The paan puzzle

Many addicts may chew outdoors, but when it comes to spitting, they prefer indoors.

Paan -chewers are people of few words. When the mouth is full of paan, the words don’t come easily; it’s either chew or speak. Unlike chewed gum which can be discreetly discarded, chewed paan, when expelled, marks territory forever. Perverse paan -chewers may chew outdoors, but when it comes to spitting, they prefer indoors. In a homing instinct, they will locate a tall building, avoid the lift, huff up the staircase and squirt their mouthful in a stairway landing, precisely in the corner. Freshly white-washed walls are open invitations for them to splatter them red.

One jugaad solution to this problem has been to install glazed tiles with pictures of deities. This is not foolproof, and only shifts the spitting a few metres from the nearest picture. We sneer at pathetic signboards saying, “Please do not spit here.” We get angry with any sentence that contains a “do not”, and so will do just the opposite, and teach these instruction-givers a lesson. If a smart signboard said “spit here”, with a sand bucket placed below, we hold back our mouthful. “Why should I spit here?” we might snort, chewing paan spitefully, and spit somewhere else close by, rebels that we are.

Indians have always been spitting at will, and it is basically a cultural thing. If you have to spit, you spit anywhere, anytime; it is not a big deal. When someone talks to you with a mouthful of

paan , the suspense kills you. Has the critical mass reached inside his mouth? When is he going to spit, and where? Is it time to jump out of his way? And so on. This enlivens the conversation.

For years, I had never been able to catch anyone in the act of spitting of

paan in the stairways.  Then one day, I saw it happen.  It was a person sweeping the stairs in the morning in an office building I was visiting. She came over with cheeks bulging with paan , and squirted the juice into the corner of the stairs casually, before I could react and stop her.  I choked back my anger, counted slowly up to 10, and then asked her why she couldn’t spit outside the building. She controlled her anger, and looked at me like I was a visitor from Mars. She spat out the remaining juice in her mouth in that corner again, and said it was difficult to walk out of the building every two minutes, just for spitting.  Mystery solved.

She had a point, I thought.  What have we done for the welfare of people who come to clean the common areas? Her only sustenance and motivation is the paan ; and where is she supposed to spit it out, as she works stair by stair on the third or fourth floor levels? Can we provide spittoons at all stairway landings?

In the old days, in public buildings, there were fire buckets, filled with sand. They were there for fire safety, but only a professional weightlifter might be able to lift a bucketful of sand and fling it far enough into a fire without tipping over and going along with it. So, everybody used the buckets as spittoons and ash trays — an Indian adjustment. That bucket focused the spitting effort into one place. With the gradual disappearance of fire buckets, the world is their spittoon.

Apart from the sweeper, there are many others whose motivation to spit in the stairways has not been analysed, since they evade discovery. These spit-and-run types need to come forward, or even anonymously email their point of view, and explain why they do it, why indoors, why on walls, and what can be done to halt their routine. Those who suggest a workable remedy (except asking for a dedicated wall on each floor for spitting on) may be rewarded suitably — a step towards Swachh Bharat.

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