I stay with a very generous and sweet
family in this village. The couple are from a nearby village, but have been
staying here for long. The house we stay in has a soakpit for sewage waste
emanating from the washrooms. The house also doubles up as a makeshift office
for my organization, hence always has a steady stream of visitors from nearby
villages. Since its one of the few houses in the village to actually have
toilets, you do have a few people who use the toilets placed just outside our
rooms. So, compared to its traffic, the soakpit is comparatively small, and
fills up pretty soon.
We periodically pump it out with a motor
to our small backyard farm. Even though it is partially decomposed human
excreta, it still counts as liquid manure, albeit not a great one. 2 nights
back, we had started the motor pump for the same purpose, but it was taking
much longer than usual. It was 11 pm and my host and I decided to go to sleep,
and wake up at 4am to check and switch off the motor. I slept well. Not a
single dream, nothing to remember about the sleep, just blankness, the hallmark
of a sound sleep.
I then heard this soft voice calling out,
I awoke to find my host guy calling me
out. It was 3 am, and I told him the pumping wouldn’t be done yet. He called me
out, smiled and showed me the soakpit. Sometime while we were asleep, the pipe
got clogged, and the pressure loosened the pipe. The result was glaring in
front of us, the pumped sewage waste, spread out on our's and our neighbour's
front porch. Many days of partially decomposed toilet sewage just out there… the
sight was plain and simply awful.
The village was all asleep, it was still
and silent. We were lucky.
We thought... If we wait till morning, the entire
village would get to know of this - not a pretty sight. The sight of everyone watching while we clean up was also not to be avoided; for all we know, some might begin to boycott us. Also, the neighbor whose porch was
filled, wasn't the best of friends and was a source of constant complaints over small issues. Compared to the
minor issues we have argued profusely on, this was ‘End of Days’. But personally, my biggest concern was that
the neighbour’s place was also the venue for the village’s mini-Anganwadi, with
many tiny tots expected the next day. This is the last place to leave in an
unhygienic manner.
It was clear what we had to do. My host
and I stared at each other, laughed a while. The heavens opened then and it
started drizzling too… we were going to be cleaning shit in the rains :P
We assembled a bucket and a mug each,
collected the dark viscous liquid waste on the floor by hand, filled the
buckets and emptied in on our backyard farm. We had to race against time, we
had to finish this entire operation before 4:30, when folks start waking up.
Getting caught in such an activity, was not a position we wanted to find
ourselves in. It was dark, and we had a tough time handling the torch while
operating. It also meant there was no photo opportunities :P
Once we were mostly done, we decided to
water down the remaining bits, and wiped them far away. We then prayed for
intense rains so as to remove all traces of the night’s work. And as luck would
have, it started raining hard. Standing there with all filth on us, with the
rains pouring on us, one could so easily visualize an epic scene from a film
climax.
To take a bath at
4:30 after cleaning so much shit with our bare hands, was a truly satisfying
experience. I shall remember this bath for a long long time to come. 