March 20 : “Stop your lies about me Or I’ll tell the truth about you”. From Dattey Raho by Bachchoo
The friend of a friend from India visits Britain for the first time. After a few days of learning London by foot, from Westminster Abbey past the Houses
of Parliament and Big Ben, across Westminster bridge to the South Bank with its concert halls and galleries and then along the river to the Tate Modern and across the foot bridge north again to St. Paul’s, he professes to his friend and to me that he has fallen in love with the city.
If he was to pick out one feature of it which had most impressed him, which would it be, I asked. The architecture, ancient and modern, the haphazard imposing view along the river, the art in the galleries, the shop windows — a long string of choices.
“None of the above”, he says. “The thing that strikes me first is that no one seems to be urinating in the street. I’ve passed under deserted bridges, gone through subways, walked to alleys behind the monuments and there aren’t any signs prohibiting it and it would seem these are unnecessary because no one commits any nuisance anyway”.
My British friend laughed.
Our Indian visitor went on to say that he would if he could leave the chaos of Mumbai behind and live and work in London. I told him I thought that it was a hasty judgment and that he should consider other factors of life as well, apart from the fact that Britain would not allow him to settle here unless he was in some professional sense indispensable to the British economy or of course if he married a British citizen and applied for leave to stay and for citizenship. After two further weeks of absorbing the British atmosphere and despite the fact it has been rather cold and unwelcoming outside, my Brit friend caught him scouring the Internet for websites that offered British women who wanted marriage partners.
Nothing came of it and our Indian friend left for Dubai which, we briefed him, was Las Vegas without the good taste. But perhaps there too the Dubai authorities and the population of foreigners kept the place free of what we in the subcontinent call “nuisance”.
The day he left, there was a newspaper report which said that 12 urinators had been produced before the magistrate’s courts in London for committing a nuisance in Victoria and Soho. The 12 were sentenced and fined a total of £2,000 by the City of Westminster Magistrate’s court, with fines for each ranging from £50 to £250. The Westminster Council’s strategic director who had initiated the crackdown on public urinators, said “not only is it offensive and unhygienic to urinate in the street, it costs a small fortune to clean up the mess and get rid of the putrid smell which seeps into brickwork and paving”.
Our Indian friend was puzzled.
“I think you’d better check Dubai out”, I said, “I also read a report by an environmental charity whose research showed that 95 per cent of Britons had urinated, vomited or defecated in public places because no toilet was available”.
“I suppose our friend will be looking into Dubai websites for prospective brides”, the Brit friend remarked. “An absurd reason for liking or disliking a place”.
I said I didn’t think so. I recalled writing a column in this very paper years ago extolling the dawn of the public lavatorial revolution in New Delhi where I had seen the first establishment of the Sulabh Shaochalays. I remember discussing the prospective column with a friend at the time and she said “why would anyone want to read about pubic toilets?”
I reminded her of the literary furore that followed the publication of V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness in which he wrote at some length about the Indian habit of urinating and defecating in public places and cultivating a social blindness to the undesirability of the tradition. He, unlike his critics who called his book a gutter-inspector’s report, thought this almost universal habit worthy of mention as a national trait.
After the column was published a few people complained that there were revolutions and transformations more important than the lavatorial one.
The slogan that I had coined for the Sulabh Shaochalays at the time, with apologies to W.B. Yeats was:
“I must go down to the Sulabh again
To the Sulabh Shaochalay!
A rupee a pee,
Two for a poo,
Everything short of a lay!”
The shortage of public toilets was, in my youth a chronic problem and one can’t claim never to have used the wide open spaces or a dark alley to relieve oneself. A college friend whom I shall, to save the blushes of his children or grandchildren and save myself a libel prosecution, call Master J, was spotted by a group of me and my friends at Pune railway station, in a crocodile of arrested persons, tied to each other with the same rope in loops round their necks and being led by policemen to the courts. His companions in the chained gang were tramps, villains, drunkards, drugees — the usual suspects. Had he been caught travelling without a ticket?
“No”, he said, “There was, on the cricket stadium wall, a notice which said Commit No Nuisance and, khulla I committed nuisance”.
He was led away by the neck.
The truth about London today is that despite the fines and the alertness of police to the nuisance commiters, the scourge of public urination is set to continue and increase. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of public toilets in London dropped by 40 per cent. There are now 415 public toilets in London serving a population of 7.5 million and the additional 28 million people a year who visit the capital.
The creative strategy of people who are caught short is to dodge into a pub, pretend to be looking for a friend and when you’ve evaded the barman or barwoman’s eye to segue into the Ladies or Gents. Then there are always the Macdonalds, the Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast food joints which I only enter in extreme circumstances to use the loo. Coffee shops, supermarkets and departments stores also have public toilets but in the department stores it is more than likely that one has to tackle five floors, escalators and vast trading areas before one finds the facility.
By Farrukh Dhondy
