Toilets on trains and airplanes are fascinating. The loos on Indian trains could by themselves inspire architectural and sociological books. The classic old-style WCs are the ones where the commode and ‘Turkish’ latrine both have the open pipe going straight down, where you can see the tracks flashing by below, receiving your bodily matter as you eject it. With these loos you feel connected to the ground, to the environment around you. If the train is air-conditioned, that hole in the floor provides you with a sensory reminder of where you actually are. It sends up gusts of hot summer air to counter the cooling inside the carriage or freezing air during winters, when the compartment is heated.
The newer toilets on the trains try to reproduce the foreign systems, complete with buttons and foot pedals triggering various denominations of H20. When these stop working life gets interesting in a way it didn’t with the old, open holes and steel, press-down taps. The different qualities of toilet paper and hand tissue on different trains (in the upper-end classes) also raise questions of culture and kickbacks — was the paper cheap on one Duronto and far more absorbent on another Rajdhani because of cost-cutting, corruption, some differential in the ordering department, and/or the supplier’s perception of how toilet paper and hand tissues should behave?
Toilets in trains versus airplanes
Both train and airplane loos provide a kind of metre of the journey. At the start of the trip they are spick and span; as the journey progresses they become dirtier, wetter, messier; and by the end of the ride they are sometimes impossible to use. However, in the more expensive classes of Indian trains this is changing somewhat: now you have cleaners on constant standby to keep the cubicles clean.
The fact is, the desi behavioural DNA tends to carry a disgust of and repulsion towards normal bodily fluids, even if they belong to us. Ironically, it is this ‘ suug’ that allows us to think that it’s somehow okay to leave public bathrooms dirty for the people who follow. Here, our relationship to water and our ablutionary traditions also come into play. People use water liberally, sometimes even bathing or having an extreme wash in a toilet that is not designed for a bath.
Airplane toilets are the antithesis of the train ones. If the train loos can be a kind of peek into the non-train world outside, airliner toilets are an inversion, cocoons within a cocoon, an inner womb in a larger womb, with a windowless, double sealing off from the outside.
Just as you are discouraged from using the toilet when the train is at a railway station, the lavatories on aircraft are also usually out of bounds while the plane is on the ground. In this regard, being on an Indian-run airline is fundamentally different from being on a foreign, non-brown, non-developing country airline. As you board, there is a silent bladder-bowel susurration that you can almost feel. As soon as the plane reaches cruising height and the seat belt sign goes off, a whole host of older Indians will stagger out of their seats and queue near the toilets. Things have changed recently, but in the not-too-distant-past, desi passengers on desi airlines would be more careless in their use of the facilities, more uncaring about the mess they left behind than they would when surrounded by foreigners on a videshi airline. I may have imagined it but I’ve always felt that desis’ bathroom manners improve tremendously when we feel we are under the gaze of the ( gora ) other. On an Indian carrier, however, it’s all apney ghar ki hi baat, or, actually, it’s the opposite — it’s not like this is my own bathroom so I can fully mistreat it. Again, the loos are absolutely clean at the start of the flight. Then, one by one, the brothers and sisters start to visit and after a while you have to negotiate their toilet installations: the wet floor (recreating that second night on the Nagpur Mail), the toilet that has not been flushed, the wet strings of paper with which some kid has festooned the washbasin and mirror, the ooze from the soap bottle, and other grossnesses that are best left offstage.
A changing mindset?
Perhaps this too is changing. Perhaps our younger Indian cabin crew are unemotional about keeping the loos clean as any Singaporean or German. Perhaps, we as a people are developing some collective civic sense, some mass inkling that just as you don’t want to walk into a dirty WC, you should not force the person following you to feel unfortunate. Perhaps there is a subconscious appreciation that the travelling toilet is not only useful for bodily functions but also a place where one can meditate, a brief sanctuary from the pressures of travel, a rabbit hole that helps the mind temporarily escape from the confines of whichever hurtling metal tube you happen to find yourself in, and that this place needs to be clean.
