that Indian women are known to be fanatically prudish, it would be hard to guess she wasn’t being deliberately provocative. Two days later, there she was again, taking her ease on the grass. She did not seem deranged, like those vagrants whom we occasionally see, walking around naked and wild-haired. Her clothes were reasonably clean. Since then, I’ve noticed her on and off, sometimes occupying an unused municipal garbage dump, curled up asleep in the middle of the day. I look at her, wondering along what dark tunnel of experience she travelled before reaching a point when she could defecate by a main road apparently heedless of who saw her or what they thought of her. It is a kind of negative freedom, a kind of strength.
She and others like her were on my mind when I visited the area near Delhi’s Azadpur garbage dump, along the Grand Trunk Road. This site might be said to represent the city’s toilet, receiving an estimated 8,000 tonnes of waste material every day. From here, it has nowhere else to go. There is a single garbage-composting plant, run on behalf of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi by a family of Delhi-based philanthropists called the Khuranas. This unit transforms a portion, perhaps one eighth, of Delhi’s organic wastes into eco-friendly, odour-free compost. The remainder of the city’s litter is dumped as ‘landfill’. That is, it is left to rot in the open, with all its toxic contents seeping into the soil and into the water table, untreated and unsupervised.
Right in the middle of this dismal place lives a community of ragpickers. Young children grow to maturity, marry, breed and die amidst low hillocks of rotting garbage, where the only touch of brightness is the malignant blue of indestructible polythene bags. Stunted black pigs patrol the landscape, like zealous four-footed janitors, rooting through the filth of the nation’s First City. Thin veils of rank vapour rise continuously out of the slowly compacting mass. There are no trees or plants, only poles bearing electric cables. They seem shorter than usual, the cables swinging dangerously close to the ground. Then it hits you: it’s not the height of the poles that’s different, but the ground that has risen, swollen with garbage, to swallow up the poles.
The ragpickers make their living by herding the pigs and from gleaning nuggets of recyclable trash from the garbage. It is reportedly a dangerous area, where murder and casual crime are commonplace. The reason I went there was to visit the MCD plant, an island of cleanliness and order amidst an ocean of desolation, in order to see for myself that it is really possible to treat garbage as if it were a valuable resource. I was told that a common sight every morning along the main access road to the garbage dump is a line of people relieving themselves. According to my informant, who takes this route every day, the squatters are both male and female. They chat amiably to one another, nothing hidden, nothing covert, as they rid their bodies of waste.
It is as if, by living at the very outermost margins of society, these citizens have dispensed with the prudery and personal fastidiousness that characterize every other facet of Indian life. While the privileged socialize for the purpose of consumption, here is a group of the underprivileged, who socialize for the purpose of elimination. Like the woman in the garbage dump, they have learnt a trick of psychological distancing that permits them to behave as if they were invisible.
In any other situation, it would be considered supremely insulting for one person to reveal his or her private parts to another person without prior consent. On the streets in Delhi, however, no conscious offence is intended—the ugliness is endemic to a situation where the civic authorities do not consider the need for public toilets to be more urgent than, say, flyovers or smartly paved roads. Nor do the authorities, or anyone else, show an interest in guaranteeing a roof over every citizen’s head—or, to be more precise, a screen around every citizen’s bum. So in a sense, these sights represent a catastrophe in slow motion, a war zone of the human spirit, where the public meets the private in a defiant downloading of excrement. They are the tax we pay for being unconcerned with the arithmetic of physical needs.
A great metropolis without proper sanitation for its thirteen million citizens is like a land-locked Titanic without enough lifeboats for all its passengers. Bereft of efficient waste management, Delhi’s tree-lined avenues, ancient monuments and gracious parks become like the worst kind of bathroom joke: many miles of sights to see but nowhere to ‘go’.
One Long Party
RENUKA NARAYANAN
I could write of the sorrows of my city, no greater or less than those of any great capital. I could write of its underbelly, its ghosts and vampires, its djinns and devils, its shadow people who flock at traffic lights like so many dried leaves blown in by a desert wind. I could write of the angels in human guise who work unseen amidst us, with disabled children, with unwanted elders, with women who are abused and beaten. Our colours and costumes vary, but is human behaviour so different in other places? I have lived, worked and travelled alone in Europe for two years and had giddy times in the dance studios and lofts of New York. There are good people everywhere, and joy seems to run hand-in-hand with its twin, grief.
But I prefer to let other pens dwell on misery. There is no lack of those, some exceedingly abler than mine is, at telling the world what it prefers to know about poor South Asian countries. Instead, I want to wander through Delhi’s hospitable hangouts and homes. It’s a city that—forgive the cliché—works hard, plays hard, and drinks far too much for the good of its liver or its love life. But there’s an energy to Delhi that I find irresistible. It’s been good to me and I’d be pleased if you joined me in a romp through my own city of joy.
A woman, hung about with silver and turquoise, swathed in a viridian dupatta off the looms of Maheshwar, walks purposefully to the elevator from the underground parking of the India Habitat Centre, the epicentre of south Delhi’s social convulsions. She’s on her way to the assured delights of a Lucknawi kabab festival, where she’s bound to see at least a hundred people she knows.
A black Lancer swooshes out at maniacal speed and she skips smartly aside. The car screeches to a halt, the passenger door is flung open, a man from Mumbai whom the woman hasn’t met in months leans across to hiss: ‘Get in at once! I’m buying you dinner tonight!’
They zoom off, laughing at this absurd kidnap, to a new Italian place with a real wood-fired oven, to feast off artichoke hearts and smoked salmon crepes.
Do you wonder that Mills & Boon does great business still, despite the trashy American novels on CD that people now play in their cars between bhajans? Keep driving. Go south, towards Haryana and the expensive new suburban ghettos with idiotic names like Malibu Towne and Beverley Park. Fiercely aspirational, mad about the movies, been to San Gimignano (the Italian town, not the Delhi restaurant). These the places for summer swims under a skyful of stars in private pools screened by scented plumeria, and winter barbecues on rolling green lawns while fat bumblebees careen about, punch-drunk on the nectar of a thousand flowers.
Or head on a Thursday (it’s already passé, though) to the Delhi Gymkhana’s dance night. I’m used to sedate lunches there with delightfully batty aunties elegant in chiffon saris, with unrelentingly exquisite manners and perfect vowels and consonants to match their lace-edged hankies. Or mellow evenings with a pleasant drink and a chat with my bookish, gentle father. And I remember the prettiness of my brother’s engagement party there (he’s in advertising, she’s a lawyer and they work so hard, I can’t tell how their lives are different from my sister’s in Manhattan). When we were little and lived together in the pleasant green of Lutyens’ Delhi, we learnt to swim in the Gym’s gloomy pillared pool (the Lady Willingdon Bath, but at least they’ve banished the portraits of Liz and Phil from the ballroom, unlike in the Madras Club down south). The loo attendant still remembers me as a ‘shaitaan’ and the hedgerows of lantana and henna nod conspiratorially—were they not a forgiving witness to teenage kisses from far-too-suitable boys?
But Thursday nights at the Gym today? If y
ou go with a bunch of gay friends, it’s like looking through the Smirnoff bottle in the old ad. Perspective shifts to seeing things as they are, not as we are. ‘Uncles’, whom I’ve always thought of as lonely old fellows nursing a solitary drink and brooding over lost love, suddenly reveal themselves as hunters, except it’s not women they’re after, but the merry men I’m with.
One of my friends keeps up a running commentary in my ear: ‘See that guy, the one in the Versace shirt with the girl in the black Prada dress? She’s a rich industrialist’s daughter, but she doesn’t know her husband’s really bi.’ Before I’ve recovered from that, he points out another (handsome) man, whom I’ve discreetly been admiring from under my lashes. ‘Don’t bother, darling. He’s gay, though he’s not come out.’
‘Isn’t there a man left in town?’ I snap, with residual bourgeois annoyance at being caught looking. ‘I don’t think so, doll. I mean, who’d want a hetero guy any more, they’re so obnoxious. But, hey,’ he pats my shoulder consolingly, ‘you could always try the marrieds—except, they’re secretly bi, too, you’d be surprised how many! Maybe you should stick to out-of-towners?’
Sensible advice, I think, not without a pang of regret at the sharp, sweet memory of all the romantic adventures Delhi afforded me in my teens and twenties (it’s also the city of my courtship, marriage and divorce). But I can’t help noticing something. Lots of sweet young things I know seem unable to marry or even find a proper boyfriend: ‘Where are the men? They’re either so geeky and boring, or they’re mama’s boys, or they’re so self-obsessed they come out as real losers!’ Some major millennial angst is obviously wracking the city, which however parties furiously on, like something in a cautionary tale before the scourges strike.
City Improbable- Writings on Delhi Page 29