Where’s the loo?

This is not the tale of how we always had to strategise before planning to spend the day, or half the day, on our new up-coming forest retreat, “Ganga Van.” The multi-acre campus had no bathroom. It did have an “office block,” with a good-sized room set up as an office, an unfinished bathroom and kitchenette, another small room for guests, and a guard room, pump room, and generator room. There was a toilet adjoining the guard room, but…. with a new squat toilet, tap, and running water, it was good by village standards, but not by mine.

So we could stay on the land only as long as we did not need the loo. As soon as the bathroom mentioned above was fitted out, the whole scenario changed. Changed discursively, that is. I still have never used it. It’s enough to know that I could were I to need to.

I am writing today about the other loo, the wind that blows over the northern plains of Hindustan, ie., India, in the months of May and June. It is a fabled wind. It is searing hot but feels cool to the skin. It lays bare fields and farms, villages and habitations, cleaning up even insects and germs. Were any creature, including a human being, to be so foolish as to expose herself to it, she would be laid down flat with heatstroke, more finely called “loo lag gayi (touched by the loo).”

My half-comic, Kiplingesque description should not fool anyone to the reality of the loo. If anything marks the North Indian summer, it is the loo. It is unpredictable. It can start in mid or late May, and last only a few weeks. Schools and colleges are closed at that time. Those who attend 9 to 5 jobs are in peril, thanks to colonial rule. Earlier, everyone worked right through the summer but from 5 to 9 am, or 6 to 11 am for the laggards, then from 5 to 9 pm. Those who could afford it, used khas ki tatti, or curtains made of fragrant khas grass (vetiver) which was kept moist and transformed the loo blowing through into chilled air. When coolers replaced khas, they had ordinary straw, or even wood shavings on them, and the fragrance was lost, but the coolness remained. The loo is so dry that its rapid evaporation produces a chilling effect, whether on the skin or the air. Oh, and the loo ripens the mangoes and turns sap into succulence.

Now, in this hyper self-colonising era, we are rapidly depleting the environmental resources of our country and the world by plugging up windows with window AC-s and decorating walls with split AC-s. For the vast majority, there are only noisy fans and natural shades. Work effectiveness has not improved and pleasures have not become enriched. The relationship between the seasons and humans has stretched out into an unnatural, unfortunate distancing.

This year, 2021, we have been waiting for the loo. It seemed to start one time in May, but lasted all of two days. Just as we began to create adjusted schedules for work and head covers for reaching the more distant plots, there were thunderstorms and episodic rain. There was a cyclone, Tauktae, that hit the western coast from the Arabian Sea in mid May. Then, just about a week later, the cyclone Yaas, hit the eastern coast from the Bay of Bengal. Both cyclones caused heavy rainfall in our part of the country, eastern Uttar Pradesh, almost mid-way between the two coasts, one would think, far away from the coasts. The thunder and lightning that accompanied the cyclonic storms was by far the loudest and wildest we had ever heard. I imagine it was exacerbated by our being located in the village, with its open vistas, gigantic trees, and shrieking birds and jackals. One can only imagine what the drama must have been like on the coasts.

With two thuderstorms and attendant one-week rains, the loo got chased off the earth and never came back. The thunderstorm rains merged into the early monsoon that  eased effortlessly into the proper monsoon. We are sitting in the middle of monsoon rains now, the land turned to mud, the river rising, drains gearing up to overflow, all low land transforming into ponds. We have not experienced a summer. The mangoes are ordinary, having been ripened artificially in straw and newspaper and with many other tricks.

The monsoons are the most beautiful time of the year. All the excitement of the rains, however, is missing. Where’s the loo? As the wise have always told us, you cannot enjoy something until you have tasted its opposite.