Fiction pick: How the greatest toilet in the world came to be built (and made its developer a hero)

To impress SDW, who was a 900-year-old vampire that had seen everything there was to see in the world, was not easy. One day, SDW complained to the developer about the lack of public conveniences for women in Indian cities. This set off a chain of thoughts in the head of the developer that eventually culminated in his resolve to build the mother of all public conveniences, dedicated to Bharatiya Nari. (1)

So he signed a deal with Takealeak Inc. to build for them, on a 400-acre plot of land in the city centre, not far from the Gandhi Memorial, the Taj Mahal of Shauchalays. It would be the world’s largest public convenience, built of marble, and topped with a tower that would be taller than Toronto’s CN Tower.

It would be a holy monument to nature’s call that would commemorate the sacred function performed by public conveniences, a structure that, by sacralising what has been unjustly profaned, would inspire an avalanche of public toilet constructions in every nook and corner of the country, and just as there are places of religious worship – often nothing more than a hollow block of concrete with vermillion marks on it – in even the remotest of jungles and the backwardest of hamlets, there would be at the bare minimum at least one public toilet per 100 sq yards of HAIR territory.

As the PM was a huge public toilet aficionado, the developer got all clearances in no time.

When the 1,200-metre tall, 232-floor monument, christened Susu Towers, (2) and fabricated in the developer’s five factories in Bangladesh and shipped to the site and assembled by imported Japanese-made android workers, was completed in a record 180 days and unveiled on Women’s Day in 2022, it was hailed by the international media as the Eighth Wonder of the Postmodern World.

It was indeed the eighth wonder of the postmodern world because the developer had taken pains to incorporate architectural elements of all the seven wonders of the ancient world, as well six of the seven wonders of the modern world, into Susu Towers, with the only modern wonder failing to find a place in the monument being the Golden Gate, which couldn’t be helped because there was no water body or geographical depression of any reasonable depth or span to suspend a suspension bridge across within the Susu Towers complex without it ending up looking silly and immodest.

But the Susu Towers had an aluminium alloy dome modelled on the dome of the Taj Mahal, and on top of the dome, impaled on the spire projecting from the dome was an exact-scale reproduction, moulded in blast-resistant carbon fibre, of the Pyramid of Khufu, and delicately poised on the pointed tip of the exact-scale reproduction of the Pyramid of Khufu was a gold-coated tin pineapple inspired by the golden pineapple of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing.

The prefabricated columns in the 150-acre Ladies were modelled on the Coliseum while those in the 130-acre Gents were inspired by the Parthenon. The frescoes on the ceiling, the mural on the walls, the floor mosaics and the chandeliers were photocopies of those in the Hagia Sophia, while the basement parking recalled the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa. The forty-acre garden featured stone benches and expressionistic installations that were very obviously tributes to Stonehenge while the nineteen-km-long perimeter wall of the entire Susu Towers complex had gateways, battlements and signal towers just like the Great Wall of China and even had Chinese-looking androids from the ITBP manning it to make the resemblance to the Great Wall even more complete.

Needless to say, Susu Towers became an international tourist attraction overnight.

It broke several records in record time. To list just a few at random: Susu Towers is the youngest ever monument in the history of human civilisation to be declared a United Nations Heritage Monument; it attracts more than 70,000 visitors a day – every single one of whom either urinates or passes stool in it – a record that no other monument can claim; not only is it the world’s largest public convenience, it is the only one to have separate toilets/toilet areas for seven different species: humans, of course, but also specially designated excretory zones for dogs, cats, cows, pigeons, crows, as well as a separate high security enclosure of luxury toilets for the exclusive use of CEOs and VVVIPs; on any given weekday, it processes, on average, 50,000 litres of urine and 200 tons of faeces (3) – a world record for any human construction anywhere in the universe; the shrine located in the Pyramid on the twenty-second floor of the Susu Towers is the only shrine in the world dedicated to the Susumata, the goddess in charge of the health of the excretory organs and the patron deity of urologists, nephrologists, proctologists, and all those suffering from piles, UTI, constipation, enuresis, incontinence, and all other ailments pertaining to excretory organs, and so in a very short span of time it became the world’s second-largest pilgrimage site after Mecca-Medina, with piles patients and dialysis-dependents and haemorrhoid-afflicted of every religion and race and nationality flocking to Susu Towers to pray to Susumata and seek her blessings, with thousands of healthy pilgrims too making the trip from different corners of the world to pray that their kidneys and gall bladders remain healthy and stone-free till their last breath, etc.

The developer became an international celebrity overnight.

He was interviewed by celebrity interviewers, hosted by celebrity hosts, feted by celebrity chefs, and screwed by celebrity screws. He spent a memorable night partying with Donald Trump Jr on his brand-new 2k short ton Espen Oeino equipped with two 1800-cc Yamaha Waverunners and a 700-cc Yamaha jetski in the artificial lake in the Gobi Desert. He got a free pass to watch the Wimbledon women’s final at Wimbledon and was, in turn, watched watching the Wimbledon’s women’s final at Wimbledon by millions of TV viewers around the world.

He became a syndicated columnist with Project Syndicate and his column on the pragmatics as well as the metaphysics of urine, faeces and their sociocultural dynamics, titled Philosophical Excretions, was printed by 12,000 publications around the world. His collection of autobiographical essays, Piss for Peace, moved into the New York Times bestseller list three days before publication and hasn’t moved out yet, having sold 10 million copies at last count.

He was nominated to judge game shows, to judge Miss India, Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss Israel, Miss Palestine (the only human being ever to judge both Miss Israel and Miss Palestine contests, that too in the same year), Miss Iraq and Miss Kurdish Refugee contests, to be part of the jury at Cannes, Toronto and Turin (4) film festivals, to the World Economic Forum at Davos, where his speech on the elective affinity between Gaia, the Earth Goddess, and Susumata, the Goddess of Excretory Functions, and how the salvation of humanity lay in keeping these two goddesses happy and satisfied, received a rousing, unending applause that went on for fifteen minutes and went viral on Facebook and twitter and was quoted on the front pages and provoked admiring op-eds besides being translated into 172 languages and published as a coffee table book with every paragraph illustrated with artistically shot photographs of Susu Towers and the developer himself, and he became the first Indian to be awarded, in the same calendar year, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Bharat Ratna, and the first human being ever to be awarded the Magsaysay Award and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same fiscal year.

In one year, the developer was the chief guest at 1,342 functions – an average of 3.67 chief guest appearances a day – a world record that still stands.

After the publication of Piss for Peace, he also appeared at seventy-two different literary festivals around the world (the Edinburgh and Jaipur festivals four times each, Ulaanbaatar and Buson litfests thrice, and Khartoum and Ajdabiya litfests twice) and gave TED talks that broke the then existing record for YouTube views by half a million. The documentary made on his life by Channel 9 won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary on a living biographical subject from the domain of real estate and excretion.

The developer was commissioned by the governments of Malaysia, Brunei, Brazil, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Madagascar and Morocco to construct a chain of ultra-modern, eclectically designed public conveniences that would also be renowned as architectural wonders, much like the Susu Towers, and much like traditional places of religious worship such as temples, mosques, etc., would combine form and function to produce the effect of beauty as well as awe and thus attract not only tourists but also pilgrims. Within a week of his winning the Peace Nobel, both Time and Being had him on the cover and called his company the McDonalds of the architectural slash religious monument slash public convenience construction industry.

And the developer’s chain of Architectural Wonders Extraordinaire, which came to be known as the AWE buildings – imagine a Coliseum or Taj Mahal in every country and every national capital, so that people did not have to traverse continents and go abroad to see a Wonder of the World and could just hop on to the bus instead – became like the first and obvious stopping point for every tourist visiting any city anywhere in the world; it was like a mandatory stop, akin to the visit to the loo at a new airport, and what’s more, it was a loo.

Travel writers and photographers made ambitious tour itineraries wherein they visited and profiled and compared and contrasted AWE buildings; tour operators offered special packages for enuretics and the nephrologically challenged focused on high AWE-density sectors; and several memorable climaxes and romantic scenes in Hollywood and Bollywood began to be shot in AWE buildings, which, again, only added to the cultural cache and religious charm of these monuments.

Footnotes

1. A term in the native tongue that means ‘HAIRian woman’.
2. The first ‘Su’ was from ‘susu’, a native word meaning ‘pee’, and the second ‘Su’ was the first two letters of the name of the developer’s company.
3. It goes up to 70,000 litres on holidays and on hot summer days when people tend to drink more and therefore urinate more.
4. Because it rhymed with urine, according to one disgruntled British film critic who wasn’t invited that year.

Excerpted with permission from Auto-Play: Not-so Stories, G Sampath, HarperCollins India.