The Real Poop: How Rivers Become Sewers

Abstract

The train coasts into Agra, full of tourists coming to visit the newly scrubbed, sparkling white Taj Mahal. Through the window I see dozens of men squatting on the bare, flat ground between the railway tracks and a string of low buildings. Their backs are partially turned to the train tracks. Some squat alone; others hunch near each other in companionable duos. They gaze meditatively into the distance as they relieve themselves on the garbage-strewn ground. I see this lineup for at least a mile as we glide toward the train station in the early morning. Some of the men carry little aluminum pots or plastic bottles as they approach the waste ground. The vessels sit on the ground next to men who are still engaged in their morning ritual. The water is for washing, for this is a land of washers, not wipers. I can’t tell whether or not the train has surprised the men today by its punctuality. No one looks uncomfortable. No one is hurrying. Privacy seems irrelevant to them. And in any case the men’s long white cotton tunics cover most of their bodies. There are no women. Perhaps they came earlier, when it was darker, before there was a chance that the frequently delayed train would catch them. I had not planned for a whole chapter in this book, let alone one right here at the beginning, to be about toilets and bodily functions. But there’s really no avoiding it. Rivers pour clear and clean out of the mountains, then become sewers in the Gangetic plain. One of the biggest problems in South Asia is, simply, what to do with the shit of more than a billion people. Few of them have toilets as Westerners understand the word. Many have nothing at all—no outhouse, no pit latrine. Globally, 1.2 billion people are still defecating in the open, approximately six hundred million of them in India. By 2010 more than half of India’s billion people had access to a cell phone while only a third had some form of toilet to use.