Fifty four, old and withered. He bicycled twenty-one kilometers to work, from a small bustling town, Bantwal, He helped in my department as a menial, helping shift bodies and organs from and to the dissection hall. Always smiling, his pearly white teeth glistened against his dark complexion. Once or twice, I had to tick him off for being too shabby for work: after all the college did provide him with two sets of khaki clothes every term – and he was required to wear them everyday – yet he often wouldn’t. Washed but not dried yet sir…sorry sir…tomorrow sir, his excuses were always the same – forever blaming the monsoons for all his woes, especially. He was a tireless employee, and that alone got him away from official chastisement and reprimand. Discipline was big in my institute, and yet, Sheena, was perhaps the only one who defied it – but as I mentioned, except for his aversion to wearing khaki, especially on Mondays, was  his only weak link – along with his incessantly mobile molars which eternally chewed betel and areca, and apart from his smelling of cheap country liquor, arrack all day, and apart from his penchant for pocketing a coin or two from staff tables when he wiped them clean…… apart from.

It is with relief that one returns home, four hours of ‘fumigation’ with formaldehyde in the dissection hall is enough for anyone.

The drainage is blocked, is the cryptic message waiting for me.

Since when?

This morning. All commodes and sewers are overflowing. Can’t you people do something?

As many from small town backgrounds will know, underground sewerage systems are colonial legacies and remain so. With increasing carriage loads imposed on them, they get clogged and overflow often. Seeping manholes, exuding fetid muck is common sight. No one does anything. Every one passing by an overflowing focus, just averts eys and nose and moves on, and each one in the immediate neighborhood, prays someone else will attend to it. Why, that is the question. Why doesn’t someone who has a blocked commode in their house just ring up the city municipality or corporation and get the problem fixed. Again, small town logic comes in. The gang-men who come to attend to the drain, demand pay-offs after work is done, and usually it is the one who rang up who is fleeced: though all the eighteen residences in the area benefit, all eighteen householders wait for someone else to get the job done. Why pay 300 as ‘baksheesh’ when another neighbor could do it for you?

So I ring up, much to the accompanying muttering of the missus – we get the locality sewers unclogged and it is our money that goes ‘down the drain’….it is always us…mutter, mutter…hiss……

In two hours a crew of seven khaki clad men are busy. They come with their only equipment – long slivers of bamboo tied end to end. This they manipulate through the sewers and piston blocks off. One or two strip down to their underwear and descend into the foul fecal mess and physically clear the manholes. It is laborious and sick stuff. Work done, they get the sewer flowing and every house heaves a sigh….the alarming floatation levels in the drains and commodes has disappeared. A few weeks more peace till it starts all over again. In fact, the ladies of the neighborhood exchange gossip over their walls …the corporation crooks engineer these blocks to fleece the unwary….

Saar??? saar!!!!! is the call at the gate. The gang has to be paid off. All doors and windows in the neighborhood are shut tight. The call repeats louder, saar..oy amma….

I sign a small ruled book the gang-leader thrusts at me “work attended to’ and sign it with date and pay the fellow 300 bucks – he grumbles under his arrack smelling mouth…I press fifty more and he grins. Just as he turns back waving the wad of notes to his work-mates I see one crew member emerge out of the manhole. He is covered head to toe with fecal waste. He shakes himself and gingerly dons his khaki half pants and shirt. I see his teeth, glinting white. Hey, this is Sheena…my anatomy department menial.

He slowly plods to me, looking sheepish and shamed. Namskaara saar.

Sheena, what are you doing here?

I work at weekends saar with the sewerage department as par-timer saar. He leans over to his mate who stuffs seventy odd bucks into his shirt pocket. His share of the takings.

I feel repulsed and revolted. For less than one hundred, a man lowers himself into human waste….lowers his pride, dignity and self esteem…for a hundred. And we sit in our toilets with cigarette and newspaper, humming and whistling our lives away.

Now I know why Sheena doesn’t wear his khaki uniform to work on Mondays. He has to get them washed for they’ve been rinsed and soaked in my own waste. For a livelihood. For a few rupees more.

This week on, I won’t pull up Sheena or any of the other attendant in the department for being off uniform. That’s the least I can do to commiserate with the lot of the have-nots. In the meantime, I pray that our city drainage systems improve, and that someday from now, there will be no need for any human being to manually excavate mounds of coagulated goo from leech pits and manholes