The Indian toilet: A pagan ritual for cleansing the soul

(This piece was written after a particularly traumatic experience in an Indian toilet on a train between Delhi and Jaipur that was running several hours late but moving swiftly and ‘mud-mustly’ swinging from side to side. The toilet was munking, the water flow was down to a trickle, and yours truly had had enough. The following should be read in that frame of mind – a pissed off shade of grey It was also written by someone now used routinely to sit on western style toilets while contributing to Mother Nature rather than squat; one could debate the pros and cons of either position indefinitely.) Indian toilets are torture chambers. One has to squat on two pieces of concrete the size of your feet on either side of the commode which looks like a man’s genital with the penis pointing forwards and the testicles at the back, sat on its base rather than hanging down. If you spread your toes a little, you run the risk of dislocating your metatarsals in your feet. You need to sit absolutely still and tight – the most your feet can move is to curl up your toes at the prospect that lies ahead. Once the contents of the bowels have been unloaded of their own accord for the thighs in the squat position press mercilessly on the innards, get ready for the toes to curl up even more. The stench of expelled turd assaults you. And if your aim is unlike that of a sharpshooter, i.e. you cannot align your posterior orifice with the orifice of the commode – all of a radius of 2-3 inches (around 20 square inches in all), the assault to the nose is even worse - the stench of expelled turd is bad, especially if one has been feasting on ‘lehsun ka chutney’ the night before. God help you if you’re of the variety that suffers with constipation. Your time for torture is exponentially increased. It might be safer to think that God won’t help you for if he wanted to do so, he wouldn’t have given you constipation. As you are balancing yourself either on your toes if you wish to give the heels some rest, or the heels if the toes are curling up (again), you cannot prop yourself in that position for long without tipping forward and shitting on yourself, or toppling backwards and peeing on yourself out of the sheer shock of it. Once the senses have been armageddoned, your legs aching and about to give way under you, the innards squelched and bowels revealed on the floor of the commode (not if you’re an Avinav Bindra with your backside), the arms come into play. All this while they had been clasping the knees – real white knuckled stuff if a train is hurtling along on poorly aligned tracks and unoiled wheels, let me tell you. For the uninitiated and of weaker mettle, the nails and tips of finger would also have been chewed by now from sheer panic of collapsing into the faecal waste and being devoured by the hole. But now the arms must release the knees and reach around the back. Convention dictates that one leads with the left hand, unless you’ve already lost it, in which case use your right but don’t tell the obsessional cleaners of the ‘shauch’ variety. The left hand approaches the rear aperture with apprehension and a fair degree of stealth. The right does likewise, in a dyadic dance, reaching around half a litre of a jugful of water. The pagan ritual is now entering the climactic stage. This is a terribly precarious position – not only are you perched on the two bricks the size of your feet with your toes curled up, narrowing the contact of the entire body to the ground to a few square inches, your eyes are now half-closed in utmost meditative concentration, nose twitching spasmodically at the stench emanating from between your cramped feet, eyes smarting from pain, ears ringing as all your blood has rushed to the head due the abdominal crunch, and the arms stretched behind like a free-falling skier balancing himself without the picks. The end looms near. The last chapter of the pagan rite is upon us now. This one is called ‘water-splashing’ and bears a close resemblance to its American counterpart, ‘water-boarding’, used so splendidly in counter-espionage tactics at the strategically placed Guantanamo Bay in US. The key differences lie in the position and purpose of the bodily orifices that are subjected to water therapy and the manner in which therapeutic water is delivered. Clearly the Indian tactic targets the lower end and uses water judiciously, responsibly, and in a manner consistent with a greener world – absolutely no wastage, the government does not allow it in most places by limiting water supply to a trickle a couple of times a day only. How wasteful our American democratic cousins are; dipping their subjects into water upto their noses for longish periods – no concern for the environment whatsoever. A mugful, if that, is splashed and the flow manoeuvred adroitly by the left hand on the backside is the grand finale of torture. The hand is subjected to the goo and wipes the backside clean. The bugs, smell and small specs of microscopic waste must reside within the safety of the fingertips and the nail-beds, lying in wait for use on unsuspecting souls (including yourself) entering the body from the other end and thereby completing a cycle of birth, death and rebirth – reincarnation in action. What spiritual nirvana for the bacteria and such-lie. When the last palpable vestige of faeces has exited the backside (if not the entire body), prepare for a dizzy spell. As you stand up, blood rushes away from head where it had been pooling and into the legs which experience pins and needles, the arms stretch above the head in a sun salutation to the spiritual elders for a pagan rite successfully completed without significant loss of life and limb, and the individual atma-ic spirit soars in gleeful abandon. Many forget to do the hand ablutions afterwards and thus perpetuate the cycle of reincarnation of one’s inner delights. Ahm brahmasmi!! You indeed are Sir. You’ve come back from the land of the dead and dying.