Toilet OCDs
Both A and I have spent considerable parts of our lives as students living in hostels and shared accomodation. We met in a boarding school-a spartan one. The toilets there were clean, but every now and then accidents would happen, wherein the evidence of human evacuations would not be washed away.
In college in Delhi, my hostel loos were freqently in an unmentionable state. I have come across people who think it is the poor who do not know how to use loos or keep them clean-this happened to be a hostel largely of middle class girls, many of whom were considered to be from “good families,” whatever that means. Bad toilet etiquette is something all classes are good at. There was one girl who regularly vomited into the wash basins instead of the WCs, with the result we had to deal with a sea of undrained vomit. Maybe she was ill with bulimia, in hindsight I think she was, but did that excuse from not vomiting in the WCs?
My mother has a huge toilet obsession. My sister and I remember how she would carry wads of tissue in her bag in case her children ever needed to use a public loo, so that we wouldn’t touch anything directly-we had to hold the tissue and then hold on to the bars in train toilets to keep our balance. Or she would be holding us. We would be instructed never to touch our bums on western style seats but to raise ourselves off the seats and pee without dripping on to the rim! We traveled everywhere by train, on long journeys, but she once made my sister R2 and me pee in plastic bags on a train, when she felt the toilets were unusable. Thankfully I have no memory of this incident, but R2 does.
I blame my toilet fetish entirely on my mother and her horror of outside loos. Now, even if I am in a really clean five star loo, it, erm..still takes me a while to get comfortable. My mother, of course, blames her obsession on her mother. Even now, if we are with my mother, she will stand outside the toilet door saying “Don’t touch anything…”
Once A and I were part of a school expedition to a wildlife sanctuary, where we stayed overnight. The toilets were so bad, they overflowed. Experiences like these have etched themselves indelibly on his memory, and even now, he has nightmares about it. He has actually woken up suddenly at night, in a cold sweat, thinking of them. The last nightmare inducing loo he encountered was in Strasbourg a few years ago, a strange thing, with a shelf like contraption. He shivers at the thought of it.
The privilege of living in our own house, and the comfort that it brings, with our own bathrooms, is indescribable. The right to a clean loo and the responsibility of learning how to use it, should be universal. It is especially hard for women in India, men, after all, feel they can pee anywhere (even when they do have a toilet they are not averse to spraying everywhere but into the pot). Women have to, as Paromita Vohra’s film pointed out, Q2P.
Also read:
The Politics of Toilets
Energy International constructs Sulabh Shauchalayas (pay as you go public toilets).
Sulabh International Website
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OMG! I think we have the same mother. My mom does EXACTLY this. Her OCDs (& mine) also extend to never touching door handles or staircase railings or elevator buttons in public directly with our hands.
If we run out of tissues to do this, we always have an emergency supply of Hand Sanitizer!
I am Q2C – Q’ing to confess! Same OCDs here. I have liquid hand sanitizers, wet wipes hand sanitizers and tissues. I use my well-shod foot to flush. And am sure I’ll be passing on my compulsions to the kids.
Me too, and I don’t even have kids. I worry about the environmental impact of wet wipes.
OMG I have OCD too when it comes to toilets. I have trained myself not to use public restrooms…
~ ahh!
Yes!
Oh god. Me too. I almost never use public restrooms, so much that I refuse to do train journeys that involve more than an over night travel so that I neednt use the darned loos.
I also have nightmares about bad loo experiences and I hate it
My earlier job involved me working in client offices across the city and very often there were no women working there and hence no proper loos even..so I’d find the nearest 5 star hotel and take a trip there to do the job! And if that doesnt work, I’d just stop drinking anything liquid..I think I’m going to die of some urinary infection some day!
And I’m now fighting terribly hard not to pass on those same inherited OCDs to Nino. Ofcourse I take him to the women’s loo in public places, Ofcourse I use wads of toilet paper, Ofcourse I slater sanitizers.
He turned to me one day and said, if you are ‘frightened’ of the loo in the mall so much, Mumma, put a diaper on me.
Hi.. Nice read.. Though i was a little disturbed about the word ‘toilet fetish’ being used over and over again.. I thought I had it wrong.. Webster’s seems to have ‘fixation’ mentioned amongst all of this :
fetish: an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner ; broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence b: an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion : prepossession c: an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression
Remya, I do treat the bathroom with a great deal of reverence, and in an almost ritualistic manner, which is why I used the word fetish. Where the toilet is not mine, there is a certain order to doing things, ie taking out the tissue first etc etc and a superstition attached to not doing them in a certain way…It’s almost like inheriting a religious ritual from my mother.
hey looks like we can start a club here!
indian style loos are way more sanitation-friendly, if kept clean of course.
Heh – I don’t know of ANY middle-class desi women without this fetish! Of course, given their circumstances, it takes slightly different forms – my mother didn’t have access to tissues, so always carried soap and a bottle of water to wash her hands obsessively on trains and so on…
Hovering to pee, not drinking water when travelling – all tricks every Indian woman learns.
My hostel toilets were Indian style – thankfully – I do think it is easier to manage in Indian-style loos than western – you don’t have to worry about not being tall enough to hover, for one!
M
Our hostel toilets were Indian style too, that didn’t stop people from not flushing! Ah yes, the washing of hands with a bottle of water and not from the train taps…
If all desi women feel this way (my sampling is of the above commentors and all my desi friends here in the U.S) why do I always encounter the filthiest toilets in America in Indian movie theaters, Indian social events, Indian restaurants,… Could it be that in our fetish for not touching anything we sometimes dont check what we left behind? Its disgusting…really.
My greatest desire is to do this act sometime in the presence of the ‘unflusher’ and hope they are suitably embarassed.
For the last several years now, I have made it a habit to flush an unflushed loo with my foot if I see one in a public restroom in the hope of saving the next person that gross sight. Of course, I dont use that loo even after flushing it down. I choose a cleaner one for myself
Vomitting in the WC…I am still trying but will be honest here, it makes me a little sqeamish.
No problem if it doesn’t clog the drain and you don’t leave the vomit behind for others to clean! I ALWAYS check if something is left behind, and like you flush for others as a public service…
Yup. Men simply have no regard for women when it comes to peeing everywhere they wish. I propose that women must have separate loos on Indian railways. I saw separate loos on many trains abroad and there’s no reason why we cant have them too.
Yes, and I’m a man saying this.
Anyways, I’m from Delhi too, and here is a link to my comic (on what men want):
http://bigotblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/what-men-want/
Shouldn’t have read this before sitting down at dinner.
Sorry!
what made you write about this?I had to pinch my nose as I was
reading.So real.Well written, though I want now to banish some
thoughts..Must say you made me enjoy reading about something
this unpleasant !!.Any particular reason why chinese toilets don’t find any
mention here?.
Also, abt the cleaning,I believe that the member of the household who
cleans the loo, is the one with the most concern for the wellness of the
family.
You really don’t want to know the reason…! As for Chinese toilets, I have never experienced them.
Re the last comment- my husband was visiting a factory in China, and needed to use the toilet. Unfortunately it had neither water nor toilet paper, so he didn’t use it, and spent several hours in discomfort till he got back to his hotel.
Yes, ‘a loo of one’s own’- I think I need to write the book!
I find that we have managed to have clean and decent loos in some of our shopping malls in Kolkata, but the airport loos, both domestic and international, are an apology.
I think Indians are really clean people only when it comes to their own personal stuff. I was actually talking about this to my manager. BUT when it comes to anything not their “own”, not even “Indian” can make them forget that, “it is NOT theirs”. Some one else used it. MUST BE UNCLEAN.
The American couple who live next doors dont even wear slippers/ chappals when they go to do the laundry. I still wear my outside slippers and patter slowly into the laundry room. I have been horrified a lot of times at how BAD toilets in temples in America are. I first of all dont advocate the idea of having a toilet within the same complex as the temple and since the people who usually clean are non-Indian contractors, it embarrases me to no end. One came up to me and asked, “Is this how people keep clean in a religious place?”
My whole gripe about India being described as a third world country lies in the fact that we still live in dread of finding a toilet on trips. What then is the situation for a poor person?
DID IT AGAIN!!! I am the only person who can turn a funny story into a moralizing situation…