The Sacred Bathroom

Artwork: Cincinius

About a month after my wedding I needed to go to the bathroom quite badly, often many times a day. My mother had died three days before I got married, and after a month, when the grief started to seem a tad less natural to perform in front of everyone, I did not want to remind my new family of my distinct brokenness – a fragmentation that only the death of a parent could produce. I could, of course. But I did not want to. The burden of grief is our own to bear. Reminders of death tend to sap the room and change the inclinations of a day. For someone hypersensitive to the mildest shifts in atmospheric emotion, it remains taxing to be the root cause of other people’s anxieties about mortality. I had moved into my husband’s house. I was cautiously happy, aware of being in a rare good marriage with a man I unguardedly adore. But every now and then there was the odd ripple, the errant thought that needed to be addressed. So I went to the bathroom to (ugly) cry, to catch my breath, to be open, to be lonely. With consideration and deliberation.

Sometime around three years ago I started taking note of my relationship with the bathroom and naturally, that led to me noticing other people’s too. Where else are you so humanly vulnerable? Physically, of course, you are in a compromised position. On the toilet, or in the shower. Slippery, wet, weak, alone. But mentally, emotionally? Where else do bad singers sing with impunity? Where else can I practice the fantasy of being on a writer’s roundtable? Of being interviewed on late-night television? It is within the sacred space of the bathroom that you do not question a person’s actions. We don’t bother someone while they’re in the bathroom. We do not question their purpose or their adherence to an external schedule. Because no matter what they’re doing, we know it is intimate. It is none of our business. 

They could be dancing, cleaning, touching their skin, finding the familiar indents and scars, and mulling over the ways they could will their bodies into the realm of beauty. Talking to themselves, reading, smoking, excreting, or all of the above. A lot of people use the bathroom to recharge and to have some alone time. (From those they love, mostly.) It is within the sacred space of the bathroom that nakedness of all forms is the default. In Islam, it is where the majority of home prayers purify themselves. Stripping yourself down and submitting to Allah begins, of all places, in the bathroom. 

I started praying salah last year after never having prayed before in my life. Like a revert, I learned the building blocks of the religion I avoided entirely during my broody, sceptical adolescence. In scouring the procedures online, looking at YouTube videos meant for children, one message was repeated: While purifying your body, do not say the name of God in the bathroom. Think it, but do not say it. The implication did not need to be explained and rarely is. A bathroom is a place of disgusting things, after all. Unsavory and rude to talk about. Even if God formed the repellant, even if He is responsible for the entire spectrum of the offensive, you must maintain your shame. 

Even so, it is with the addition of the shameful that we feel we may become wholly known, and held in our physical and spiritual entirety. Shame helps us in our dutiful day-to-day functions, one of the greatest motivators throughout history. It adorns the mundane with a certain necessity; it is the root of politeness. Shame fights the losing battle of hiding what everyone already knows about themselves, about human nature. You may refer to the bathroom through any number of euphemisms – women say ‘washroom,’ ‘ladies room,’ ‘powder room,’ and, oddly, ‘the little girl’s room,’ in an effort to detract from the fact that they do indeed have the same bodily functions as men, who use the ‘shitter’ with a lot less beating around the bush – but there is no hiding from it or hiding it from others. 

You learn about people from their bathroom habits, you feel close to them when you reach that level of ease. Someone you know takes entirely too long in the bathroom, it is a running joke in their family, and their friends groan when they get up to go. Someone needs to go before every major event or outing. Someone thinks it is an uncomfortable place, and likes to be in and out efficiently. Someone can’t go if there is a chance someone else might hear them. Someone has never thought about it. 

One of my friends was dabbling with magic mushrooms. Halfway through, he left us because the world we shared became too overstimulating. He went to the bathroom and stayed there for a considerable length of time. When he came out, he was ready to be back with us. We asked him why he went to his bathroom, of all places. 

“It’s a safer world in there,” were his exact words, said as if it were obvious. 

So much of our comfort is derived from our proximity to a good, reliable bathroom. The best part of coming back from vacation is using our own bathrooms, almost like coming home twice. You escape the loudness of parties in bathrooms, a famed congregating place for the cool and aloof. Women dress up alone or lovingly beautify each other in the bathroom. We need them, yes. But we’ve also grown to want them, to decorate them, to make them another attempt at explaining who we are. Perhaps this is why bathrooms maintain such a privileged position in the American culture wars – people take their bathrooms quite personally. American anthropologists have long noted the veneration of the bathroom in American culture, how bathrooms are prime selling points in real estate, and how they are the first and last stop of the day in the wake-and-grind life they have normalized for themselves. Horace Miner, the famed anthropologist who turned the othering eye back onto America through his satirical article on American culture, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, begins his breakdown of Nacirema (America backwards) by introducing the bathroom as a ritual shrine:

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly…Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony.  Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centres it possesses.…

While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. (503)

That was written in 1956. Today, with wellness consumerism at a peak, bodily rituals have only become a bigger crutch in the daily American imagination. Morning routines, nighttime routines, skincare routines, shower routines, makeup routines and shaving routines; these are all steeped in ritualism. In the midst of crushing productivity, have a rest in the restroom. Fight back a little, shit on company time. This understanding of bathrooms has become a massive cultural signifier for Americans, even if they sheepishly giggle at references to it. It is culture, after all, that defines how we must poop, and with who. And American culture has a funny little habit of trickling down into the most unsuspecting people. After I moved from America back to Pakistan, I started understanding the subtle ways in which I had learned to revere the bathroom. 

In university, living in the dorms meant I had to share the bathroom space with the girls on my floor. Moving away from my family was fine, starting a new phase of life was necessary, but this part was hellish. Making the adjustment from privacy to company, knowing that others could hear me – and worse – see me as I left the cubicles was like teaching myself how to swim all over again, essentially panic management. I started by going in when I thought nobody was likely to be around, the shallow end. The middle of the night was my favorite time to be there. It was in one of the university bathroom cubicles, at 2 AM, that I wrote my first passionate speech. That speech changed the trajectory of my life, as a lot of bathroom epiphanies do.

After a few months, I got used to it. I adapted, and proudly so, patting myself on the back as a changed person, a (wo)man of the people. I chose one cubicle to keep returning to and lulled myself into a sense of ownership of the space. After an unstable, shifting life, claiming ownership over the transient was a skill I had honed for the purpose of survival. Decidedly for me, that is what home is: a sense of ownership. The assured part of the brain that knows where you belong, that feels accepted by the familiarity of a place or a person. Personally, that sense has been intrinsically tied to how well I have grown accustomed to any given bathroom. This is the American in me, brought up on Disney arcs and promises of individual exceptionalism. Americanized modernity has rendered the bathroom arguably the most essential room in a modern household, but it was not always so. 

When speaking to one of my father’s oldest and most academically-inclined friends, Dr. Bahar Ali Kazmi, I was informed that my understanding of bathrooms was laughably modern. Before the British arrived in the Subcontinent, there were no attached bathrooms.

“You used to go in groups to a field or something like it,” he told me, smirking, “together, at designated times, like it was a social activity.” 

“Wait, wasn’t that so awkward?” I asked, reasonably, concerned about shame.

“This awkwardness you have is a recent development,” he responded. My father laughed at us then, amused that we had found ways to intellectualize the humble toilet. 

Today, in India, around half of the population is still without toilets. Research on attitudes towards open defecation reveals a ritual culture that considers indoor toilets a breach of purity:

One such young man, a Brahmin from Haryana, misappropriates the germ theory of disease in explaining the ritual pollution he associates with having a latrine* in the house: If a latrine is in the house, there will be bad smells, germs will grow. Latrines in the house are like… hell. The environment becomes completely polluted. There is no benefit of religious candles and lamps, no benefit at all. (Coffey et al. 2016)

*In the Subcontinent we often colloquially refer to toilets as latrines. 

Every following year in university after moving into yet another cramped, shared room I first made sure to choose my cubicle. I chose it and then tried my best only ever to use the one I chose. If it was being used by someone else, I waited. The only condition under which I relegated myself to another one was if it was out of order, feeling quite sorry for myself whenever I did. As the years went on, I started noticing footprints on the seats. The nearest girls I asked about it scoffed in disgust, telling me it was a sign of how the university was letting just anybody in now. The people who were putting their shoes on the toilet seats were accustomed to “Indian” toilets, which are toilets on which you squat above rather than sit down. Squatting is a more natural, strain-resistant way to poop – by all accounts, it is healthier. The rise of “squatty potties” or poop stools in the United States is a testament to the growing acknowledgment of how our posture affects our bowel movements. But to the girls in my university they were associated with primitiveness and rural life, so they clocked this as a marker of a lack of social refinement. I in turn absorbed that, having always been self-righteously averse to Indian toilets. Now that I think about it, it was probably an aversion to seeing my faeces so bluntly, overtly – something I got over while living in Germany. As Slavoj Zizek has noted, German toilets, like the Indian toilets, are constructed to allow you “to sniff and inspect [shit] for traces of illness”. This was a disquieting prospect for me for a large chunk of my life. 

Growing up in various apartments with three siblings, I found quiet where I could. The bathroom served me because treehouses couldn’t. My father still laughs about the fact that I used to go in with a fresh book, stay in the bathtub for a few hours, and then come out with the book finished. It was the bathrooms I had that facilitated my reading habit. It is within the sacred space of the bathroom that we have the time to stop everything else. It was never about the shit.

It has been a sanctuary throughout the ages, but also a connector. In public bathrooms, you have small poems written on the walls for whoever might come next, a small scribble of something for posterity. You have secrets. You have things that people wouldn’t say out loud, jokes, condemnations, inner workings for an inner place. It is within the sacred space of the bathroom that we look into ourselves, as unappealing as the prospect may be for some. 

During a road trip in 2018, I used exposure therapy to get over my fear of public bathrooms. There was no water and it smelled bad. I cried, my friends held my hand and told me I would live to see another day. I got over something massive within myself. I understood that preferring a nice clean toilet is another way I embody inequality. It is a privilege to have a bathroom to yourself, with running water and a place to sit down. As I said, open defecation has remained quite a norm in South Asia, with numerous diseases spread through the filth of excretion, and through other infrastructural inequalities. In India, Gandhi was famously preoccupied with toilets, but nowadays the social attitude pushed by those like the young Brahmin man from Haryana quoted above is that open defecation is a socially responsible and ritually clean thing to do. (Coffey et al. 2016) 79 million people were reported to not have access to proper toilets in Pakistan in 2022. Some may note that I am carving a sacred space out of something so horrifically exclusive to a certain way of life. In my quest to be more active in observing my own life, to be someone who is aware and deliberate about the bubbles I inhabit and the assumptions I make about them, it would be, frankly, uncool of me to leave out the fact that there are in fact caveats to every single human experience. The bathroom’s elusiveness might even make it more sacred. Everything can be boiled down to nothing if you break it down far past its intended purpose. But I digress.

In the intuitive nature with which we understand the bulk of our surroundings, the modern bathroom remains a symbol of privacy despite a growing universal lack of it. In Pakistan, where sprawling joint families are the norm, we are starting to embrace bathroom time. It is within the sacred space of the bathroom that we may demand not to be disturbed. 

It has been a year since I got married. On the anniversary of my mom’s passing, I spent a while in the bathroom, ripping myself apart and then pulling myself together, knowing that while I was within the confines of the bathroom walls, there was no one else who would get at me. It was all me. No God, no spirits, nothing except the naked ache of loss and the despair that inevitably flows from it.

My mother loved the bathroom. She would light multiple scented candles and soak in a warm bath, listening to music and smoking. Sometimes there would be silence and darkness. Alone, with herself, I can only assume she found some peace. I believe that this world was largely painful for her; she was sensitive to mass suffering and the general indifference of people she thought were meant to be good, a sensitivity she has imparted to me. So there was a certain refuge for her in the bathroom, a place that made sure not to be like the rest of the world. The rules are different there, and we abide by them as we please.