Cleanliness, whether moral or environmental, can be achieved by society only if it becomes the goal of every individual. There. Now you don’t need to plough through the rest of my column because I’ve dug up the nub of my argument and handed it to you on a platter — or should I say on the blade of a spade? You don’t need to read what I have to say about cultural notions of cleanliness. You don’t need to read about the gold you throw away after a festival or my fruitless search for a tongue-cleaner in an alien land. Okay, maybe that last one tickled your curiosity — fess up, now.
A tongue-cleaner was a long, narrow, thin strip of plastic with which one used to, in the distant past, scrape one’s tongue after cleaning one’s teeth. Since they broke easily, the frugal thing to do was to buy the durable U-shaped stainless steel model. Your mouth wasn’t considered clean until the surface of your tongue had been scraped raw and pink by this implement. A quarter of a century ago I had just landed in eastern USA when my tongue-cleaner — a steel one no less — snapped in two. I didn’t think I could survive six months without it so I started asking all and sundry about shops that might stock the item. ‘Tongue-cleaner’ left everyone utterly confounded. I presented my problem to an Indian friend who lived on the West Coast, but instead of commiserating with me he ribbed me mercilessly and suggested that I use a toothbrush to clean my tongue like everyone else.
It is through displacement that we become most keenly aware of our inheritance. What I had inherited, in this case, was a set of prejudices about ‘dirty foreigners’: they don’t take a bath daily, they drink their morning coffee without brushing their teeth, they don’t wash their bottoms after doing Number Two, they wallow in dirt from their own bodies by sitting in the bathtub, and so on. What I had also inherited were notions of cleanliness that are bound up with rituals rather than based on science, fixations about purity and pollution that are centred on our bodies and our homes. Clean the ‘inside’: to hell with the ‘outside’. Who’ll clean the outside? Oh, somebody will. It’s not our job. This is what we have grown up with — a Somebody to clean up after us, a Somebody to quite literally cart away the shit we leave behind.
How majestically they pose for photographs, those bigwigs symbolically holding long-handled brooms that resemble garden rakes and are nothing like the stubby broomsticks that low-caste Somebodys are forced to stoop over during their daylong, backbreaking labour. Both public filth and those who clean it are invisible to us. This blind spot is part of our DNA, and unless we get rid of it, neither two lakh crore rupees nor twenty times that would suffice for cleaning India. I was emerging from our local organic store when a woman came out of the shop next door armed with two large plastic bags of garbage. She dumped them nonchalantly into the wide storm-water drain. I was walking down a neighbourhood street when a shower of confetti fluttered onto the pavement. A woman had tipped a bucket-load of shredded paper, heave-ho, right over a first floor balcony railing. The moment we’ve finished cleaning the inside, never mind what time of day or night it is, we instantly fling the polluting refuse outside. This is why you will see someone strolling down the road just after the garbage lorry has picked up the rubbish, to toss a bulging bag at the street corner.
Street corners, transformer ‘cages’, the pillars of Namma Metro — many such hotspots show up on the garbage radar. There are no dustbins because the civic authorities removed them in 2000, remember? They launched an over-ambitious door-to-door waste collection system but the public, instead of handing over their garbage, continued to litter the spaces where ring-shaped concrete dustbins once stood. In my neighbourhood, the ghost of one such bin refuses to be busted. Its spectral dimensions cover a stretch of pavement and expand on festival days to half the width of the road alongside it. Festival garbage is pure gold, teeming with leaves, rotting vegetables and other biodegradable matter, which makes my mouth water, not because I want to chomp on it like a cow but because the possibilities are so tempting. Just imagine them for a second. In my Clean Bengaluru fantasy, every city-zen not only segregates at source but recycles at source. Plastic, glass and paper are collected by the BBMP. We make compost out of wet waste in our domestic recycling units (the three-tier terracotta khamba). We dispatch this organic fertiliser to farmers in exchange for organic vegetables. And the farmers, who’ve been cursing us for creating poisonous mountains next to their fields, now wait to receive our rich cargo. Why stop there? Waste shall be converted to electricity, feed the power grid...
“Dream on, Dona Quixote de La Huchcha,” I tell myself sharply. To dislodge entrenched habits, to be responsible for public hygiene and accountable for the trash we create, we need to take radical measures. I suggest tweaking our DNA.
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