Between Waste and Food

FMS#359 || Faridabad-NCR || May 2018

O-0-o-oh uncle! Don’t press so hard; the pain is unbearable.

Crystals have accumulated in the soles of your feet.

Crystals!? Where from?

They’re residues of waste. The body discards through sweat, urine, shit, breath, menstrual blood, but what gets left behind forms crystals in the body. I try and locate them in the soles of your feet to remove them. The pain you are feeling is the crystals dissolving.

O-0-o-oh uncle! There’s a huge problem in how waste is thought about and acted on in our society.

What problem?

It is sensed by all but remains unthought. And it keeps becoming a bigger and more tangled knot. If it is brought into debate, much will uncoil and unfurl. If you think about shit you’ll see layer upon layer of cruelty and violence. Something as natural as shit has so many curtains drawn over it.

In factories thought about toilets is less, and prohibitions on going to the toilet are more.

That which is natural, and which comes from everyone, has been imposed upon a few and kept out of thought. O-0-o-oh!

The ESI hospital building in Okhla has a mountain of the city’s waste right beside it.

Everyone has seen that mountain. Everyone has seen the bodies at work on it. Everyone has seen fans in the hospital throw its air on patients. The bigger it gets in the world, the more it recedes from thought.

From the soles of your feet it seems to me the same can be said of food. What do you eat? You can shit well only if you eat well. Once the stomach becomes light, the heart turns buoyant.

Uncle now you are joking. Place and time to eat are uncertain for us. And the quality too.

Listen. When my children were little, the house used to run on his — uncle’s — earnings. I used to cook, but he used to be so satisfied with canteen food that taking food to work from home never occurred to him. Today my son, my daughter, and I work. We don’t have time, and we run around to cook food to take to work with us. None of us trust the canteen.

Aunty, did uncle brag a bit much, you think? I’ve never heard of workers having that kind of control over quality of food in factories. O-0-o-oh uncle! Are you pressing in anger now?

Ha ha ha! Not at all! So listen: Egg curry once a week, and once a week meat, one day kheer-puri, and one day kadhi-rice along with kidney beans or lentils, salad, vegetables, four chapatis, and thick yogurt. We’d talk about the quality of food in different factories. And if we heard praise for food in another canteen, we’d insist we get what they have. Once in a while we’d even take some snacks — samosa or bread pakora or chicken — home with us. And you won’t believe the ruckus we created if the daal was watered down!

You’re saying quality and nutrition of food were part of daily conversation? That has withered away, uncle.

I don’t think it’s withered away. The conversation has been shrunk, been turned into the family’s responsibility, even reduced into becoming every individual’s own effort. This, when it is something that should be debated publicly and by all, so that the infrastructures around food become robust, address life as a feast.

Food has got divorced from nourishment, and even embellished food is look at with despondency.

This ties back to what you were saying earlier about waste. Attitudes towards food and towards waste seem similar. These attitudes overlap at weddings, and the line between food and waste gets blurred. The human body becomes the vanishing point between the two.

Uncle, I am feeling the cure-rest of dissolving crystals. I think I might sleep now. I wonder if food and waste will carry on in my dreams.

Let them. In dreams, thoughts germinate.

Fms May 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd