All Over Toilet Paper

By Achal Mehra

This Indian’s hierarchy in the human order is measured by his particular talent at fondling his buttocks after relieving himself.

 

 

Finally, he just blurted it out. Straight out. "I hear these people use paper in the toilet, not water like we do after pakhane," he intoned in deep earnest in shudh Hindi.

The occasion for his astute insight was a pleasant stroll my wife, who is Caucasian, and I were taking in Lucknow’s famous Aminabad shopping market. The stocky man had been stuck to me like a leech for the past 15 minutes, curious about my background — and, more obliquely, of my relationship with the "woman." Nothing I said could quite shake him off. So here I was, Plato to the greatest of all philosophical dilemmas troubling his Socratic soul.

I had only haltingly begun my response, "Kya bakwas karte hein aap..." when he piped in, his stare fixated on the offending buttocks, "It is strange to us, but then I have seen in the zoo that animals wipe themselves on the grass as well. If they can do that, this must also be ok."

His distress would appear incongruous in a country that must boast among the filthiest public toilets in the world and a public culture that is inhumane toward its sanitary workers. As any visiting NRI or foreign traveller could vouch, answering the call of nature outside the home is one of the most unpleasant chores one can undertake in India. In many parts of the country, whole city blocks are public latrines, without drains and sewage systems. One did not have to go a block in Aminabad itself to be assaulted by the stench of public toilets. Eva Newman’s Going Abroad: The Bathroom Survival Guide recounts some of its most dreadful and bizarre encounters in Indian bathrooms.

But no matter. No such reality check would deter my swaggering, potbellied,15-minute acquaintance from exuding his superiority at his toilet deportment over his Western nemesis. Curiously, social historians tend to think of the toilet as the ultimate democratizer. Julie L. Horan observes in The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, "Reviewing toilets throughout history has an equalizing effect on social hierarchies. After all, everyone must pull his pants down or lift her skirt to relieve themselves. Only the facilities differ."

Horan was thinking of King Henry VIII’s black velvet close-stool studded with 2,000 gold nails. But for this toilet-phile, descendant of the grand Indus Valley civilization, which, with Mesopotamia, boasted the world’s first cesspits and sewer system, his hierarchy in the human order was measured by his particular talent at fondling his buttocks after relieving himself. It did not occur to him that in vast parts of the world it could seem bizarre that Indians touch their discharge in the process of cleaning themselves. Perhaps in recognition of this oddity, Hinduism prescribes a strict regimen, right from how one holds his member to the use, or lack thereof, of the offending left hand in public protocol. Indeed, "advanced" civilizations with a penchant for the use of water after relief, such as Japan, have invented the bidet, in which a toilet is equipped with a nozzle that discharges water scientifically positioned to affect proper cleaning of the appropriate body parts, followed by a warm breeze for drying out.

If all this fascination with bodily relief is beginning to sound morbid to readers, let me stop here. The point is that every culture has characteristics that may seem, quaint, even odd to outsiders. This month’s Little INDIA touches upon the culture shock many Indian immigrants experience on their first arrival in the United States. While our reaction to these cultural variations often in the inanest of things may range from the hilarious to the shocking, one should be careful not to formulate judgments on the society and its people simply because they do some things differently. Lest we be like that toilet-phile in Aminabad who sings odes to his toilet etiquette while soiling his hands daily in his own excrement.