spring2015

Ashok NiyogiElegy to a Flush TapIn India, we still don’t use toilet paper. Mostly.People like me,Who have polluted themselves by crossing oceans back and forthMay have strangely regressed to the unhygienic practice of wiping their ass.But as widely reported,Six hundred and fifty million still defecate in the open.We the fortunate, on the other hand, pass refined and cultured stool.With a little help.Look at my toilet seat.This ‘water-jet’ seat-attached appurtenance is progress.My father sent me to an Irish Christian Brothers’ SchoolAnd I recited “….lend me your ears…” bare-throated,Learnt to cover my Macaulay ass.Now, how can I go out into the fields?Therefore, my ‘inclusive-India’ babies,Let the river wash your backside no more;You’re educated now and part of a United Nations programme;Bring the river into your bathroom on tap,Let it lap.My ‘jet’ has been with me for seventeen years.It has washed my rebellious forties alcoholic bumAnd aged with me, wrinkled with me.My gyrations have changedWith my sciatica, male menopause, with theHorribly fast metamorphosing commerciality of my newspaper;But the jet remains true and intense.If anything, it has gained in intelligence,Like computers do, and generations who are not malnourished anymore.It probes with increasing vigour contours that only age can create;It has adapted to my vegetarianism and the consequent bovinityOf my excretion, it understands that nowadays, in addition,I need a water-massage.But lately, we are renovating. One last time before death,Senility or painful lingering smelly disease.May God bless us in this sinful day and age of warming,Drought and rising oceans.Before the jet abandons us, we are abandoning it.This I lament.A hand-held sprinkler will henceforth dust our backsides53