Last Night in Memphis
What’s the worst smell you can imagine? To me it is the smell of human waste smeared and evaporating on the side of a hotel toilet for an entire day. With the windows closed.
That’s what we came home to on our last night in the city that never sleeps with Ben Popik. "Hi, I’m in room 215, and there is human waste smeared on the inside of our toilet, I wonder what you might be able to do about that, because it’s ruining my life….I see…Uh huh….Are you Indian? No way what part?…Oh, you know, I was supposed to study abroad in Hyderabad….That’s so funny…Yeah, I loved the God of Small Things…"
They sent a man up to clean. While the caste system may be a post colonial relic, I know that this man was an untouchable. He couldn’t do anything about the smell or explain why there was human waste smeared on the inside of our toilet and not water in the bowl.
So we got a new room. Actually it was exactly the same room, but this one was "Deluxe" which I guess is Hindi for "with microwave and ironing board."