Human refuse is on my mind, along with garbage, for a few months now. Blame it on the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or the film Toilet (which I watched with great interest and appreciation). It was a bus trip to Jaipur that really brought this to the forefront. I alighted on the main bus stop in the city and decided to walk to my hotel, which was just 200 metres away, after escaping from a flock of autowallahs who descended on me and other weary passengers as soon as we stepped off the bus. As there wasn’t a pavement in sight I made my way along the side of the main road, weaving around sundry obstacles that clutter all Indian roads, trying to keep as close to the wall as possible to avoid the oncoming traffic, some of which was weaving in mirror image to me.
I turned the corner on the main crossing and almost walked into a slimy, slippery wall of men urinating on the self-same wall I was using as a shield. Now, you must understand that I was in an unfamiliar city, walking a road I had never walked before. I would have never (well, almost never!) done such a thing in Delhi, where I am familiar with every stinking niche along the paths around my home or office that I need to avoid, if I am stupid enough to be walking. I gaped at the men in shock (again something I would never do back home!). They just gazed back at me unabashedly which carrying on with their business in plain sight, at what seemed to be a really busy crossroad. Hurriedly changing course, I glanced around to see the reaction of the other people milling around, to what seemed to me to be a blatant, almost exhibitionist display. Women, with covered heads and lowered eyes, hurried past, while cars and bikes drove by, their occupants with unseeing eyes.
I am not sure what I was expecting to see. This is pretty much normal all around the country and certainly in Delhi where I live. Even while driving on expressways and highways, parked vehicles with men doing their thing alongside are a fairly common sight. Recently while driving to work, I saw one such specimen watering the roadside greens, not far from where the Vice-President lives.
Arenas of action
Anyplace, wherever the urge strikes, is the arena of action. This is also one area in which you don’t see any class consciousness or caste hierarchy. The gender disparity though is obvious: not only can women not squat on a busy thoroughfare, they also need to be the ones covering up and redirecting their gaze.
In Jaipur, on my wanderings, the situation seemed acute, the proliferation of openly urinating men, and women with covered heads and averted eyes, alarming. So the two days I spent there did nothing to get my mind off crap, one type or another. Alongside, I mused over the governments’ efforts: I remember Narendra Modi talking about sanitation and cleanliness in his earliest speeches and Mann ki Baat broadcasts after he became Prime Minister. Much has changed since then, and from what one sees, for the worse.
Things really came to a head when the mound of garbage collapsed in a Delhi landfill recently, killing people and causing garbage-loaded trucks to drive around trying to dump their odiferous contents on the unsuspecting, in various parts of the city. On the surface there doesn’t seem to be a caste system here either: the first alternative site may have been in crowded East Delhi, but the second, a park in a posh South Delhi colony, highlights both the desperation and the lack of preparedness of the authorities. While competing authorities slug it out and garbage-loaded trucks lurk around the city’s edges, the mounds around our colonies get higher. Yet, we do nothing.
Garbage segregation is unknown. . In Delhi, residents’ welfare associations and housing societies continue to run unsegregated garbage disposal services, that essentially collect plastic bags of unsegregated garbage in localities and dump them in the nearest designated dustbins or dumpsters. That too, only if you live in a regulated, well-off area. Others just use street corners or empty plots. Adding to the crap already flowing across our pavements, creating smelly puddles of pee and more. One more Indian reality to skirt around and glaze over in our daily lives.
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