What do you do when you open the gate one morning to find a big plastic bag chock-full of whisky bottles - empty ones, in case those among you who guzzle the stuff believe it is the answer to a tippler’s prayer - leaning restfully against your wall? It was especially ironic, for my husband drinks only water with a daily cup of coffee thrown in as a morning pick-me-up.
Ever since the residents of this ‘clean’ city were asked to take care of their own garbage, they have come up with their own methods to get rid of it. We have first world ability to produce garbage and third world ability to dispose of it. Once the Vilappilsala crisis reached an impasse, most residents began to resort to expedient means to solve the problem; burning, for one. A permanently misty sky might appear romantic, but not when it is caused by the burning of plastic and other waste. Choking drains with garbage is another. Don’t be misled by respectable looks; I once spied a well dressed lady look furtively about, then lift a loose slab of the pavement and stuff two bags of garbage in.
The haves believe in gifting away the wealth of garbage they generate as surprise packages to the have-nots as well as to other haves; there’s no discrimination here. No doubt the underlying philosophy is, ‘keep your house and compound clean, throw the garbage somewhere else.’ If you can shove garbage into your neighbour’s garden, shove, if you can fling bags of garbage out of the car, fling, if you can throw them carelessly about like a generous king scattering bags of gold to his people, throw, and if you can sneakily place them against the walls of unsuspecting people who have done you no harm and who don’t even know you exist, place them so.
A lone bag always attracts companions, and that worried me. No one likes to see a solitary bag of garbage anywhere. People immediately feel obliged to dispel its loneliness by placing another beside it and in no time a mini dump is created. Fixing a banner that reads, ‘Do not throw waste here’, is asking for garbage. Who respects injunctions these days? It quickly attracts the attention of those who creep out of the woodwork looking for possible places to relocate their waste. They hurl the trash with a ‘There goes!’ and laugh all the way to their empty waste bins at home.
The bag of empty bottles blighted my existence and I turned to my husband for succour. ‘Ignore it,’ was his helpful suggestion, ‘turn a blind eye to it, in other words, forget it’. He is a firm believer in the dictum that if you ignore a problem long enough, it will go away. But the bag didn't. So he comfortingly said the sweepers will do the job. But our road has a peculiar set-up. The Corporation has employed one team of sweepers for the right side and another for the left and never do the twain meet or co-operate in the cleaning process. The sweepers in charge of my side of the road seemed to have taken an indefinite holiday and the sweeper on the opposite side studiously ignored my desperate dumb charades that she remove the bag.
I began to watch out for people who might take the bag away. A man walking unsteadily with a sack on his back seemed an ideal candidate. ‘Psst, there are some bottles of whiskey there,’ I said, forgetting to add ‘empty’. He wobbled eagerly to examine the bag, then turned angrily to shower me with slurred abuse; too late I realised it wasn't the sack that was making him totter and bolted for the safety of my house.
A man buying old newspapers was the next. He took one look and shook his head. Why, what’s stopping you? I asked. ‘No stoppers on the bottles,’ he said. Well, really, how choosy can you get? Another said he might have obliged had they been made of plastic. Strange; I’d always thought plastic was the material non grata. But clearly plastic was more in demand, for three days back I was elated to discover the bag missing. Hurray! I exulted. Too soon, for a closer look revealed that someone had taken the plastic bag and left the bottles behind. Now they lie in a tidy heap near the wall. Any takers?
(khyrubutter@yahoo.com)
A fortnightly column by the city-based writer, academician and author of the Butterfingers series
