The alone time in a clean toilet

Everyone needs a few minutes of time out every day. It gives them a moment to pause and reflect, away from the madding crowd, away from wives, husbands and children.

Throughout history, men have gone into hiding from family and society, if only for a little while. Nowadays, we call it the alone time.

Some of the most famous historical figures also had the habit of disappearing. Buddha famously chose the Banyan tree, Muhammad took the trouble of climbing a rocky mountain for an hour to hide in a cave. Indeed, their anti-social habits were to become precursors to great civilisations.

These days, time out is a luxury. Plus, you would be lucky to find an empty cave or a tree without the four-legged fertilising it.

So where is your alone time?

My alone time happens once a day, sometimes twice, and on gluttonous days, thrice, in the great room we refer to as the toilet.

“Toilet” is of course the slightly more crass term for bathroom, just like it is politely called locally as “bilik air”, instead of the more honest “jamban” and “tandas”.

Due to this elevated status of the lowly toilet as the abode of my alone time, I have developed an almost obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to ensuring its cleanliness befitting its role as the thinking room.

My idea of a clean toilet is that it should also be dry, and every tool in it should be in working condition. When the flush is faulty, I waste no time to get it done. When the bidet gives way, I thrive at the prospect of actually buying something from the hardware store.

A toilet can be tip top without covering it with luxury fittings or Italian wares. But when your toilet is unsightly and smelly, you are forced to do an Italian job: get in, get out, get even.

A clean and dry toilet would make you want to read good novels in it, whether catching up on your Tolstoy or whizzing through an Enid Blyton. I kid you not, weeks before my SPM exam, whole syllabuses were revised, and I have the thinking room to thank.

I have seen many toilets which are fitted with luxury wares, but which show a deep neglect by its users.

I remember one time in the late 1990s, visiting the toilet at the KLCC mosque. Just weeks into its opening, the flush was faulty. Then again, it was during the reformasi era, when everything we held sacred was beginning to crumble.

But toilets in mosques and other public places make for another huge topic at a different time.

Most Malaysian toilets, whether at home or in public places, are a picture of stink.

In our culture, the toilet is considered an unclean place, and often made to remain so. The logic at play is that it’s a place where faeces and urine rule the day. So instead of spending long hours there, one is supposed to do the Italian job.

And so, little attention is given to the cleanliness of the toilet, except for commercial purposes, as in hotels, malls and airports.

We place so much emphasis on personal hygiene, but the state of our toilets – smelly, wet, faulty – is perhaps the best example of how our obsession with ourselves is at the cost of our environment.

For example, we bathe twice or thrice a day. But we also leave strands of hair on the floor, perhaps enough to supply shrines around the world claiming to keep strands of hair that belonged to past prophets.

We spend hours washing. Sometimes you could hear a battle being fought inside a Malaysian toilet when someone takes a bath. “The water in the toilet goes Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, whoosh-whoosh-whoosh”.

And after the storm, the silence. The door opens, and the bull, all clean, smelling nice, comes out of the flooded china shop, leaving behind a trail of destruction.

Sometimes, they want to tell others what happened at dinner last night, or about the state of their health.

The obsessive clean bathroom seeker is then forced to fool himself by saying that the bits of brown matter in the toilet bowl are actually leftovers from a pack of Hershey’s, or the drops of yellow happened when the bull was peeling an orange.

A wet floor, meanwhile, is a must in almost all Malaysian toilets, as if a peeping tom above the ceiling shed giant tears while looking at a pitiful creation of God.

Why is this so? It’s not only about maintenance and attitude. It’s also about the whole concept and logic of cleanliness.

I remember in school, a whole thick syllabus of the Islamic religious studies was dedicated to cleanliness. But much of it had to do with personal hygiene. How to wash this, wash that (which incidentally is still such a favourite topic among our celebrity preachers that I sometimes wonder why there is Islamophobia).

We go to great lengths to explore the mystery of purification, we classify water to this and that type, and how to use it to remove this and that type of impurity.

“Explain in point form the steps for purification after having intercourse (10 marks)” is the kind of question you would get. One can be forgiven for thinking how the Prophet fought important wars when he was too busy with the science of ritual purification.

I suspect that the great Egyptian reformist Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) had the toilet in mind when he made his famous statement “I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam”.

So immersed we are with our personal hygiene, that we forgot the most important thing: keeping our surroundings clean.

Similar is the case with the toilets (and wash basins) in restaurants. How often you see a dirty sink at the mamak, with homemade liquid soap in a modified mineral water bottle. And just above, a government-supplied poster teaches us how to wash hands the correct way!

If a clean toilet was a condition for being awarded the halal certificate, there would be no halal eateries in the country.

Our problem is we do not treat the toilet as an important part of our lives. A toilet should not be a “bilik air”. It should be a thinking room. It should be a place to take a break, not merely to do a “berak”.

The modern West has given the toilet its due dignity. Today, toilet ethics come almost naturally to most people in the West. It is as if it’s in-built in them, just like kids these days who come with an innate knowledge of the smartphone and tablet.

That there exists the “Great American Bathroom Book” shows the intellectual function of the toilet in Western culture.

I dare say that many great ideas that have changed the world are conceived, at least in their earliest stage, in clean toilets.

You see, Newton didn’t have to be outdoors watching the apple tree. His theory of gravity could have also come from the comfort of a clean white throne, only that something else falling might have sparked that eureka moment.

A clean and dry toilet makes one want to kill the proverbial two birds. We can do the crap while catching up on reading, or in this age, browse the latest news and online rantings about a mystery donor.

We can check emails, take selfies, send emails, send selfies, watch YouTube, check emails again, take selfies again. Only a clean and dry toilet would allow us such clean fun.

So let’s give the toilet more than our share of yesterday’s dinner.

If the kitchen is the heart of the home, the toilet is its liver. Leave it clean and dry, so it becomes a perfect place for some alone time to reflect on life’s unending crap.

And now, my alone time has come to an end. Flussshhhhhh!!! – October 17, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.