Till East and West stand presently at god’s great toilet seat.
-Without apologies to Rudyard Kipling
In John Masters’ 1954 novel, Bhowani Junction, set in India during the sunset of the British Raj, a young Anglo-Indian, Patrick, who is in love with Victoria, also an Anglo-Indian, attempts to dissuade her from forming a romantic attachment to Ranjit, an Indian, by asking her if she realised that the hand her lover-to-be would caress her with was the hand he used to wash his bottom after attending to what is referred to as one’s ‘morning business’.
That single sentence summed up a watershed divergence in daily practice between East and West, as presented by the Anglo-Saxon hemisphere, which can’t be papered over: the difference between wash and wipe. The Anglo-Indians, like the fictional Patrick, who sought to emulate the British with mixed success, in all manner of things, from dress, and speech, to ablutionary custom saw, at least in Masters’ view, what might be called the ‘wipe-wash divide’ as the unbridgeable chasm between the two worlds, real or imagined, of East and West.
While Western Europe, for the most part, has long recognised the bidet as being a necessary item of lavatorial requirements, the Anglophone domains of Britain, Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia, resolutely stick to their guns – or, rather, toilet rolls – much to the dismay of visitors from South Asia who search in vain for a makeshift receptacle that may serve the balneary purpose, and might be observed furtively conveying into the W/C plastic bottles of drinking water, especially retained to this end.
Though the officially recognised flower of India is the lotus, for many an Indian marooned on shores where TP – toilet paper – rules the morning throne, the longed-for symbol of home is the brass lota, now largely being replaced in urban locales by the hygiene faucet, both of which appurtenances seem as remote as the lunar surface in loos forever foreign. However, in the global climate change of cultural custom, there might be early signs of, if not the winds of change, at least a puff of progress. On a visit to London, in the cavernous innards of a Tube station I spot a large ad depicting a male behind and proclaiming:’It’s go time.
Bums of the world, 1 million trees are cut down every day to make regular toilet paper. It’s pretty crap, but you can help by switching to our recycled or bamboo rolls.
Who gives a crap,
Bamboo/Recycled’
To butt-stress the ecological point being made, there is also a TV commercial which, in a follow-up derriere-guard action, shows backsides, of both genders, and of varying ages and ethnicities, heading towards what used to be called ‘the privy’ clutching rolls of recyclable bum-boo TP.
Having long enshrined the putative ‘Indian’ tikka masala as its national dish – and in a perhaps not entirely unrelated diversion accorded its prime-ministership to a second-generation Indian-origin migrant – Britain may appear to be reconsidering its accustomed way of dealing with the nether end of its alimentary canal. But while TP made of recycled bamboo (ouch?) may be an improvement environmentally-speaking, it does nothing by way of cleaning up one’s act anatomically-speaking, making for a bottom line that leaves the user both high – as in odoriferous – and dry.
When it comes to using what the Americans call the ‘john’, John Bull remains bullish on paper, reusable or otherwise, in an implicit expression of defiance tantamount to saying, ‘I’d rather itch than switch,’ that being the non-negotiable bottom line, in more ways than one. However, erstwhile empire – well, former denizens of former empire, at any rate – could well strike back, employing tactical flank attacks, such as increasingly popularising Made-in-India practices, and products like yoga and haldi shots, to further a strategy that would, eventually, lead to the insular kingdom meeting its Water-loo.