Jackals mark their territories by defecating on prominent sites like boulders. Civets do it on the run, especially along fallen logs. Rhinos have community latrines; several of them visit the same spot to deposit their dung. Gharials like to evacuate in water.
Hundreds of millions of Indians, like jackals, flamboyantly leave unsightly piles out in the open; some park their vehicles and do it on the roadside, not unlike civets; others, like rhinos, prefer latrines. But disastrously, millions more turn freshwater bodies such as lakes, springs, rivers, and canals into toilets.
Never has the want of a toilet terrorized me as much as on a trip I made through a rural district in Maharashtra in early 2005. Over three days, I talked to families of victims who had been attacked by leopards. I heard stories of terror, disabilities, and bereavement.
During the course of the day, tall crops such as sugarcane, banana, and corn provided ample cover to relieve oneself, just as some of the victims had when the shadow of death fell on them. I ducked behind these plants nervously; it took just a leaf moving in a whisper of wind or a sudden distant sound to make me jump. When I sought the privacy of one dark banana plantation, the nearby temple loudspeaker was so loud that had I screamed in distress, no one would have heard. If I was so tense in broad daylight, when hardly any leopards were around, it must have been utter terror for villagers when the cats were out prowling in the dark.
Several villages in this sugar bowl of Maharashtra appeared prosperous. Yet, even the largest houses didn’t have toilets. That’s no surprise. Even in my village in Tamil Nadu, the richest landowner who owns a tractor, SUV, harvester, and about 30 acres of irrigated land has no toilet in his house. Every morning, his family lines up along our shared boundary and defecates in the open. In leopard-land, a few households that had lost a family member to the big cats had completely renovated their houses with the compensation money they received from the government. But no toilets were added.
If lack of indoor plumbing put people in danger, you’d think they would change their behaviour. But the taboo of human waste in the house runs so deep that even the threat to human life wasn’t enough incentive to build a toilet. If en suite loos were forbidden, why not make outhouses? I lacked the language and skill to ask these delicate questions.
On the last day, I finally found a row of toilets in one village. But there was no water to flush, and a radius of 50 metres around the loos was a disgusting open latrine. A five-year-old girl had been killed a few feet away. While the father was narrating the horrific sequence of events, I was trying not only to ignore the awful stench but unobtrusively ward off the clouds of flies.
Returning to base every evening, closing the toilet door, and being able to relax felt like a guilty to-die-for luxury.
Since I’m programmed to go to a pre-assigned area, I’m like a rhino I guess. But I’m also more like a cat that fastidiously buries its poop. Urbanized rhino-cats like me are quick to feel superior to rural India’s jackal ways. We wonder what it would take to convert the masses to our way of doing things. Subsidies? Exhortations by movie stars? Cheap toilets?
Where does our own superior rhino-cat poop end up? Urban sanitation systems are so poorly equipped that untreated septic sludge is dumped into rivers. The fecal content in some rivers is so high, they are unfit even for bathing. We worship these waterways as goddesses and desecrate them just the same. Are we a nation of chimeras? Do bears poop in the woods?
