Calcutta's Tap Water

Calcutta's tap water: that which tourists to India take precaution against by at least 5 shots and whose symptoms an entire pack of extra strength Imodium, combined with Pepto Bismol, cannot solve. Calcutta's tap water has a life of its own.

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Born in the ghetto fabulous city of Calcutta, one of my earliest memories as a child was breaking my rib cage on a school bus in Kindergarten. But, by then life was beginning in a different city. Yet I remember this particular summer in Calcutta, because it was so hot, I drank water from the shit mug.

In India, there are unwritten rules about how you use your hands. And they definitely extend to whatever you do behind closed doors(there are no specifications for when a man's hand is his best friend). The right hand is reserved for all things good and pure, and your left hand,'bad' things.. You can shake someone's right hand with yours, you can accept flowers and mithai at the temple with your right hand and you can certainly bring it forward to accept your husband's hand in marriage under the aegis of the wise.
The shit mug in its benign way represents the old class struggle. Washroom cleaning was below the dignity of the upper classes and relegated to the 'untouchables,' or the lowest rung of the caste system. To this day, it is a rare Indian household who clean their own toilets.
But the left hand is your very own janitor. You use your left hand to wash your ass after you've been in the can. Toilet paper (tp) is still relatively unknown in most parts of the country, and even the most cosmopolitan Indian will fight tp with a mug full of water. Water is cleaner and guaranteed to leave your nether regions flushed and clean; rather than taking folded, scratchy paper to wipe off what necessarily should be washed off. Washing is more hygienic too.
For the sole purpose of behind-washing, every household relegates a separate mug in the washroom that must be used for this, and this purpose only. It comes in a larger size than most regular mugs, which you may use for watering plants or measuring flour. In fact, the shit mug’s size is as large as a mug can get without turning into a bucket. The idea behind full capacity being, you can wash off what you have to, without having to go back to the tap with shit on your hands, literally. It is considered unclean to engage the shit mug in any other household activity but the latrines. I have an aunt, who will bathe and pray if she touches the shit mug by mistake.


My mother is a busy lady. She saves lives everyday and since people don't stop falling sick after 5 p.m. when everybody is unchained from their desks and directed home; my mother pretty much works all the time. She is a doctor and that’s was how it was explained to me. I had a nanny I think, but she spent most of her time on the job, secretly snogging with her boyfriend till someone found out and fired her. In the interim, the someone who had fired the nanny also directed my father into baby-sitting me. This man and I hardly spent much time together. He was a busy man with his ways. But he fed me the chocolate equivalent of 4 boxes of smarties for breakfast whenever I asked him. Which wasn't as often as I liked till he started watching over me on a more regular basis. He also thought it would be funny to watch him break glass or get high off diesel fumes from his bike but I digress.


A summer in Calcutta arrives early and stays late. Before the rest of India has had time to recover from an especially cold winter and before launching into a rather rigorous summer, Calcutta is already oppressed by the humidity and stagnant white heat that makes doing anything, day or night, a feat onto itself.
I would stand with my back to an open window waiting my turn by the fan. Calcutta’s heat is in a way a reflection of its people. Where unions can shut down at the drop of a fly, summer brings with its heat, raging tempers and many dropped flies in the form of union strikes. These in turn, affect the power grid and what may be a catastrophic ‘blackout’ in North America, is merely ‘load shedding’ in this red, but hardly-Marxist capital. Which is how I got stuck between a gaggle of adults who took turns cooling their backs by a flippant fan or smoking cigarettes by the window, hoping to catch the last breath of cool air blowing in from the stagnant river Hoogly.
The British, back in the day, used to escape to the cool confines of Darjeeling, but most of Calcutta cannot afford it, and so we collectively swelter for a few months with no respite in sight.

It was one such afternoon. My aunt who bathes and prays at the touch of a shit mug was due for a visit. These were exciting times for me but my father did not share the enthusiasm of having his sister-in-law come poking around his fatherly duties, so he decided to take a nap. But I was a hot and thirsty, nagging child who had yet to grasp the authoratarian ‘because I said so…’. Somewhere between his snores, I managed to dribble the last of my drinking water on his nose and watched it slowly trickle into the back of his nostrils before he woke up to a coughing fit. Desperation for sleep on a hot afternoon struck a raw, rather sweaty, nerve somewhere which led him to fill up our household shit mug with Calcutta's tap water and figured it would take me a while to go through this load.

The rest is in slow motion.

I am running towards my aunt who is screaming. In turn, I am screaming with excitement as I run faster. My cousin accompanying my aunt has sensed disaster, and hurls himself away from the exploding shit-tainted water about to hit him with alarming speed. My aunt's linear-toned, nasal screaming reaches a new high but fails to wake up the snoring man, who had he been awake, would’ve averted disaster. I embrace her with Calcutta's tap water in a shit mug and myself in one giant show of emotion.

There was talk of de-worming medication from the last of what I remember. This was traumatic enough to lay buried for the past 20 years till I contemplated feeding my roommate’s dog ice cubes on a humid, Toronto afternoon. As I crouched in the heat of the patio beside his limp body, I wondered what could be a weirder thing to do on a hot summer's day than coaxing and feeding, triple filtered, hand crushed, delicately flavoured dog-food ice cubes to a black, standard poodle named Paris Bueller Commune.