As India tries to breathe, as her people — my people — alternate between different forms of grief, as her far-flung children attempt to assuage guilt with donations that cannot refill even half an oxygen cylinder, as I move between rage and helplessness and love and nostalgia and depersonalization, I find myself — instead of crying or screaming or expressing my grief in more recognizable ways — thinking about toilets.
I think about the toilet in my childhood bedroom, with its shiny tiles, blue commode, and accompanying bidet unit. Handheld bum shower attachments weren’t available then and these bidets were hollowed seats, of sorts — contraptions that you sat on while using three taps to control the pressure and temperature of the water that would then spray upward from the bowl to cleanse your behind. They were magical things, these bidets. Symbols of excessive comfort and privilege in a country where, even today, plumbing cannot always be guaranteed. As I look at images of cities studded with the lights of funeral pyres and read one more plea for oxygen on my Twitter feed, I think about the hole in the wall in my childhood bathroom — a dark space that looked like a storage area, which I never-ever looked into for fear of its being a breeding ground for the cockroaches that would inevitably appear as I tried to wash away the podis and the ennas that my mother religiously slathered on my hair and body to improve their lustre. An attic-type cobweb-y crawl space that had a ventilator fan which would whirr loudly as I scrutinized, every night, the number of black spots near its edges: marks that I would count exactly three times, while I turned the light on and off three times, before opening and closing the door three times, and checking the latch three times, before sometimes repeating the ritual two more times because I couldn’t remember if I had counted whatever it is I needed to count the first time.
Sitting in the comfort of my New Mexican home, feeling what I can only describe as survivor’s guilt, wishing I was home while being grateful that I’m not — I think about another toilet. The toilet that was in the room that was once my uncle’s, which had brown tiles and a whiteish-creamish bidet that I would sit on while my body shook and trembled as I read specific scenes from one of my mother’s many Mills & Boon novels. Novels that spoke of tumescent hills on women’s chests and piercing hardnesses that emerged from men to plunge into moist, feminine warmths. Novels with descriptions of the kinds of acts that, when we watched TV, Mom and Dad always changed the channel for. Novels with the kinds of descriptions that, when experienced with water pressure on parts of my body that I am still too shy to name in my writing — because God forbid amma reads this and once again has cause to ask what kind of daughter she has raised — made my body shake and moans escape. I had no word for these feelings because no one had told me in my convent school that such feelings were nameable. Inexplicable feelings that I was later taught begin with the word “o” — taught by the 14-year-old son of my father’s US-return-classmate, a son who could not believe that this seemingly “modern” Indian girl who spoke perfect English and watched Hollywood movies did not know the word for pleasuring oneself.
Just when I think I’ve thought about toilets enough, I remember the toilets on Indian trains and the two-day-long train rides I used to take as a child from Coimbatore to Delhi, during which I would refuse to go “Number 2” — “It’s too dirty, ma,” I would say, eventually agreeing to do “Number 1.” The journeys always ended, 48 hours later, at the doctor’s office in Lajpat Nagar, with an enema. I had stuck to my word. No “Number 2,” only “Number 1.” However much I traveled in India, and I have been to her various edges over the years, I never did get/have gotten used to those train toilets — the ever present, equally pungent “Indian” and “Western” style options that were pretty much the same whether one travelled in Second Class or First Class or Second AC or First AC. Well, same except for the rodents. The mice in First AC were small, cute, white mice rather than large, dirty, grey rats.
In the midst of a kind of grief that I am only beginning to identify, let alone understand — I am, for some reason, visualizing my life through toilets. Like the makeshift toilets that I had to use, with diarrhea, on a 32-hour bus ride from Ahmedabad to Pune. And the toilet, in Paud, that I shared with an albino frog that remained plastered to its inside walls no matter what the bowl contained or drained. And the toilet in the Taj hotel in Bangalore, which was almost spa-like with its incredible water pressure and pearly white towels. And the toilet somewhere close to Jammu that had worms oozing out of used condoms in an open trash can.
As India tries to breathe, as I weep for family that I will never see again, as I mourn for strangers that I will never have the chance to meet, I can’t stop thinking about toilets.
And I have to ask: why the fuck am I thinking about toilets?
Maybe they are an allegory? Some kind of representation of the sheer range of experiences that Indians are experiencing in a moment of collective trauma. Some kind of commonality amongst a diversity of bodily and societal experiences. Like the Indian who was born with a particular set of biological markers that make the effects of the virus serious rather than fatal. Versus the Indian who was born within a particular set of socioeconomic conditions that make a private room in a private hospital a likelihood rather than an impossibility. Versus the Indian who will believe, no matter the evidence, that religion will heal him in ways that science cannot explain. Versus the Indian-by-passport-only who will tell you that she is now existing with/in two occupations: one that is enacted by the state and the other that is spread by disease. Versus the Indian who will critique and escape consequence. Versus the Indian whose cry for help will land her in a prison on charges of treason.
Is that why I’m thinking about toilets?
Or maybe…maybe it’s because, in the grand narratives of destruction and mourning and loss and fatigue, it’s the banalities that I want to know more about. Like how the 67-year-old aunty who is waiting in line to use the toilet at the general ward at the private hospital maneuvers an oxygen cylinder while also trying to hold on to her makeup bag and her medicine bag and her wallet and her diaphanous night gown. Like how the 40-year-old mom has to tell her son that she needs to use a toilet with running water because of the demands of her uterus — demands that she has been conditioned, all her life, to never discuss with a man. Like how the 16-year-old choti has to figure out how to stand her octogenarian dada up from off the floor where he has collapsed midstream, in a pool of his own urine, all while trying to get her head around the fact she is seeing a penis for the first time.
Does that seem like a reasonable defense of this absurd expression of my grief?
Or maybe I’m overthinking this and it’s a much simpler explanation.
Maybe, as the gravity of India’s losses hit closer to home each day, I am thinking about toilets as a defense mechanism.
A way to reminisce without cracking.
A way to mourn without breaking.
A way to grieve without shattering.
Maybe somewhere, somehow, thinking about toilets is simply my brain’s way of ensuring that my heart can cope.
Beat.
Survive.
