Public Potties

Kaentian Street

KJ Hannah Greenberg

“Arjun! No!”

The squatting man looked up from his early morning emptying of his digestive system. His wife, his mother, his sister, and five other women from their village were watching him defecate on the jute. He had thought that at this hour of the day, women were too busy tending babies and making breakfast to interfere with men’s activities.

An unidentifiable voice continued the tirade by shouting at him, Stop! Stop right now!”

Arjun didn’t know whether to pull up his pajamas and ruin their fabric or to continue to void in front of the women. As it were, those females ordinarily identifiable as “family” or as

“belonging to friends” were banging pots and pans, waking not only barbets and quails, but also all of the other local birds and all of the other local inhabitants. The women had already unintentionally flushed a peacock.

“Go away. I need privacy.”

His second older sister responded. “No! No more privacy! Privacy leads to rape. Field toilets bring diarrhea, too. Plus, Izna died when that snake bit her. There would have been no snake to bite her if she and the rest of us had bathrooms.”

“Five minutes. Let me finish. Then we’ll talk.”

“Arjun,” implored his mother, “Sai needs a wife. Have pity for your brother. Buy us a toilet.”

“Bring us plumbing,” yelled his sister, Pooja.

Others of the women, too, began shrieking.

Amidst the commotion, Arjun finished his business, pulled up his pants and faced his harassers. “Bring me water. Bring me porridge.”

Hastily, he washed his right hand. Thereafter, he prayed and then slowly ate his breakfast. Village leadership had its advantages.

Leadership had its disadvantages, as well. While he washed, prayed, and ate, the female chorus carried on. His neighbor’s wife, Nabitha, taunted, “you have a cell phone. My husband has Wi-Fi. Yet, none of us have toilets.”

Nabitha’s nearly grown daughter continued, “I don’t want to keep dealing with my monthly bleeding in the millet. It’s not healthy, for any of us, for me to do that.”

Arjun’s elder brother’s mother-in-law addended, “I supposed you were manly. I supposed wrong”

Arjun rose. He could hit the matron with impunity, but his brother’s wife would probably leave his brother if he did. Instead, Arjun glared first at the matron and then at each of the rest of his tormentors. He looked each of them in the eye.

Then he noticed their hands. Some women clenched sticks. Others grasped sizable stones.

“You’d never.”

“Only because I forbade it,” answered his wife. “We don’t just want plumbing. We want access to it, and we want it at the school and at the church, too.” “I’ll call a meeting of the elders at the full moon.”

“Not good enough, Husband. Our daughter, Omala, dropped out of school yesterday. She said it was too hard to be there without a bathroom during her monthlies. The pipes need to reach not only our homes, but also both of our public buildings.”

With tight lips, Arjun replied, “how could we possibly pay for such wonders?”

Taahira, a crone, who was also Arjun’s maternal aunt, extended her hand. The scroll she offered Arjun contained many columns of figures. “We can sell the land on which we currently grow coffee. That sale will bring us more money than those scrawny bushes ever did.”

“I’ll talk to the elders during the meeting. I doubt Shaurya will agree to it”

Shy Pia, Shaurya’s wife, spoke up. “He’ll agree. He wants to see our children married. He’ll agree to everything you suggest. You’ll agree to everything we suggest.”

During the weeks that followed, the elders were accosted by the village’s women every time that they used the fields to urinate or to defecate. The women divided themselves into teams; at least one team was always watching the countryside. Not only were the tribal heads constantly hounded, but there were also no more rapes.

After the full moon meeting, the village sold its coffee acreage and bought toilets. Subsequently, there were abundant weddings - nearby communities wanted their scions to marry into Arjun’s “advanced” settlement. Sadly, Arjun did not attend most of those festivities.

It was not the women’s makeshift weapons or the menfolk’s manifest anger that killed him. Rather, Arjun died when the cheaply constructed privy seat, upon which he was perched, broke in half and he fell into the pit below it.

The elders had agreed to bring private stalls to the community after Arjun had promised each of them a substantial bribe. As village head, he had pocketed the remainder of the profit. Thus, the village’s homes, school, and church had received outhouses, but not running water. Accordingly, the women’s would-be champion expired on the mound of excrement piled under his latrine.

KJ Hannah Greenberg is a published author of several books and served as editor in multiple literary journals.