Imagine a scenario: You are in a long car ride, not with your family, but say, your co-workers. Imagine you are a working woman and you leave Dhaka frequently for work. Most of your colleagues are men, and they are passionate about their work just as you are. You go visit locations, collect stories, or work towards the development of something or other.
You wake up early and walk down village roads, sit near rivers, talk to people, collect data, take videos — whatever the work requires. And then you head back, presumably in a car. Your days are so consuming that you don’t think about timely meals or other bodily needs, including the need to use the toilet.
Then you sit in cars for hours, two, three, four, six, seven. The highways support your movement and teach you how to hold it in. You do not mention your need to use the toilet as you doubt the existence of decent toilets, in the rest stops or CNG stations, for women. And even if you are okay with those poorly maintained outfits, you are embarrassed to tell the driver or your colleagues to stop.
And you hold it in longer, you hold it in till it burns, till your lower abdomen is in pain. Even if you want to, you cannot squat in the bushes, even if you are okay with a hole in the ground, you stop yourself because others would be uncomfortable. So you look at the houses by the highway and ponder which home may have had a decent toilet for you to use.
Your bodily needs make you feel like a lesser being. You cannot stand and pee facing a wall like your male counterparts, you are afraid to drink water or any other liquid for hours at a time, worried it will make the situation worse.
Have you been in this position before? If you are a man then you probably have not, but if you are a woman, then you have, at least once in your life, haven’t you? Some of you have developed urinary tract infection, you have taken antibiotics trying to balance between being a capable professional woman and just a human with humanly needs.
With all the development around the country, with all the women’s empowerment talk, no one has thought about the need for women who travel, and how they might need toilets, that they also need to empty their insides. And the capable professional woman has also kept quiet in the fear of seeming weaker, with the “if it is not a problem for him, then it should not be a problem for her” logic.
I have done this countless times, others I know have too. Some reading this may say, it is my fault for not speaking up. And perhaps it is, but you see, this problem dates back a long while, starting from school, when our mothers discouraged us to make use of school toilets because they were public and hence unhygienic. Same thing continues into college and university and then in the workplace. Now my question is, does the perfect Bengali girl not pee?
And say you do express yourself and ask someone – most likely a man – that you need to use a restroom. You will notice the shyness on his face, and then of course the silent urgency for him to go find a toilet. He will most likely go consult a few others and figure out the best place for you to be “fresh” (most commonly used term towards woman referring to the need to pee), he will return with one or two more people, and the whole bazar is now aware that you are looking for a place to urinate, so you walk down the road and go to the toilet found for you, and the entire time everyone looks at you from the corners of their eyes, you are no longer the perfect Bengali woman, you are open about your bodily needs, you talk about the needs of your privates. How unwomanly of you!
Every educated person talks about gender equality these days, people say they support treating each other right. Yet, even after long gender trainings and awareness in this issue, we skirt over these basics which make us feel uncomfortable and often lead us towards illness, all for one of the most natural needs.
Dear prime minister, will you build us a thousand toilets so we can work around the country? We promise we won’t challenge our cultural norms too much, we will not talk about urination openly, we will just point to these outfits and tell our male colleagues “ektu fresh hotey hobe.” We will keep the toilets clean, we will even pay for it if that makes it easier.
And dear male colleagues, we have an ovary, we have a uterus, but we also have a liver and kidneys and the same organs which urge you to empty yourselves, so please don’t be embarrassed, it’s not news, we do it every day. Please don’t make us feel sorry for it, it’s as natural for us as it is for you, seriously, shotti bolchi.
