Garbage: Where Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Ends
When life imitates art, something bites. Amandeep Sandhu wrote Garbage much before the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan began to define the cleanliness of our public spaces. Talk to your garbage, seriously, even if without dialogues.
Location: The corner of a park, an intersection of roads.
Act I
11.30 PM. The locality has gone to sleep. Mosquitoes and cockroaches have come to life. An odd light remains in the windows of the locked homes around the park. An occasional motorbike makes its way on the semi-lit road. A streetlight glows next to a transformer.
A shadow enters the road. Under the glare of the streetlight the shadow disappears and a figure emerges. It walks soundlessly. Its hands carry a large polythene packet. Its face unclear to the window of a house about fifteen meters from the streetlight, opposite the park.
The figure approaches the streetlight cautiously. Looks over its shoulder, and twitches. Its full hands do not move more than a few inches from the body. The polythene packet is now on the base of the streetlight. Its job done, the figure looks around again. It recedes.
Ten minutes later another figure comes into the street. From the second floor window, above the tops of the trees in the park, one can see the figure is from the lane behind the one next to the park. No house in this lane has opened its door for no rectangle of light has formed on the road. This figure too approaches the streetlight. It throws a full polythene bag and vanishes. Through the night, more figures come.
Act II
By 5 am when the vigil resumes at the window, the foot of the street light is covered with polythene bags with rotting sambar and rasam and rice in them, dirty paper plates, plastic bowls and glasses, thermocol packing material, used notebooks, CDs. Every thing is in neat bundles, but everything is garbage. A black and white and another brown dog are poking their nose in it, opening the packets. A brown cow with white patches resembling the different states of India comes to the garbage dump.
As soon as the cow comes to the garbage dump, an old man in a white dhoti and kurta appears with three small bananas in his hand. He offers it to the cow. The cow sniffs at the bananas, exhales harshly and puts its head into the trash. Unperturbed, the man stands there for a minute. When the cow does not attempt to eat the bananas, the man neatly puts it close to her mouth on top of the garbage. Then he touches her neck, touches his head, murmurs a prayer and leaves.
A cart arrives. A disheveled man alights. His clothes are rags. His once cream shirt, torn at the back, is now brown. His long hair is astray. His scraggly beard is rough. He does not wear slippers. His toe nails claw out of his blackened foot. He starts rummaging through the garbage. Picking out plastic bottles and tossing them into his open cart. He picks the bigger polythene packs, disgorging their contents in the garbage heap: sambar, rice, rotten cooked vegetables. He finds a bicycle tyre.
Older ladies in expensive sneakers pass by him on their way to the park for their morning walks, polythene packs in hand. They aim their throws across the man sifting through the garbage. At times he takes welcome catches.
Act III
The houses around the park came up a decade ago. That is when the slum dwellers who owned them as compensation for their slum being razed sold them to more middle class people. At that time the park was a barren ground. On Sunday mornings a right wing outfit used the ground — school kids and young adults in white shirts and khaki shorts performed the drill and attentively listened to speeches. In the late evenings it was used by local boys to drink and play cards, and on late nights an open urinal. Some nights live bands played in the ground. A small temple sneaked up on one side of the park. Linguistic and state fanatics put up a red and yellow flag. Now all that is over but the flag still stands. It is frayed now. No one has changed it.
A neighbor filed a public interest litigation to convert the ground into a park. Some neighbours created a play space for children. The municipal corporator fenced the ground keeping the temple out of the fence. That was its license to grow bigger and bigger. The temple top now looms large over the side of the park opposite its main gate. The ladies cross the gate of the park and start walking. Some walk solo, others in groups of two or three. The rag picker segregates the wet garbage from dry, picking out the reusable materials and loading them into the cart.
Another neighbor, the corporator’s man in charge of the park, enters the park like a cockerel does a chicken coop. He is setting his dyed hair, silently nodding at greetings, smiling a bit too much. He opens a tap. Water shoots out of the drip irrigation pipes in the lawns. An unruly hose unleashes itself on the morning walkers. They look up.
The man appears busy with the pipes. He does not say anything. Walkers continue with their walk. The man scolds the old gardener who carries the leaves to the garbage dump in spite of being barely able to walk. The gates of the park are tight, tied together with a chain. Some leaves fall. The gardener dumps the leaves, twigs and branches on the garbage and comes back to collect the fallen ones.
Act IV
The priest comes out of the temple and dumps all the puja flowers on the small garbage mountain. The cart man picks up a plastic Ayappa picture that has fallen on the garbage dump and goes away. The cow eyes the flowers and barely moves. Then the cleaning lady arrives in her dirty green coat worn over a yellow sari with her rickety wheelbarrow, one rear wheel broken. She runs through the garbage with a short stick. It hits something hard. She probes and puts her hand in to retrieve a kalash. A small pitcher. Brass.
She tucks it in her coat and starts sweeping the road. Passing vehicles interrupt her. She tries to pick the little bit of garbage lying on the road. She is exhausted and leaves her cart on the side of the road and starts asking the walkers for money. Some merely look at her, others give her a rupee. Many ignore her. The man with dyed hair gives her a Rs 5 coin. She collects enough for a coffee and perhaps also a bun. She leaves and after a while returns to sit under a tree. By lunch time, she gets up, throws the bags she has filled with trash into the garbage dump.
While the priest goes to the man with the dyed hair to confer, an old man who has watched the pantomime from his perch in the next house opposite the garbage dump comes down the stairs . He pokes the dump with a long stick, settles it. The cleaning lady joins him. He collects a few paper items and sets them on fire. The wet leaves and branches from the park take time to catch fire. There is smoke all around. It causes him to cough. The smoke fills up the skies.
Act V
It is late afternoon. The roads are deserted again. There is a light shower. The rain puts out the smoke but does not drench the embers. The dogs, cows, crows and humans have increased the circle of garbage. Torn polythene bags, yesterday’s sambar and rice, squelched flowers now litter the roads.
A garbage truck arrives. It is already full to the brim. Two workers get down with a spade and a flat cane basket. They pull out packs of garbage and load it onto the truck. The ground below is soggy. Their gum boots get caught in the squelch. They pick the garbage, load it into their truck, leave a lot of it on the road and leave as quickly as possible.
The man with the dyed hair and the priest come back and scold the cleaning lady. He demands to see the kalash. She feigns surprise, starts crying. The priest turns accusatory. Finally she brings it out from under her coat. The man orders her to wash it and bring it back. When she returns, the priest sees her spitting on the kalash and wiping it on her coat to make it shine. Seeing that, he does not take the kalash. The lady walks away with it.
In the peak of noon everything is still. The cow is the only one still standing there, far away from the temple. Some people, while passing it, touch its body and then their foreheads. The cow shoos them away with its one and a half horns. A fat rat comes out from under the park fence. Another one joins it. A dog comes chasing them. The one watching from his windows goes off to make tea. When the vigil resumes, there is one round white polythene pack, tied on top, sitting pretty on the dark, wet ground where a garbage pile will again start forming soon.