issue 29: monsoon 2024

CHANDU MAHERIYA

The Mayor’s Bungalow

Translated from the Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar

Please find the original Gujarati version as published in the Dalit Adhikar here.

Since the day I moved to my new house in Gandhinagar, I have been dreaming, curiously enough, dreams of just two kinds: of the police or of toilets. The ever-expanding strip of land east of Ahmedabad called Rajpur, which overflowed with settlements of laborers, had been my original home, or native village or homeland, whatever you please to call it. Bapa would often remark bitterly, ‘We left the village because there was no work for us there, just none, you see. So, consider this your village. Where you get shelter, and a piece of bread is your homeland.’ He worked in a mill, based out of a neighboring suburb called Rakhiyal, that manufactured fabric for vests and frocks. It wouldn’t be wide off the mark to say that a seedy chawl mushroomed, like an excrescence on the face of the city, in the lengthening shadow of every single chimney that towered over and dotted the tightly packed eastern side of Ahmedabad. One such densely populated, privately owned chawl, at the intersection of Rajpur and Gomtipur, was known as the chawl of Abu, the butcher, and therein lay my small home, sitting as if on its haunches.

I think, my life shares as deep a bond with my excretory system as it does with my respiratory system, if not more, for whenever I jog my memory and drag it to the far end of my early childhood, the odd things that invariably surface on that mnemonic landscape are the sordid toilets of the neighboring chawl, named after its owner Hiralal. And rightly so. As if the question of how to fill the bottomless pits of hunger in our tummies was not vexed enough, the embarrassing question of how and where to empty one’s bowels every day had made our personal and social lives miserable.

And those toilets were no great shakes either. Unlike the ones we commonly use these days, the floor of those toilets was not set in marble or glossy, ceramic tiles. With coats of plaster, having dropped off its walls, the goddamn structures sported big patches of brick-and-mortar design at several places. And in most cases, the pathetic excuse for a door shutter would neither have a stopper nor a chain latch to boast of, something that left the squatter on the edge throughout the business…to the mercy of Lord Rama, if you will. A soiled, soggy chamber pot, flanked by two parallelly placed, uneven stones, was all one had in the name of a toilet seat. No marks for guessing that one of the stones would either be broken or on the verge of it, which made the whole human squat installation lean on one side.

Even in such an awkward position, the user literally had to hold fast to the makeshift chain or whatever that secured the rickety door, lest someone from outside pulled it open, out of innocence or sheer malice. As the queue of prospective users grew outside, a howl of protest from the impatient and the edgy would warn the user inside to make haste. At that moment, if someone snitched about such and such chanotaro occupying such and such toilet, the precariously hinged door would be yanked open with a bang and the water in the brass pot, one had carried along for washing and flushing, would be drained with a resounding kick. Despite waiting in the queue till your legs ached, if at the time of your turn even a kid from Hiralal’s chawl materialized – god knows from where -, you had to forgo your right to use the loo and give the queue-jumper the right of way. A strange thing to say but it was in these queues that I learnt my first lessons in social inequality.

I have often wondered why we, the Dalits, use the same term ‘odor’ to refer to both ‘fragrance’ and ‘stench’. Perhaps, in the Dalit lexicon, there are no separate terms to define and differentiate between the pleasant and the unpleasant smells. Thus, for us, everything ‘reeked’, be it a rose or a vial of attar. Even otherwise, how could the dictionary of a people, whose olfactory organs had known nothing but the noisome stench of toilets day in day out, have a luxuriant terminology around fragrance? Even today, public toilets, not only in our chawl but in other chawls and slums, are seen to be brimming with excreta almost as a rule. To make things worse, people in our locality came up with rat traps and released huge, grey rats in those toilets, regardless of them being occupied or vacant, in the hope that they would scurry their way into the cesspit below; naturally, the sudden entry of Uncle Rat with scary, needle-like whiskers would get the hell out of the squatters. On days when the chamber pot surged with excreta, the droppings splashed droplets of shit all over the squatter’s body. And when these toilets overflowed - which was almost every other day - the unbearable, rotten stench that permeated the surroundings would send a ‘normal’ human being into fits of retching. And yet, I don’t remember having seen anyone in my community feeling gagged, clipping her nose, or pressing handkerchief against it. On the other hand, on seeing the converted Christians cover their noses with hankies as they passed by our locality, Dalit women would giggle among themselves and then quip, ‘O dear me, look at these hoity toity Christians, they can’t stand this odor!’ 

The bus stop for Hiralal’s chawl was right next to the toilets. As the buses plied by the Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service halted and stood purring opposite the toilets, the college-going boys and girls from the chawls, waiting in the toilet queue with a brass pot in hand, would freeze with embarrassment at the thought of what a pathetic figure they cut in front of their savarna classmates who might be travelling on that bus. For some bizarre reason, the savarna youngsters from Rakhiyal and Gomtipur mockingly called our toilet-hugging bus stop ‘Hollywood’. Scared of being ragged back at the college for where they lived, Dalit boys and girls of our area would get off either at Kamdar or Gomtipur bus stops, which came before and after the Hiralal’s respectively, and walk their way home.

And I can’t even begin to describe the sorry scene that would be created when the septic tanks overflowed. The fecal matter and reeking water flooded the main road like hell. Quite often, the sanitary worker tasked with cleaning these squalid toilets would be a skinny woman - either a widow or someone who had been deserted - and the contractor’s headman wouldn’t think twice before rudely setting her to this filthy task even if she was ill. I have seen several such women breathe their last at a tender age on account of their constant, infective exposure to the dirt and squalor that those toilets unremittingly disgorged. The headman would push her into the toilets with or without a door and, at times, even when a man was squatting inside. She would have to clean the whole puke-inducing thing without a wince, let alone a word of protest. By her misfortune, if a local bully or an influential man showed up at that time, he would give her a public dressing-down, ask her to pour more water in the toilets and do the thing all over again.

On the eve of the Diwali, groups of kids from each chawl would take out a ritual procession, holy torches and auspicious lamps in hand, and visit houses one after another. The next morning, on the New Year Day, every household would discard old earthen water pots and suchlike and replace them with mint-fresh ones. No quarrel with festive customs, but unfortunately, it was also customary to dump this clutter near the toilets. Some cleanliness buffs would go a step further and drop the debris directly into the chamber pots or the septic tank outside, as if to ensure that the auspicious morning of the New Year was welcomed by overflowing toilets. Located at the mouth of the chawl, my house had the luxury of having the footpath for its veranda and thus, the most putrid stench from the spillage assaulted us before everyone else. And as luck would have it, my dear friends Indubhai Jani and Harshad Desai would come over around that time, as they did customarily every year, to wish us New Year greetings. Thanks to the surging toilets and tanks, their friendly visit, a source of huge delight, would turn all of us into bundles of nerves. From the break of dawn that day, Maa, the poor thing, would get down to removing the litter of fecal matter with a rectangular tin plate or a broom and wash the area again and again with abundant water. But whatever you did, the intractable, head-blasting stink would persist in the air. Ultimately, as always, we would welcome our guests with the nasty niff of toilets to the insolent might of which the bunch of incense stick fuming inside our home would be no match.

You might find this incredible but using even such filthy toilets came at a cost. Many of you might have learnt about lagaan, the system of land revenue, after watching the Oscar-nominated film produced by Bollywood actor Amir Khan, but I had the foretaste of the toilet ‘cess’ quite early in my life. Every month, the assorted goons of Hiralal’s chawl turned up at our doors to collect what they called “toilet tax”. Drunk to the gills, those local toughies would let loose a stream of abuses as they demanded the “relief rent” and if someone made a feeble excuse about their monthly salary from the mill being due, they would fly into a lion rage. The womenfolk of that unfortunate house would coax and cajole them and finally, fall to their feet with the loose end their saris outstretched, begging for mercy.

By the time I reached the age of recognition, so acutely aware I was of our toilet trouble that I had made up my mind to resolve it at any cost. Significantly enough, the few efforts I made towards the construction of separate toilets for my chawl in a way facilitated my launch into public life.

Eventually, with a sharp increase in the density of population in Rajpur, the state decided to widen its roads. As fate would have it, Hiralal’s toilets came within the ruthless sweep of the engineer’s plumbline and measure tapes and resultantly, two rows of men’s toilets were demolished. That day, I and quite a few residents of my locality had felt a deep pang of sorrow as if it was not the toilets but our own homes that we had lost.

In terms of their general state, even the public urinals around those chawls fared no better. Thus, an upper-caste doctor who served in our area would go as far as Gomtipur just to take a pee; the reason being, it was difficult to pick one’s way through all the dirt and gooey ooze to enter the urinal in the first place. In case you made it somehow, the yellowish gunk on the walls inside would exude such terrible, head-blasting effluvium, just don’t ask. Similarly, to spare himself the ordeal, another doctor running a private practice in our area had improvised the small wash area in his clinic into a personal urinal; he would draw the curtain of the injection room, squat near the drain and pee but could never in his life muster the courage to use a public urinal, oh no.

Later, the municipality came up with a scheme to build a dedicated toilet for every single house in the chawls. The collaboration clause of the scheme mandated the municipal corporation and the householder to bear the construction cost to the tune of eighty and twenty percent respectively. I vividly remember the funny episode that had taken place while the construction of our toilet was underway. The hawker woman, who regularly came to the chawl to sell vegetables, had innocently asked my mother, ‘Why just one toilet? What about the womenfolk? Won’t they need one as well?’ Clearly, she had thought that just like in the public space, latrines for men and women would be separate even inside once’s home. When we saw our toilet for the first time, complete with snow-white commode and glossy, tiled floor with skirting to match, we were literally flabbergasted. Our house had a tin-sheet roof, but the toilet had a ceiling of reinforced cement concrete; the house floor had a thin coat of cement plaster, but the toilet floor was beset with shiny, brand-new ceramic tiles. To be honest, so spick and span was the toilet space that I often felt the urge to take my meals sitting inside the toilet rather than in the kitchen.

Thanks to the scheme, every single house in the chawls got its own toilet, but the toilets of Hiralal’s chawl, with their attendant slime and grime, remained intact. Several activists and motivated young men tried their best to get the authorities to erect a community hall, a kindergarten or a chain of shops in their place, but sadly to no avail. Getting the stink out of the way of a Dalit ghetto was just impossible, even unadvisable, it seemed.

Finally in 1997, when countrywide protests erupted against the defacing of Dr. Ambedkar’s statue in Mumbai’s Ramabai colony, the Dalits of Ahmedabad too called for a bandh, a general strike or lockdown of sorts. As dusk fell, angry crowds of Dalit youth spilled from narrow lanes and streets onto public roads. They were raring to take out their deep outrage one way or the other but were clueless about how to do it. Just then, someone suggested that the demolition of the crumbling toilets of Hiralal’s chawl would be a fitting response to the insult, and everyone, keen on a monkey business, went gung ho. Within no time, the toilets were razed and every single bit of brick, no matter how soiled with flowing shit and piss, was spirited away.

After the dust of the demolition settled, lengthy deliberations about what to do with the cleared space ensued. Evidently, the chawl had a clear title to the toilet land, and thus, it was the sole and undisputed right of its residents to decide what happened with it. However, while one group had plans of erecting new latrines there, the other thought the whole proposition was pointless as each household in the chawl had its own pucca toilet. But ultimately ‘better’ sense prevailed, and it was resolved to construct a pay-and-use lavatory there. And within a year, the facility came up, and turned out smartly. Today, the mint-fresh public utility, with whitewashed walls, tiled floor and an entrance flanked by lush potted plants, stands tall at the mouth of Hiralal’s chawl. Such is the glitz and glam of the place that one would prefer to use it, not as a place for shauch i.e. squat but as a space for soch i.e. thought. But the access to the luxurious lavatory comes at a cost, a rupee coin. Mills in the city shut down long ago, the residual factories too are in throes of recession. Dire poverty and unemployment hold the entire suburb in a vice-like grip with the result that the pay-and-use toilets are hardly ever used. Even today, every time I visit Rajpur, the sight of this new, gleaming utility pricks my conscience. At a time when few houses in the locality could compete with the utility in terms of shape, size, and sophistication, what better name could the poor chawl residents have thought up for this bedecked behemoth than the highly creative and shrewd epithet, ‘The Mayor’s Bungalow’. Yes, we call it the Mayor’s Bungalow and such bungalows have popped up at multiple locations in the city now. Be that as it may, those decrepit toilets of Hiralal’s chawl still invade my dreams, jolt me out of my slumber and goad me to write something under the dim, dazed lamp of midnight.   

First published in Gujarati in Dalit Adhikar, Issue 228, 2015.       

Chandu Maheriya (1959- ) is a prominent Dalit writer, intellectual, editor, activist, journalist and well-regarded columnist based in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. During his association with cause-based organizations like Bhimrao Vidyarthi Sangh and Adhikar between 2001 to 2013, Maheriya organized a number of public events around Ambedkar’s thought, Dalit issues and Dalit literature. As an editor of reputed fortnightly Dalit Adhikar, Maheriya became instrumental in positioning Dalit issues on the frontline of political discourse in Gujarat. He has written more than a thousand opinion pieces and columns in popular newspapers like Sandesh and Divya Bhaskar as well as magazines like Naya Marg, Bhumiputra, Jalaso, Aarapar, Samaj Mitra, Dalit Shakti and so on. Among his books, Sambarada thi Swaman Nagar (a history and socio-political critique of Dalit forced migration in Gujarat), Dr. Ambedkar (a book on Dr. Ambedkar’s philosophy), Pran Prashn Pani no (a book on water crisis and experiments in conservation), Chotaraf (a book on the exposition and critique of issues of current relevance) Asmita (edited Dalit poetry), Visfot (edited Dalit poetry), Madi Mane Sambhare re (Collection of Dalit essays on the figure of mother) are read with great relish in Gujarat even today. He has presided over several conferences organized by Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, Gnana Satra and different universities.  

Dr. Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor and critic who writes in Gujarati and English. His works have been translated into Greek, Italian and other Indian languages. His English translations include Poetic Refractions (2012), an anthology of contemporary Gujarati poetry, and Thirsty Fish and Other Stories (2013), an anthology of select stories by eminent Gujarati writer Sundaram. Penguin Random House, India has brought out his translation of Gujarati Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s novel Vultures (2022), and edited collection of short stories titled Fear and Other Stories (2023). His Gujarati translations of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), Sarpa Satra (2021) and Jejuri (2024) have been critically acclaimed. His scholarly monograph Translating the Translated: Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation in India and English translation of eminent painter-poet Gulammohammed Sheikh’s collection of autobiographical essays Gher Jatan (On the Way Home) will be published by Orient Blackswan and Seagull Books respectively in 2024.