Thinking About Toilets

As India tries to breathe, as her people — my people — alternate between different forms of grief, as her far-flung children attempt to assuage guilt with donations that cannot refill even half an oxygen cylinder, as I move between rage and helplessness and love and nostalgia and depersonalization, I find myself — instead of crying or screaming or expressing my grief in more recognizable ways — thinking about toilets.

I think about the toilet in my childhood bedroom, with its shiny tiles, blue commode, and accompanying bidet unit. Handheld bum shower attachments weren’t available then and these bidets were hollowed seats, of sorts — contraptions that you sat on while using three taps to control the pressure and temperature of the water that would then spray upward from the bowl