Shefali Tripathi Mehta, Dec 23, 2012
Humour
Humour
Mother Earth refused to take our dump. Landfills filled full
and mountains of garbage threatened to flood back to drown us in our own muck.
Then Bangalore sat up and groaning under its load,
implemented waste se-gre-gat-ion. Bangalore piles up 3500 tonnes of garbage
each day. The farmers around the landfills took up scythes and a desperate
administration implemented desperate measures.
But inside
homes rubbish happened. On my floor alone there is a garbage thug that leaves
it out in the common area each day, and has never been caught litter-handed. Can
Houdini’s blood brother/sister be expected to comply as long as they can
get away with trashing like this?
And here I
am with a pile of garbage before disposal bins that are labelled Wet, Dry, Kitchen waste, Biodegradable and not-that. Not-that is
further split into – Recyclable, Toxic, Soiled. Where does my milk packet – its inside milk-licked go? Why the
sanitary pad that the ad says always dry, not so? The food foil, the toffee
wrapper goes into Dry but is not
recyclable. I never messed with such, I swear.
The house-help finding her position
threatened, assumes authority and informs me that it is simply ‘kitchen waste’
and ‘all else’! So garden leaves, she says is not kitchen waste but ‘all else’.
If the discarded palak leaf is ‘kitchen waste’, how dare she discriminate against
the fern! She challenges, ‘Eat and show?’ So I stuff the fern leaf – no, not in
mouth but into another big bag I call Moot!
Kleenex and noses! How the muck did we
land up with so much garbage!
Two decades ago, when foreign-returned talked of the pile up
of junk in foreign and said in foreign they don’t repair, just ‘dispose
off’ – cars and refrigerators of all things, everyone listened wide-eyed.
We had an army of grime-collared and
amazingly efficient men who mended, oiled and painted to ‘brand new’ everything
they could lay their dirty nails on. There were drycleaners who darned and dyed,
repair guys that mended mixers, geysers, coolers, fans, even flasks; the
sofaman squashed back jutting out sofa springs; tailors and mothers came
together to turn old sarees into jholas and cushion covers, faded sheets into mattress
covers, which by the way, weren’t foam or poly-fill but cotton that was beaten
and fluffed out and added to when flattened out. Ditto with razais and pillows.
Nothing had to be thrown away, shoe boxes were amassed for craft projects; fused
bulbs carefully tipped out to grow money plants.
There were cows in the aangan or the
neighbour’s aangan to be fed the leftovers. The kitchen did not generate waste
that could not be dumped in the garden to turn into compost. Frugality wasn’t
frowned upon because nothing was two-minute. No snip of scissors produced ready-to-cook
or to eat rice, curry, paste or puree in tetra or plastic packs. When bitter
gourd was served for dinner, we knew what was coming for lunch the next day -
its skin. Milk came in glass bottles that had to be washed and exchanged for
more. So did soft drink. If you broke one, you repented.
Birthday and unbirthday parties had
people borrowing plates, spoons and glasses from neighbours. Wash and use was
the mantra. One person was engaged to wash all evening for a continuous
water-dripping stream of plates and spoons. It did not matter that some people
had to wait because patience was not in short-supply.
If the Sunday morning breakfast was to be got
from the bazaar, steel tiffin carriers and dabbas were taken along, no eatery
offered take-away plastic dabbas even for the price of Rs 2 and 5 we pay now. Atta
was stored in Postman oil cans and dal in Sixer biscuit tins. Pearlpets, Tupperwares
shelved those out. Cling foils, bubble sheets, zip pouches—how much plastic,
polythene...we cannot do without! Even our soap, shampoo and ointment look
delectable in shiny plastic containers on supermarket shelves.
Waste people, all of us have become! Wait till treating someone like dirt
becomes a term of reverence.
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