The Shittiest Place On Earth
I’m not like the biggest fan of train or bus station bathrooms. I mean, I don’t think that like, everyone else is all, “Yay! Can’t wait to use the bathroom at Port Authority!” But I feel like, that if there’s even the tiniest possibility that a homeless person might have used a bathroom like once, then that’s a bathroom I don’t want to even go near.
So my husband Jesse, his friends, and I went to this huge monsoon wedding in Mumbai earlier this summer. It was hands down one of the most insanely cool weddings I’d ever been to. I got my hands done up in henna, wore a sari, and danced with a thirty piece marching band while the groom rode a white horse. A horse!
After the wedding, we took a trip to see the Taj Mahal, which required a train ride to get to. I had been against the train idea from the start after seeing some horrifying youtube videos of men overflowing out train windows and riding on roofs.
“Oh honey, that’s the commuter rail,” Jesse had assured me. “We’re riding first class. It’s totally different.”
I felt OK about it then, imagining some kind of Orient Express experience—white gloves, tea service, maybe a good looking stranger in the next car over. I mean, just to talk to.
Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling so hot the day of our departure from Mumbai. I had that rumbly tummy thing going on—the kind of thing that if the room is really quiet and your stomach makes that sound, everyone knows you have gas pains so you just go, “Man I’m starving!”
As we approached the station I started to worry. What was with all the livestock? And where were all the other first class people?
We shoved our way up the stairs and tried to read the signs to find our train platform but unfortunately my Hindi wasn’t up to snuff. Some not-so-pleasant-looking policemen with machine guns gruffly pointed us in the right direction. I looked around and noticed that in addition to there being no benches to sit on, there wasn’t one single snack stand. I mean, not like my stomach could handle a snack at that moment but you never know.
“Guys, isn’t there like, the Indian version of Acela or something, that we could take instead?”
Once we got to our platform I felt worse. I don’t know if it was the flies that I was constantly swatting away or the incessant mooing of the cow next to me, but I suddenly had to vomit.
But I hadn’t seen any sign of a bathroom anywhere so far. And I judged from the people around us lying on blankets with pails next to them for the day’s trash, that garbage cans were strictly BYO.
Just then, I glanced over to the train tracks and saw a mother dangling her half-naked son right over the tracks. Oh no! She’s going to kill him! Someone do something! Damn this train station! Look what it is doing to people! But then I realized that she was just giving him a landing spot for his poop. Just like, “Oh, don’t mind my son. He’s just defecating onto the railway. No big deal!”
“Oh God. Please don’t tell me that’s the bathroom,” I said to my friend Hana. “Because if so, I think I need to throw up there right now.”
But then something worse happened. As if in some kind of freak natural response to seeing another person shit, suddenly I was hit by the most uncontrollable desire to go like I’ve never had to go before.
I took Hana’s hand and we raced to find a real bathroom. I didn’t think anyone would be able to hold me up over the tracks for that long and that would just be like the worst travel dying story ever.
We found a place with a sign overhead that read “Lady’s Lounge”. In my past experiences (Bloomingdales, Barney’s, Sak’s), “Lady’s Lounge” meant a nice clean place with flowers, upholstered stools, and unlimited tissues. But all I really wanted at that moment was a toilet, so when we burst through the door and saw, to our disappointment, that the women in there were, simply, lounging (on the floor) and that there was no bathroom, I started to cry.
We ran until we found some official looking people not holding machine guns and I tried unsuccessfully to ask them where the bathroom was. They had no idea what “bathroom”, “washroom”, “wc”, or “take a monster dump” meant. When I clutched my stomach in pain, they finally understood and pointed back toward the direction of the Lady’s Lounge.
We booked it back to the Lounge where Hana pointed to a crevice in the wall.
“I think we need to go through here.”
We were like regular Nancy Drew’s! Well, through that crevice, on the other side of it, was in fact a bathroom. I leapt to the stall and threw open the door.
You know that moment when you’ve had to go sooooo badly and you’re just about to land on the toilet seat and it’s like HEAVEN because ohgod you didn’t think you would make it? That’s where I was, and you’d think beggars can’t be choosers but my phobia kicked in so hardcore that I could not move one leg in front of the other.
Here was the situation: The walls of the stall were covered in some kind of poop graffiti. The floor had a nice thick coating of green slime, and included in the mess for some reason was, the remnants of a juice box. And of course, there was no toilet paper—just a faucet that I guess you’re supposed to run your left hand under and wipe yourself with (which is why you only pass things with your right hand in India). And at this point I think I would have been OK with going into a giant bottomless hole—but no. My plight included this thing you step onto with cutouts for your shoes that slope downward into a tiny hole.
“I can’t do it!” I said to Hana.
“You have no choice!” she said, shaking me.
I looked at the row of sinks lining the wall, an idea hatching in my head. Maybe if no one was looking?
But then two Indian women walked into the bathroom and looked at me like, “So, American Jew from New Jersey. You gonna go or are you gonna just stand there and admire our sinks all day?”
It was a shit or get off the pot moment but I just had to get to the pot or um, footsie hole thing.
So I went in. The whole time I was in there I had Hanna hold my pocket book and hand me my things. And it went down like some kind of complicated surgery where I was the doctor and she was the nurse and I’d be like, “Charmin toilet tissue.” “Wipes.” “Hand sanitizer.”
I cried when it was over, and I was so disgusted with myself I made her flush. My whole body shook as she dabbed a refreshing peppermint wipe over my sweating forehead.
“There, there.”
On a recent trip to visit my parents I was in Port Authority. Before I boarded the bus I realized that I kinda had to pee. I walked into the bathroom there, and prepared for something bad. Like for the homeless person to jump out and go “oogabooga” and spray me with her germs. And you know what, it was no Bloomies Lady’s Lounge, but it was like, clean. It was then that I realized: Hell, as long as I don’t have to squat in a footsy hole, the bathrooms at Port Authority might as well be the freaking Taj Mahal.
Happy New Year, Y’alls
6 years ago
