Alok Mukherjee, The Way I See It

I was going to see a movie with my friend that day.  My friend had spotted a perfect parking spot on a side street to our mutual delight. It was free and not too far from our movie theatre.  As my friend began parking, we were both presented with a sight that stunned us.  A woman on the sidewalk had lifted her skirt, spread her legs, bent over and let out a stream of urine.  I suppose she had chosen this moment to pee because no one was on the sidewalk.  My friend and I were both thankful that we were still inside the car.  My friend muttered, “I guess, she is homeless.”

We should not have been stunned.  We both see homeless people begging outside the neighborhood Shoppers Drug Mart.  And I had seen dried up urine near the Loblaws where I shop regularly.  But I suppose we were stunned because I had never seen a homeless person lift her skirt, bend over, and start peeing in broad daylight.

This encounter with a homeless person peeing in public occurred about 5 years ago, way before the pandemic.  But this woman appears, unbeckoned, in my mind’s eye from time to time.  One chain of thought leads to another, and she pops up on my mental movie screen.  

She popped up today when I felt the arthritic pain in my knees as I sat down on my toilet.  I began to think of the Indian squatting toilet that I used every day until the age of twenty-five when I moved to Canada.  Then my mind went back farther to when I had to urinate and/or defecate (or to put it modestly, answer the call of nature) behind a tree at bus stops while travelling in India as there were no toilets.  One time, a friend of my family had invited me to go with her to her village for a few days, and, of course, there was no toilet there either.  So, she and I went to the fields. 

I have learned that in today’s India, young village girls are in danger of being raped and murdered when they have to go out to the fields to answer the call of nature.  Of course, I have also heard of a popular Indian movie where the girl refuses to marry a village man until he builds a toilet for her.  The movie ends happily, but girls and women in the rural areas continue to live under the fear that they might be grabbed, raped, and murdered just because they don’t have a toilet at home.

I grew up in a town in India where few had indoor toilets.  My mother and I would see children and grown-up men and women defecating by the side of the road during our morning walks and call them shameless.  I continued to think of this open defecation in terms of shame or shamelessness rather than in terms of economic privilege for a long time.  I wonder now about the power of the human mind to obliterate the unpleasant from our consciousness.

Our social system helps too.  When President Trump visited India, bamboo screens were put up on the sides of the roads that he had to travel on to reach the stadium, where apparently a million people had gathered to say “Namaste Trump” to him, to shield him from what was behind the screens.  Similar screens protected President Macron when he went on a boat ride on the Ganges during his visit.  I wonder what sort of protocol was followed to manage the calls of nature these gentlemen would need to answer during their visit to India.

Back in Toronto, I manage my calls of nature when outdoors by walking into a Starbucks, and paying for a coffee that I don’t like, just so I can use the washroom.  But every time I have to do so, I am haunted by the image of the Toronto human peeing on the sidewalk.  I am also now haunted by the photos of mounted police removing the encampments of homeless people from the city’s Trinity Bellwoods Park.  

And now some new material has been added to my haunting images library.  The government of Ontario has announced that people will no longer get sick pay to stay home from work when they are sick.  The government of Ontario has also announced that the undocumented people, – i.e., the homeless, the new immigrant, the “illegal migrants” – will no longer be eligible for free treatment when sick.  When I came to Toronto as a young woman in 1971, I felt so happy and carefree to land in a city where there were no beggars sitting outside stores.  I am no longer happy and carefree  living in the Toronto of 2023. It is a haunted place for me.