Potty parity
Dateline: Delhi outskirts, July
As we pulled out of the Delhi station, I was struck by three things:
- It takes much less time to get out of Delhi than Mumbai, with a much sharper line of where the city leaves off and the fields begin. It takes forever to get out of Mumbai.
- Poverty in Delhi, hard as it is to imagine, is worse than that in Mumbai.
- The tracks serve in lieu of public toilets.
Whenever you see men holding hands in public in a society, you can assume one of two things about the status of women: (1) they have it really good; both gay rights and women's rights are protected (very, very rare), or (2) heterosexual men despise women so much that they redirect their nonsexual affection to men (very common).
Looking out the train window and seeing rows and rows of squatting men, facing the train and grinning, holding hands while crapping -- well, it's hard to know where to start. But, just as you start to wonder whether there could be a more objectionable sight, you encounter these same rows of men facing away from the train...
There's a game that one can play practically anywhere in Delhi, similar to "Where's Waldo?" of "Where's the Women?" In this case, given the numbers of, er, squatters encountered, and the uniformity of their sex, I suspect the women's shift is in the middle of the night (modesty here being exclusively the domain of women). It's hard to imagine anything worse than living in one of these camps of cardboard shacks, but it's got to be having to pick your way to the tracks in the dark, avoiding the leavings of the morning crew, and having to contend with the many feral pigs we also saw, or, perhaps even more prevalent, feral men.
As we pulled out of the Delhi station, I was struck by three things:
- It takes much less time to get out of Delhi than Mumbai, with a much sharper line of where the city leaves off and the fields begin. It takes forever to get out of Mumbai.
- Poverty in Delhi, hard as it is to imagine, is worse than that in Mumbai.
- The tracks serve in lieu of public toilets.
Whenever you see men holding hands in public in a society, you can assume one of two things about the status of women: (1) they have it really good; both gay rights and women's rights are protected (very, very rare), or (2) heterosexual men despise women so much that they redirect their nonsexual affection to men (very common).
Looking out the train window and seeing rows and rows of squatting men, facing the train and grinning, holding hands while crapping -- well, it's hard to know where to start. But, just as you start to wonder whether there could be a more objectionable sight, you encounter these same rows of men facing away from the train...
There's a game that one can play practically anywhere in Delhi, similar to "Where's Waldo?" of "Where's the Women?" In this case, given the numbers of, er, squatters encountered, and the uniformity of their sex, I suspect the women's shift is in the middle of the night (modesty here being exclusively the domain of women). It's hard to imagine anything worse than living in one of these camps of cardboard shacks, but it's got to be having to pick your way to the tracks in the dark, avoiding the leavings of the morning crew, and having to contend with the many feral pigs we also saw, or, perhaps even more prevalent, feral men.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment<< Home