The One Euro Pee

Women have exciting stories to tell and are great storytellers because they are wonderful conversationalists, and they have a primordial aversion to grunting. They love to understand and nod their heads and offer a counter, carefully lay out options, meticulously unravel the mystery, arrive at a confluence and finally – enjoy the convening powers of the washroom. The washroom is where a woman carries her make up, lavishes on a touch mood up, adjusts her clothing, decides to wage a war against the knots and tangles of her hair, and also seeks her refuge to cry. Crying in the washroom, is as noble a deed as peeing, that no fellow woman disturbs you or asks you to hurry up – they leave you alone to your cathartic upheaval, and only intervene, if ever, to point you to which basin gushes forth with a steady supply of water and which dispenser has adequate soap. The washroom is also where generosities of the sanitary napkins are swapped back and forth.

Once during security check at the Chennai airport, the officer sees me, dabs me down with her scanner and says, “aap khol deejiye na, khule baal mein aap achche lagte ho”,

and I went, “aapne kab dekha”?.

She said, “Aapne help kiya na humare staff ko, aapne sanitary napkin di”

I went, “achchaaa”.

And of course, about twenty minutes back I had yelled from inside – midpee – “Helloooo… Aapko sanitary napkin chahiye? Rukhiye, mein deti hoon”.

When you’re waiting in line at a public loo, the strike of the flush is such a divine sound to the ears – you thank Lord Almighty that this person that peed before you, was instilled with the divine intervention that instigated the muscle memory to flush – a lot of people do not have this muscle memory, and in life – whether you find your soulmate or not, or the cute guy on the airplane seat – you definitely wanted the flushers ahead of you.

So the women looked relieved when they heard the sound of flushing too and eyed me with ample curiosity when I zipped open my spilling suitcase, to begin my hunt for sanitary napkins. Amidst the top layer of books, last minute panic lingerie, a ball gown that I never knew why I carried, a small umbrella, gloves, an extra pair of gloves – the sanitary napkins did not belong to the list of quick retrieval, they were the demure bride in a sea of drunken sailors. But five minutes later, I managed to find them and held them up triumphantly. This small incongruent coincidence on the day of ample time at the airport, had earned me my “aap khule baal achche lagte ho”, and had registered my ‘airport look’. I thanked the officer and flicked my hair open.

The next time, I would remember the pee – the one euro pee, would be in Slovenia.

Krakow to Croatia was a long, long ride.

It was 23 hours on the bus.

And that did not count the delays and the passport checks at the borders. The passport checking was a stern, mostly hostile ritual. The borders appeared only when you were deeply ensconced between two clouds of a candy fluff dream – there were prairies after prairies, of grass that was luscious and verde, or of intermittent snow, that ate the grass in blotches and sat without pattern or prettiness, sometimes you were moving in the dream, and sometimes you were not- you were as still as you would be on a lone hard bench on the platform.

“Passaporte”- rudely awakened you, the driver yelling into the microphone.

The winters were grueling, especially between the borders. Couples huddled together, kissed each other on foreheads, lit a cigarette and rubbed each others’ palms and looked half bored and half in love. The bus had to disgorge, empty itself of its confused, slumbering mass of human paraphernalia, and cross over, with only the driver and its mechanical parts, its wheels and engine and luggage of the humans. The driver waited patiently and stretched his legs, not for too long though, because he immediately receded back to the warmth of closed space and a heated engine. We stood there, kicking into the snow or the gravelly tar, sometimes demanding divine intervention, that would somehow, anyhow speeden this slackening rhythm of passport number vs checking for illegality through a computer screen that stored details – about whether you belonged to a piece of land or not,

and whether your current claim to a piece of exotic land, was legitimate or not.

I’ve often stood there and wondered, what if I had calculated the visa eligibility incorrectly, what if I had already exhausted my 90 days on the schengen soil, what if this country wasn’t in the schengen list – sometimes my brown skin was stared at, and sometimes my brown skin stared right back.

Sometimes my passport was withheld longer, sometimes only my luggage was fetched and was asked to be stripped, and the sea of white skin looked at me through the windows, wondering if my skin and I, were both illegal? And unallowed?

After an equal measure of drama and dread, I rolled back into the bus, reclaiming my seat, readjusting the curving of my spine and settling into another deep conversation with insomnia, begging it to leave, pleading with it, with niceties and postponements, assuring that it could come back another day, when I am not a curved ball in a bus, when I haven’t been unceremoniously inspected by bored, mirthless officers at banal country borders, when I didn’t have to pee so badly, and when I should be negotiating way better with my bladder.

I don’t think pee ever recedes back into oblivion, especially on a cold winter night on the bus. You try not to think about it but that’s a throbbing, fully awakened thought – like a gagged hostage in a bank robbery that singularly tries to kick and beat its way out. In India, especially on a bus route between Coimbatore to Chennai, this would be a nightmare – but then it was another new country and there was a supermarket blinking into existence.

We had arrived in Slovenia.

Humans poured themselves out.

I was coming from a Krakow and getting into A Croatia, and hence I had only the polish zloty and the Croatian kuna on me. And the Slovenian washroom insisted on the one Euro, if I had to get the iron bars to click open. So I went to negotiate with the girl at the supermarket, “I buy this fridge magnet? You use my card, charge extra and give me back one euro? So I can go pee?”

She said she’d love to help but didn’t know how, she looked helpless and very sleep deprived. And I was still begging, because I had the ‘pausa’ (break)for exactly 15 minutes and I had already squandered 10, and I hadn’t even reached the fortress with its enemy lines and long queues. Supermarket girl stood her ground too.

And then it happened – this slovenian girl tapped me on my shoulder and said, “here.. Take this one euro and go pee”

I was like, “can I buy you a fridge magnet?”

“No no go pee”.

And she wouldn’t allow any further insistence and shooed me away.

And I trotted off to earn the one Euro Pee.

And every time I see this fridge magnet from Ljubljana, of the Ljubljana Dragon – I think of us, the sorority of women dragons, watching out for one another, on a cold winter night.