My issue with tissue

There are many traumas an intrepid traveler faces after landing in the US from India.

Firstly, there's the problem of language- watching endless reruns of "Friends" sitting in your house, fanning away the mosquitoes, while eating sambar rice does NOT prepare you for the barrage of words that comes out of the big, black officer at the immigration counters at JFK. You can only stand there, mouth slightly agape, looking a bit goggle-eyed while he (or she) sighs in frustration at yet another uneducated, uncool, fresh-off-the-boat novice.

Next comes the total unfriendliness of the chaps loitering about the baggage claims area who refuse to help a lone woman out with her luggage. They lean back, hands in their pockets, with the look of men who are about to enjoy the spectacle of a small being wrestling heroically with a piece of luggage twice her weight, trying to get it on to the cart which refuses to cooperate. Mute appeals for help are met by blank stares.

You finally leave the area, pushing the cart ahead of you, catching your breath, and you come to the airport lobby where there are shops galore. You step into one of them and get the third jolt- the excessive friendliness of the American checkout girl. This friendliness is, of course, fake to some degree, but the trick is to learn to what degree. You can't respond to her with unabashed gratitude, then you'll be met with a freezing stare. You can't respond to her with a totally aloof look, a supercilious raised eyebrow, say. Then you're just being a bitch. You have to balance it out- learn to play it aloof, yet approachable. Friendly, but only to a certain degree. Warm, but with the definite possibility of cool.

But all these are very minor jolts, blemishes on your horizon that blow away as soon as you stop thinking about them. But the big jolt, the one that you don't think about at all, but makes your life a bit miserable every, single day is the toilet.

Public toilets in the airports of the East, whether in India or Dubai, are equipped with an invention which, in my mind, is the greatest one in the past century- the little butt-washer shower. This is a tiny little shower, which has a handle. When the handle is pressed, a stream of high pressure water comes out of the shower, which you then direct to the essential parts of your body after you do your deeds. With a little maneuvering, there is no excessive water spillage, no need to struggle with toilet papers, no need to keep flushing a thousand times to get rid of unseemly stains and best of all, a truly clean nether region.

No toilet- public or private- in the US has such a nifty system. You have to struggle with other people's spills on the seat, then with the toilet paper dispenser and then with cleaning your hands and if you're truly paranoid, viewing with suspicion other people's hands. If you leave any messes in the bowl, you either shrug and say, Eh, the cleaning lady will take care of it or you stand there and flush and re-flush till you feel you can leave with some dignity intact.

And even worse, the doors on these toilets don't close tightly (what IS with that?). Who the heck wants a little space between every single piece of metal making up the booth, such that everyone outside the booth can see (if they just stared a bit) all your trials and tribulations within it? Why can't people just make them like real rooms? No. Some of them go to the extent of placing couches with pretty cushions and intricately carved tables inside the restroom, outside the booths (in the off chance that someone may want to host a tea party in there) and then they make the booths such that the person inside can look outside through the spaces between the door and wall, and the people outside can catch glimpses of the bare bottom of the person inside.

You cringe in the beginning at this blatant lack of privacy, at this open show of non-hygienic cleaning. Then, you reconcile with the first, saying, ah well, it's not like I have anything that everybody else doesn't... so let them see me and I shall see them.

So, as with everything else in life, given a little time, you adjust.

But the cleaning of the tissue is the real traumatizing issue of all. Let me wring my hands together and say those supremely ineffectual words, "Something needs to be done about this!"