The night of cleansing

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.