It’s nice to make people laugh, but sometimes I suspect I’m providing free entertainment to people I don’t even know I’m entertaining. Like six months ago, when I read about Delhi’s overflowing landfills, it deeply affected me. So I suggested to the mothers in the park that we dig a compost pit in the park: “everyday, when we bring our children to play here, we could dump all our bio-degradable refuse in it!” That’s daft, said they, for the colony has a system of garbage collection that worked beautifully. So after doing some research on the internet, I stomped off to the local potter to make my own compost bin. Every little bit, thought I, counts.
“Show me,” I said, “your best and largest ghara”. The man dug out a beautiful earthen pot, embellished with red and white designs. I loved it. We bargained amicably about the price, and when the deal was struck, I asked him to bore little holes all over it. You see, I’d read that compost needs to breathe, so the holes were of paramount importance. The man looked like I’d asked him to murder his favourite pet: “you want me to make holes in this pot? How will you fill water in it then?” By then, a crowd of interested bystanders had gathered, and speculation was running rife. Anyway, the holes were bored, the crowd dispersed and my compost bin was now ready.
I was determined to make a success of it. The first hurdle came from my maid. “How to separate the peels from the plastic?” she said, “don’t I have enough to do already?” I railed earnestly about overflowing landfills and the next day, our first installment was dropped into the ghara-turned-compost bin. Days later, strange insects began breeding in it. “Let’s add some neem leaves,” I said, “they’re natural bug repellents.” So all the kids in the colony were roped in to gather neem leaves in the park. “What will you do with them?” they asked. I explained everything clearly and concisely. Or so I thought. The next day on, mothers forbade their children to scrounge around the bushes with me, on the grounds that it got their hands dirty.
Then someone told me that sawdust was a great thing to add to compost bins. You’d imagine it would be easy to get hold of it, no questions asked. But it wasn’t, I discovered when I went to construction site in the colony, and asked if I could take away wood shavings. My request was greeted with suspicion: “why sawdust? What will you make with it? Will you buy it from us?” I was asked. My landfills story was now beginning to sound quite stale, even to me.
Meanwhile the goop in my ghara has begun to fester alarmingly, showing no signs of turning into anything I can dump into my flowerpots without murdering the plants. Nobody has been really able to tell me where I’ve gone wrong, or how I can make that black goop turn into useful compost. Every morning I read that our landfills are still overflowing, and I wonder why the government or MCD does not take on the task of educating people like us to compost our waste…
The potter has taken to coming around every now and then, asking cheekily if I need another pot, knowing from the grapevine that I’m stuck with a very large one full of garbage that stubbornly refuses to change into compost.
All I can console myself with is that fact that at least it’s not in a landfill…
