The footpath of my memory is lined with manholes. It seems wherever the masons ran out of cement, they decided to leave a hole, an uncovered hole. I am not scared of manholes. In fact, whenever I encounter them, instead of getting off the footpath like some people do, I walk straight towards them and gallop exactly at the right moment so that I am not swallowed. My mother says manholes contain shit. Everything we eat goes out this way: we chew our food well enough to not mess with the digestive process, then we swallow whatever we eat (less spicy the better), then our stomach churns and we remember we should be careful about the spices. Depending on whether we were careful or not, we shit on a level between constipation and diarrhoea. After that comes the process of disposal. I did not know anything about this when I was younger. Until I found out about Salim kaku.
Salim kaku was a thin man with an amply muscular body; the upper part of his body was especially remarkable. So much so that when, in my adolescence, I thought of myself in a gym body, I imagined his muscles chunk by chunk on mine. I limited my imagination to the upper half of our bodies. When the imagination got out of hand, when it trickled down, it got really embarrassing. I would see my mother down on her knees, with his penis in her mouth. It wasn't what I intended to see, and the image only became clearer the harder I tried to resist.
I knew my mother would never go down this path. It was she who had told me that Salim kaku was the person who carried our shit away before it could overflow from our septic tank. "What does he do with all the shit, ma?" I would ask her. "He eats them; eats them all," she would tell me – the same thing her parents had told her when she was too young to understand even the fact that actors don't live inside televisions.
Salim kaku visited our house occasionally without the ulterior motive of eating our shit. At times, my father, who has a long history of generosity, would want to donate a shirt or two of his to the man. "Why give it to the sweeper? Don't we have poor relatives?" my mother would ask angrily. However, it was obvious that she was also proud of her husband's generosity, which came to the fore especially in front of strangers.