Scatological Drama

I thought I was ghetto, before I went to India. I was so painfully mistaken. I saw a man in a three piece suit take a shit on the sidewalk. That is gangsta!!! He just squatted down and went for it, all the while, casually reading the paper. I love that he had such an air of weary decadence, so that the act of defecating in the street wasn’t enough for him. He still needed something to read.

The amount of shit everywhere is something that you just have to deal with, being there. There is all kinds of shit too. Cow shit, dog shit, goat shit (little and pebbly like rabbit shit so less offensive and more petting zoo like), and of course real live BULL shit, which I thought was just an expression. Then the many faces of human shit, unpleasant and instantly recognizable. The shit didn’t bother me as much as the piss, which was a surprise. I didn’t like to encounter the public urinals placed on busy street corners. They weren’t toilets per se, just tiled three walled structures, the foul, piss-encrusted insides streaked brown from the years and years of use. I never looked close enough to see if there was some sort of drain, but there must have been. Still, it looked like hell and enough for me to be glad that I didn’t have to pee there.

I think that the farther away we are able to place ourselves from our bodily functions, the more affluent our society. There, we come face to face with our fluids. In America, our products are secrets held in porcelain vessels, diluted beyond recognition with gallons of precious water, instantly spirited away from us at many miles per hour. We don’t want to know about it, we don’t want evidence of it, and we pay dearly for that privilege. It isn’t like there aren’t toilets like that in India, but they were different. We frequently encountered the squat variety, which is a porcelain bowl much like the one at home, but this one you aren’t able to sit on. It just rests on the ground, and we are required to hover. It is usually wet, as Indians don’t use toilet paper, at least not with the tremendous ass appetite of Americans. I called down at our hotel in Delhi one too many times for toilet paper. “We just sent you two rolls already! What are you doing with it? You Americans try to wipe wipe wipe all your problems away. You cannot do that here!”

What they do is wash themselves clean with a plastic cup placed next to a very low faucet, in very close proximity to the squat toilet. It is probably cleaner, but the moisture is still a mystery, and an unpalatable one. What confused me is that women would be able to hold up their saris through this scatological drama without soiling them – that this, the most scarf and shawl driven society, was able to cope without too much mess. That is why they invented yoga, I guess. It is why all their goddesses have multiple arms.