A Fa cry

I’ve no problems with India’s Great Unwashed, for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist. Every Indian, poor or rich, is a compulsive bather. Our cities and towns might be giant open sewers, streets choked with garbage. Our paan thook-spattered public places, redolent of overflowing urinals, might be filthy beyond imagining. But in his or her person, the average Indian is scrupulously clean, making a fetish of the daily bath.Unlike in the West — particularly Europe — the Great Unwashed doesn’t exist here. But what does exist here is the Great Undeodorised.
Deodorants? What do we need those foul things invented by westerners who unlike us don’t bath every day and as a result have to use something to mask their lack of bodily hygiene? True, anyone who’s been crammed into a rush hour underground train in London, or Paris, will testify to the ripe atmosphere composed of Right Guard and Sure, Chanel and Hugo Boss fighting a losing olfactory battle against unabluted anatomy. Like a Gorgonzola cheese factory which has got its production line mixed up with Givenchy. A smell neither to dream of, nor to tell. But similarly, anyone who’s been put into close proximity with India’s teeming millions in a confined space — a bus, or taxi, or movie hall — will also verify that the experience hasn’t been a bed of roses.
In a tropical climate like ours, people sweat. What’s wrong with the smell of honest sweat? Nothing. Because sweat, honest or otherwise, doesn’t smell. What does pong, and to high heaven, is sweat which, trapped in clothing, breeds bacteria which putrefy and give off that unmistakable effluvium of attar of armpit. BO is an elitist affliction. The truly poor, not being able to afford much by way of clothes, are less likely to be affected than the more
affluent, who in comparison are often literally stinking rich. As national prosperity grows, India stinks. But few are prepared to face it. In more ways than one, Mum’s the word on the subject. I have it on good authority — that of a former, unsuccessful vice presidential candidate — that no less a personage than Indira Gandhi was seized of this problem and tried to persuade members of her immediate entourage to set an example and deo their duty by the country. She obviously failed, which might have been one of the motivating factors behind the Emergency. That that raised a stink of quite another sort is a different matter.
Whatever the reason, along with that other victim of the Emergency, family planning, the use of deodorants is seen as a politically incorrect no-no. It’s viewed as being anti-people, a sort of aseptic fascism. Why do you want to spray yourself with probably harmful chemicals just so you can go around smelling of an ersatz pine forest or whatever instead of yourself? the Green brigade asks. Besides, think of the damage all those aerosol cans do to the ozone layer, it adds. With due deference to the Greens and to the ozone layer, I’d as soon smell a fake pine than a real decomposing corpse of a sweaty bacterium. Then there are others who think using deodorants is namby-pamby, a sissy thing to do. And most of these people are women. Their menfolk — bless their testosterone — would rather undergo a gender change with a pair of garden shears than succumb to something as poofy as admitting they even know what BO means, let alone doing something about it.
At the risk of being classified as an epicene neo-Nazi saboteur of the environment, as I emerge from the shower I tell myself: It is a Fa, Fa better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a Fa, Fa better smell I leave than I have left before. Squirting vigorously under each arm, I like to think that Sydney Carton displayed the same deo or die spirit as the tumbril trundled him to his appointment with the guillotine.