The Big Necessity (17 page)

Six thousand wards of scavengers have also been given education at Sulabh Public School on the Delhi campus. It provides education with a message: the intake is scavenger and non-scavenger to encourage mixing. All children learn in English because it is the language of the educated, employable Indian. Classes are also taught in Sanskrit, the school head teacher tells me, “because that is the language of the Brahmins.” Sanskrit is a shocking thing to teach a scavenger child, and therefore makes a powerful point.

Pathak tells me with pride about a program in Rajasthan, whereby twenty-eight scavenger women were given the opportunity to sell snacks for a living. It sounds a modest achievement. But even after three decades of trying to eradicate untouchability, getting an Indian to eat food prepared by a scavenger is a big deal. The Rajasthani snack women may be few, but the number is incidental. The point is that Indians will now buy food from people who used to disgust them so much, they would not touch their shadows. Even Pathak's Sulabh colleague Mulkh Raj admits that the habit of untouchability is still formidable enough to affect his own thinking. “You can share lunch with scavengers,” he says, “but you'd never marry a scavenger girl. It's wrong to pretend this doesn't exist.”

Pathak's other great achievement, in his eyes, was to make toilet talkable. “In India until few years ago,” he wrote in 2004, “nobody could imagine that any politician, bureaucrat or businessman of some standing would like to associate his name with anything even remotely connected to something as ordinary as toilet. Now things have changed and most prominent politicians (including Ministers and Chief Ministers), high-position bureaucrats and well-known businessmen readily agree and rarely decline to inaugurate the opening of public toilets in the country.” When Sulabh set up an adopt-a-scavenger system, top
politicians invited scavengers into their home to share food and sponsored their education.

For Pathak, the toilet was always a means to achieve his end. He said in one interview that “Gandhi used the spinning wheel to enter families' homes; we're entering through the toilet.” Even his critics—of whom I find very few, despite looking—admit that he has changed Indian society. Paromita Vohra featured Pathak in her documentary about public toilet provision in Mumbai,
Q2P
. The film manages to be ethereal and earthy, and features a fine example of Indian humor when, during a “Take Back the Night” march, some young women looking for a public toilet ask another marcher, a middle-aged woman, whether they can pee on a certain patch of ground. “Can we sit here?” they ask. “Is it a religious place?” “Go!” says the woman. “You sit and make it religious!”

Vohra has mixed feelings about Sulabh and its “Visionary Founder.” “If the goal of Pathak is to have eliminated scavenging, then he's failed. And I find Sulabh very paternalistic. But the guy is a Brahmin and he built the first public toilet in India. You can't take that away from him.”

 

Nor can anyone challenge his status as the founder of the world's best-known toilet museum. In 1994, Pathak realized that maybe not everybody shared his delight in pour-flush privies and the transformation of scavengers to snack-sellers and cleaners. He decided to “make toilets interesting.” During a visit to London's Madame Tussaud's, he got an idea. Why not build a museum of toilets? Letters were dispatched to all foreign embassies in Delhi, asking for information about their country's toilet habits. The British provided a small booklet on the work of Mr. Thomas Crapper. The Counselor for Scientific and Technological Affairs at the U.S. embassy could offer only the address of the American Society of Sanitary Engineering, and the suggestion that Sulabh's idea of playing the national anthem of various nations as one approaches their toilet in the exhibit might be “something that many people might object to. A simple sign explaining the exhibit may be less controversial.”

Pathak gathered the exhibits on his global travels. The collection is
impressive, but it still fits easily into a single room on the campus, next door to the biogas research lab. Replicas of historically relevant commodes, toilets, and latrines are placed alongside a microwave toilet—used in ships—and a portable privy aimed at campers. There is a French commode disguised as English books, including a Shakespeare play. “The French always used English titles for books,” says my guide, as if he can't imagine why. In the center of the room, in a glass display case, there is a model of the Sulabh public toilet at Shirdi, supposedly the largest in the world, which has 120 toilets, 108 bathing cubicles, 28 special toilets, six dressing rooms, and 5,000 lockers, as well as a biogas system. (I later make a 10-hour round trip to spend an hour at Shirdi, and on the road wonder as usual where I will find a toilet, before I remember where I'm going.)

On the walls hang densely detailed displays relating to sanitary history. Visitors who trek out to the airport area—they are more numerous, since the museum was included in the
Lonely Planet Guide to India
a couple of years ago—will get an education. They can learn that the best and first flush toilets were built five millennia ago in the Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and that Ben Affleck once bought Jennifer Lopez a jewel-encrusted toilet seat (though she's now moved on to the TOTO Neorest). They can be enlightened by one poster that elucidates the Su-jok therapy devised by Korean scientist Park Jae Woo, which I will include here in a spirit of public health because it served me well during ensuing months of research in toilet-deficient places. Should the urge to defecate strike, take a pen, pencil, or blunt object and trace a line, deeply and with pressure, in a clockwise direction on the left palm or counterclockwise on the right. The urge, assures Dr. Park, “will immediately cease. You too can try sometime and feel the magic pressure in reverse order will give good relief in constipation.”

A visitors' book collects comments, some with expected humor, some serious. Jack Sim of the WTO has left his compliments. Nana Ziesche thought it “such a big history part never taught in school. What a pity.” Swiss tourist Jonathan Hecker offered his congratulations because “this is exactly what we need to pull sanitation out of its dirty corner.”

Pathak intends to keep pulling. He has plans for a University of Sanitation.
He will also amend the nonprofit model and accept grants. There is still much work to do and Sulabh needs help to do it. Despite the organization's achievements, half a million Indians are still cleaning dry latrines. “Seen in that context,” Pathak tells me, “Sulabh has achieved almost nothing.” A Sulabh colleague is also gloomy. “Sanitation is a gigantic problem,” he says. “The world needs a thousand Sulabhs, a hundred Dr. Pathaks. What Sulabh does is a drop in the ocean.”

Pathak prefers to see things more brightly. “We are still at the beginning of the beginnings,” he once said. “We are a candle in the dark.” And the dark doesn't frighten him. This is the man who transformed teenage rebellion into a toilet revolution, and overturned profoundly held beliefs about purity and pollution in the process. “It's totally amazing,” he tells me by way of a farewell. “Scavengers used to be afraid of our shadows. But look. The earth and sky can meet.”

 

 

_________________

Da Li, China

(Author)

 

 

A PIG IN EVERY BEDROOM

____________

 

 

A several-thousand-mile road trip across China can provoke a lot of questions. For example, how tiny dots on the map turn out to be cities you've never heard of but have six million people and more skyscrapers than London. Or why Red, our Chinese translator, thought that asking melon sellers for directions was always the best option when lost. Or why we were almost killed by truck drivers several times a day, occasions that provoked comments from our driver, a chubby, lovely man called Wang, like, “That truck's from Inner Mongolia. He thinks he's still driving on grassland.”

Mr. Wang had found my interest in
fen
, the Mandarin word for excrement, peculiar. Nonetheless, he tried to be helpful. He would point out when he spotted a truck full of
fen
looming behind, though its odor preceded it by far. He would alert me when he saw a tiny figure in a roadside field bearing a tank and a hose, spraying—by the smell of it—the contents of his toilets on his cabbages. This practice would horrify any public health professional, given the disease-load of feces, but it's what happens to 90 percent of China's excrement, and has been done forever. There are reasons not to eat salads in China, and why the sizzling woks are so sizzling.

Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. Those roadside
fen
spreaders are only the latest practitioners of a 4,000-year tradition of using human excreta to fertilize fields. China's use of night soil, as they rightly call a manure that is picked up at night, is probably the reason that its fields and paddies are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya's, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecalphobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields.
Fen
and toilets have featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years. In Beijing, I found several shelves of books—under the heading “Toilet Culture”—at a state bookstore. One tells the tale of Qi Furen, concubine of the first Han emperor, whose fate was to have her eyes burned out, her limbs cut off, and her ears sliced off by her mother-in-law, who then threw her into the toilet to die. The dowager empress called the poor concubine “the Human Pig,” a name most records attribute to the total abasement of Qi Furen, but which I suspect had more to do with the fact that up till today, pigsties and toilets in China are often the same thing. According to some authors, the Chinese word for toilet,
ce
, originally meant pigsty. One of China's toilet goddesses—there are several—was originally a beautiful lady called Zhi Yan who saved a boy who was drowning in a toilet. The boy survived; Zhi Yan was drowned and made a toilet goddess by the King of Heaven. For reasons that remain obscure to both me and Red, even after reading the riches provided by the Toilet Culture shelf, the “toilet deity is therefore a pig or a beautiful woman.”

In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance. Andrew Morris, a historian at California Polytechnic, relates the story of Chen Qiaozhu, a famous night-soil collector from Shanghai who eventually managed to leave her sanitary profession, or—in her patriotic description—“came out of the toilet to declare victory.” (She also
became a competitive cyclist.) In 1959, the night-soil carrier Shi Chuanxiang was a star speaker at the Communist Party's National Conference of Heroes. He vividly described working for the exploitative gangs who controlled Beijing's night-soil collection, and of customers who showed their appreciation for his work by calling him “Mr. Shitman” or “Stinky Shit Egg.”

Shi qualified as a hero because Party policy had decided that excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. States competed to collect the most valuable fertilizer. Hunan province launched the “Seas of Shit, Mountains of Fertilizer” campaign, exhorting all Hunanese to collect as much human night soil as possible (they obliged with 10 million tons' worth). In Hubei, “ten thousand people entered battle like flying horses to collect manure and march forward side by side.”

 

Flying horses have now evolved into cars, but the Communist Party's efforts to dictate the toilet habits of its people are unchanged in their fervor. Since the 1930s, China's authorities have thrown much energy into biogas. Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement.