Notes on Toilets From a Zombie Zone
I am back from India.
A quick visit to Wikipedia to check on the meaning of 'jet lag' leaves me informed that it takes 1 day per each eastward time zone to recover your circadian rhythms. (it's 1day per 1.5 westward time zones) I still have 3.5 (out of 10.5) days to go, before I emerge from my zombie zone! Why there's a half-hour in there, beats me, but there's a handful of countries utilizing fractions of an hour to computer their local time, India and Canada among them. Are they trying to buy some time?
I am at a nice local cafe, Esselon. I walk into one of the bathrooms here, and instinctively all my defense mechanisms kick in at once. It's Pavlov's reflex, developed over the 2 weeks of my travels in India. All these embarrassing thoughts flash though the subconscious mind of my westernized-ly pampered self, before I even enter the bathroom: Will there be toilet paper? Will there be a TOILET? Will there be a door to close behind me?... Take it easy, I am back home, I almost told myself. There are plenty of small - and isn't God in the small things anyways? - design details about the public bathrooms in the U.S. that have always unnerved me, such as stall doors opening inward leaving NO ROOM for your entire body to enter, or in-plain-view gaps between the stall doors and partitions (how about some privacy, please?!) These particular bathrooms are impeccable though, thanks very much, Pavlov!
Truth be told, my experiences with Southern India's public bathrooms of the type that triggered that detour into my subconscious are most of the time impeccable, in their own way. There's always water (even if it's all over the place), and there's always, at the very least, a hole in the ground. As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union and has travelled around that vast country, often in search of holes, *and* toilet paper, I felt grateful for that.
It should strike one as a contrast then that some of the brightest and tallest store windows I saw in the cities and towns of Southern India were of modern bathroom appliance showrooms. In that bright fluorescing spot of the familiar where a weary traveler from 'the West' might expect - or beg - to see sleek Italian couture, or the next big thing in the car industry (or, in a particularly desperate moment, even some distant Martha Stewart hold-outs), bold glowing towers of modern amenities in the form of glistening toilet pedestals tower high over the streets, like some royal impersonators of displaced wealth, inviting you to join in, in the bold westernization festivities. Or, are these more like the return-to-the-roots type of festivities? Let me explain: another consultation with Wikipedia (I know, I shouldn't be building my entire knowledge of the world based on this source alone!) on the subject of lavatories brings me to this discovery: "...the ancient cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, e.g., Harappa and Mohenjo-daro which are located in present day India and Pakistan had flush toilets attached to a sophisticated sewage system" That's 4 thousand years ago!!
3.5 more days to go, 3.5 more...
