Toilets (2) - and Spitting

There is a political joke here, which goes like this...
Q. What's the difference between American democracy and Indian democracy?
A. In America, you can kiss in public, but not pee in public. In India you can't kiss in public - but you can pee in public!

Like a lot of seemingly feeble witticisms, in fact that joke has a lot of truth to it. (If you don’t believe me about India and kissing, just put the phrase "richard gere and shilpa shetty" into Google. Go on, do it now).

Open Urination, unlike "open defecation" which I mentioned in my last blog, gets very little attention in conversations at parties I attend, yet I actually think it is a subject more demanding of attention.

In Mumbai, men think very little of finding a convenient stretch of wall and relieving themselves - and at almost any time of day and in open view.
(Men in Britain tend to wait until the late hours of Saturday, when they are staggering back home from the pub, before doing anything like that…). The stink that accompanies the most favoured stretches of wall in Mumbai is pretty rank; the cloud of flies that one has to navigate is also truly unpleasant.

Yet, here again, I do have an ounce of sympathy with men. (I have never seen a woman do this incidentally).
Whilst public toilets appear to be more frequent than I thought they would be in this hard-up city, they seem none of them to be free. Which I think odd.
After all, in a city where a very poor man may earn as little as Rs 100 ($2) a day, I would guess he is really not going to want to spend two rupees to use a urinal. If you/the government wants men to use toilets, make them free.
It’s hard to know what men would do in England if conveniences were not free. I shudder to think.

Er… not that there are urinals in many of the Mumbai public toilets that I’ve used so far anyway! The fact is that the conveniences consist usually of private stalls and showers, and no urinals. I can understand why. If you can urinate into the nearest ditch, why would you trudge across the road to pay to use an "expensive" convenience?

Even more bizarrely (this no one can explain, I’m sure), many small ‘desi’ restaurants, which have a washbowl to wash one’s hands in, have no toilet! So, a man cannot even nip into a food-joint (as one might in London or New York) for fast relief.
I'm still puzzled why desi restaurants have no toilet though.

So … what should a man do?

**

Just a final quirky thought on this – and again, I’d appreciate the view of Someone Who Knows.

I’ve just finished Rohinton Mistry’s wonderful book set in Bombay ‘Such A Long Journey’. In it, one of the characters, who rather wishes people would stop urinating on the stretch of wall outside his home, persuades an artist to paint pictures of religious figures on the wall. The plan works. Sure, enough, out of respect, men thereafter leave his wall alone.
Well, strike me, but in fact there are many, many walls in Bombay on which figure paintings, tiles and drawings of gods and icons from nearly all of Mumbai’s religions. Are they too being cleverly “protected” by their owners?
Now, was it a trend before Mistry’s book came out? Or did Mistry’s writing inspire it? Someone tell me!

In a further twist, I began to notice that stairwells had also similar arrangements of sacred images along their walls. But why, in this instance? It’s doubtful that men would urinate there, inside a building.
Was it simply India's inherent desire to be devout?
Or, and I believe I am on the right track here, could it be another Rohinton-Mistry trick?
You see, Mumbai is plagued by men who love to spit. They chew a fragarant and intoxicating mix of leaves and spices, called paan, in a similar way to the cowboys who had their "chewing tobacco". As the excess liquid builds up in the mouth, they feel the urge to spit it out, as you'd guess.
Strangely however, they often like to spit the superfluous fluid out not just on to the floor but often toward an upright structure, mostly a wall, or - don't ask me why - the sides of a corner recess on a stairwell landing in a block of flats. In housing complexes, the consequent splash of spit creates a rather familiar garish dark red colouration on the walls (betel leaf, one of the ingredients, turns the mouth crimson when chewed).
Not surprisingly, spitting this guck on a wall outside your neighbour's front door is regarded in some quarters as a tad unsociable, not to say objectionable.
In fact, now I think about it, why does anyone do it at all?

Anyway, to get to the point, I was wondering whether the sacred images on the stairwell walls have a similar protective purpose - to ward off spitters. For who but a complete heathen would spit on such a wall?

Fascinatingly enough, the creators of these talismans know their enemy well. They deliberately place images from all the religions they can think of - a Hindu god might be there, alongside an image of Jesus, plus a depiction of the mosque in Mecca, and a portrait of one of the Sikh prophets. All bases covered.
Well, nearly. There are apparently not quite enough Buddhists, Jains or Parsis in the city however to make it statistically worthwhile to put up images from those religions. I guess so anyway... because I have never seen such.

Well, as usual, I think I'm guessing too much. I shall stop now. But if someone can put me right, please do. Comment away!

It’s a great city, this, isn’t it??!!


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