A month ago, when the national lockdown was imposed across the country, I called my house help to check if she and her family were safe and needed anything. But her absolute delight at me having called out of concern, I discovered, had a different dimension—she thought I could not do my housework by myself and was expressing my desire to have her back.
“All the memsahibs who had never done a spot of housework in their lives and used to stretch themselves out before their television sets while ordering us about, now are holding brooms and mops in their hands and spending half the day in the kitchen cooking their own meals,” she laughed merrily.
A month later she had less cause for crowing at the situation of her multiple employers in high rises. This time she called to express fright and worry and I could see she was desperate to resume work. But not because she had run out of money. Her concern and fears were more primal. At the end of a long chat, they came pouring out.
“We have to use public toilets. There is no way we can maintain cleanliness or safe distancing there.”
While working in the high rises, this maid would either use the watchmens’ toilets in the buildings, which were far cleaner than the public ones in her area, or she might even get lucky and some or the other employer would be generous enough to allow her to use theirs. So she wanted to move
in with one of those employers for the period of the threat. But the situation now is such that all building societies have banned domestic help, are disposing of their own garbage and cleaning not just homes but even their toilets themselves—more than just the cooking, sweeping and swabbing they had to do in the early days of the lockdown. No one was willing to take her up on her offer to help them in their household chores, in return for the use of a private toilet.
I always knew that the claims of past governments on having built a toilet for every home in India were extremely hollow. Even after Bombay was declared open defecation free (ODF), I could see even children and women lined up along railway tracks, mornings and evenings, defecating in the open. The coronavirus pandemic has busted all those claims of cities becoming ODF and brought into sharp focus the obfuscation of facts and statistics—like Maharashtra Navnirman Sena president Raj Thackeray had once pointed out, the claim of building eight lakh toilets per week was simply unsustainable because, broken down, that meant one toilet was built in seven seconds. “That means faster than you can even go to the toilet!” he had said rather graphically.
Now in crowded slums like Dharavi, Asia’s largest shanty town, this problem becomes exacerbated. If Bombay had been really ODF, as the previous government had claimed, why are there so few toilets in the slum? The government is now thinking of providing the shanties with portable toilets. But that is a concept good only for high-end users during conferences and public meetings or exhibitions and fairs on open grounds. Who will clean those toilets? Where would the plumbing go?
Moreover, having visited Dharavi frequently for reportage on various issues, I can say that more than defecation, it is spitting that is a major issue. Users in these areas chew tobacco and spit into and around the toilets all the time because they don’t have wash basins at home, they live cheek-by-jowl and so cannot spit into their neighbours’ homes; many homes are perched on gutters that flow nearby, so public toilets are the best place to spit out their tobacco. As a colleague with equal experience of reporting from slums told me, “Did you ever notice the public toilets smell less of urine and more of tobacco?”
This is an issue that has never been addressed by any government. Despite a ban on tobacco in many states, it is freely available under the counter. There are no public spittoons in slums and, as we have seen before, imposing of fines has not helped. At the moment, spitting in the open is more of a health hazard to citizens than the use of public toilets and that is why suddenly the disease has shifted from affecting the wealthier travellers to infecting slum dwellers in larger numbers.
There is a culture of unhygienic living among many sections of society that needs addressing and will take a long time reversing. And this unhygienic living is not unique to the poor slum dwellers or limited to any caste or religion. I was startled to discover my one-time neighbours, an upper caste South Indian family, had no garbage bin at home—they thought that was a sign of great cleanliness. They would simply throw the discarded waste from their plates out of the kitchen window and into the neighbour’s courtyard—they had to leave the area after many quarrels and protests.
Then there was a middle class family who used the same bucket for washing utensils, clothes, mopping the floor and bathing among five members in the family. It is no wonder one or the other was constantly visiting the doctor even before the coronavirus. As for the slum dwellers, I know of those rehabilitated in pucca buildings with indoor toilets who still would want to defecate in the open following a lifetime habit, saying they cannot clear their bowels without the smell of the sea—or tobacco—all around them.There are critics who have said a lot more Indians might die of hunger than of the virus. But a lot more Indians are now chewing tobacco to kill that hunger.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
(sujata.anandan@gmail.com)