“An ant can walk through an elephant trap...”
From Size Matters by Bachchoo
Outside our house in Pune, under a spreading neem tree, every day of the week, Raghunath would set up his stall which was no more than a handcart fitted with four b

icycle wheels and tyres. It had a glass case from which he sold the chikki he or his consorts and cohorts had made. For those not familiar with this confection, which is called different things in different parts of India, it’s brittle toffees made of peanuts and jaggery or sesame seeds, cashew nuts, even lentils and jaggery. These he dispensed in scraps of paper while squatting cross-legged on the vacant part of his handcart.
Attached to the cart was a rope at the end of which Raghunath’s goat named Shambho was tethered. The animal was Raghunath’s constant companion and was brought to and from this sales pitch each day. Shambho was occasionally fed from a bag of grass or fodder which was tucked into the metal frame of the cart. Raghunath also carried a long menacing stick.
He would sing songs to himself to pass the time between customers. We regulars knew why Shambho was subject to this standing and waiting each day. He (we presumed he was male and therefore not useful as a provider of milk) had a bit of leeway on his rope and would wander a few feet from the handcart on occasion. Raghunath would at times worshipfully pronounce his name out loud, to no one in particular, as though he was testing his voice against the power of the ether:
“Shambho hai, Shambho! Jai Shambho!”
The last phrase in a quavering trill of a soprano.
But Shambho’s real function was darker. Even while serving customers, Raghunath would abandon all restraint, raise a thigh and let out a resounding fart. He would immediately pick up his stick and strike the poor goat with it, shouting in Hindi “Oi, kahan sey gobur kha key aatha hai...”
The trick fooled no one, but when in my reading I first came across the word “scapegoat” I knew exactly what it meant.
And now one hears that Malawi has passed a law banning farting in public. In India, in any town or city one is used to seeing notices which implore or threaten citizens against spitting or pissing. I notice that these imprecations have become more explicit. In my youth they were more discreet and said “Commit No Nuisance”. The subtlety of such a message caused a lot of misunderstanding and it was evident that people “committed nuisance” in considerable numbers.
As far as I am aware, Malawi is the first state to actually ban the passing of wind from that particular orifice. I don’t suppose the law extends to belching — that would be tyrannical. Some might say “about time” but the first difficulty of the law is that all are guilty. Who then is entitled to cast the first stone?
I read somewhere — probably on some lying Internet site — that every human being releases eight pints of gas a day from their intestines. After reading that I kept a very close eye on friends and companions — obviously mostly in their waking hours — and could find no corroborative evidence for this rather startling statistic. One wants to think of one’s near and dear as exceptions to this physiological truth, if indeed it is a truth.
Nevertheless, even if one disregards the quantitative statistic, there is no doubting that passing or breaking wind is not acceptable in most societies, though I have been in third class sleeper carriages in India in which one or other fellow passenger, having changed into the lungi he slept in, began to regard the railway compartment as no longer a public space and resorted to loudly expressing this intestinal hydrogen sulphide. No doubt he regarded it as a natural function, like breathing, and suspended all consideration of the olfactory inconvenience or disgust this could cause his fellow passengers.
Other societies, presumably Malawians among them, take farting more seriously. My father, who served as an Army officer in the North-West Frontier Province before the Partition of India used to tell us that in certain Pathan tribes farting in public was the deepest shame and the offender would be required to leave the company and kill himself. My father was prone to exaggeration, but there must have been some grain of truth to the story which he told in order to instil in us a fear of such public disgrace.
I predict that the Malawian police (have they set up a special squad for the detection and punishment of the new crime? The “Gastropol”?) will soon learn that one of the characteristics of civilised societies is the working out of strategies to avoid being detected as the farter in the pack. Which of us has not exercised instinctively-guided muscle control to minimise the vibration and therefore the sound of the passage of gas? Which of us has not been embarrassed when such muscle control fails and the breaking of wind is accompanied by an inaesthetic honk or murmur?
The stratagems to avoid being detected are obvious to anyone who has travelled on a crowded train, especially an underground one without windows, gone up or down in a busy lift or been in some other enclosed space. Having mastered the art of suppressing the sound element, culprits attempt to disclaim responsibility for the unleashed noxious miasma, pretending to get on with their Sudoku, staring into the distance, or attempting to shift suspicion by wrinkling their nostrils to imply that anyone displaying their displeasure couldn’t possibly be the guilty party.
There is almost always a doubt about who perpetrated the silent emission. The exception is when there are only two people present in the lift, the compartment or even under the same quilt. Both know.
It is very likely that the University of Malawi’s forensic science school is, even now, working on a way or spray to make intestinal gas emissions visible. There is an old British schoolboy joke:
Q. Why do farts smell?
A. So the deaf can enjoy them too!
With the possibility that Malawi’s researchers will succeed in making farts visible, I would urge them to resort to bright colours like the gay powders at Holi so that the negative of stink can be off-set by the positive of bright and rising displays.