From the memoir: What waiting in line at toilets taught a Dalit writer about social inequality

I think my life shares as deep a bond with my excretory system as it does with my respiratory system, for whenever I jog my memory and drag it to the far end of my early childhood, the odd things that invariably surface on that mnemonic landscape are the sordid toilets of the neighbouring chawl, named after its owner Hiralal. And rightly so. For, as if the question of filling the bottomless pits of hunger was not vexed enough, the daily dilemma of emptying our bowels had made our lives, both personal and social, embarrassing and miserable.

The rub was that our chawl didn’t have even a single public toilet attached to it, something that compelled us to use those hellish toilets of Hiralal’s chawl. Kids like us could squat anywhere on the footpath outside, but what would the elders do? And what about the women? Our chawl was inhabited in large part by the Rohits, people of the tanner caste, who had migrated from Charotar, a large swathe of fertile land covering districts like Kheda and Anand in central Gujarat. However, the rest of the chawls, including that of Hiralal, were populated by the Vankars, people of the weaver caste,...

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