the trials of a chamber pot

I lived across the street from a family that had just moved into the country, I think from India. They were very poor and I wanted to help them out however I could, especially since they had three small children. I watched out my window as they carried a rusty pile of metal up the hill in front of my house and left it there. The way they carried it was to be completely enclosed in the metal. When they got out from under it, I saw that one of the children had no shirt on, and his back was covered in rust, except for his shoulder blades, which were bare.

A little later, I went across the road, planning to offer my services as a babysitter, should the parents want to get out sometime. The children weren’t around; I don’t know if they were at school or sleeping elsewhere in the house, though the house was really small. The parents invited me in and I watched the dad doing some repairs for a little bit while the wife cleaned. The man was very skinny and had a moustache; he was on a stepladder, hammering something. The wife was plump; both seemed friendly.

I asked him where the bathroom was and he told me; I went to it and saw that it wasn’t entirely enclosed. The room had two walls, an open front wall instead of a door, and for the final end wall, another room’s door, when it was opened, would block the way and give a little privacy. However, the ‘bathroom’ was right across from the front door to the house, and it was open to let in the sunlight. There wasn’t a toilet, sink, or bathtub, either, there was just a small, blue-seated thing that looked like a training toilet for children. I went back to the dad and asked him if I was to use the blue toilet, or if there was a particular one for women to use. He smiled at my ignorance of their culture, thinking it was nice of me to ask, and told me to use the blue one. I went back to it and now the blue toilet was gone, but in its place was a dresser. The top drawer was pulled out and I knew I was supposed to use the bathroom in that. I heard the husband telling the wife that she ought to help me, because they knew I wouldn’t be able to reach that drawer to pee in it.

The wife came to me, carrying a small, golden chamber pot about the size of a sugar bowl. The lid and opening were maybe two inches in diameter, and I was supposed to squat over that small opening and somehow not pee all over the place. She gave it to me, saying that it would need emptying. There was another chamber pot just like it behind me, underneath the chest of drawers. I didn’t know what she meant about emptying the pot, so I started to open it so I could maybe pour its contents into the other chamber pot under the dresser, or vice versa. She stopped me, however, saying that the contents was some of the worst stuff on earth. In opening it, I sloshed some of its contents on myself. It smelled bad, but not as bad as I was expecting; it seemed as if oil had been mixed with the other contents, so as to make it less unpleasant to have around. She left me then so that I could have some privacy. I set the chamber pot she had given me down on the floor and then tried to pee in it, but it was really difficult to aim because the pot was so short and the opening so small, so I spilled some on the floor, which was a beige carpet.

After I was finished, I left the pot there and went to talk with the wife and her husband again. I watched the wife take both chamber pots and empty them right outside the front door in the gravel walkway. We all then sat down to dinner; the wife had prepared some dish with rice and maybe pork or chicken. I jokingly told them that, in my experience with other cultures, I had realized the Western World got two things right: the fork, over chopsticks, and the toilet, over chamber pots. They laughed.