Men and women do it differently when it comes to getting rid of garbage. Women tend to package it. My mother collects the garbage very neatly from the kitchen and toilet bins in plastic bags and usually dumps them without a murmur into the jamadar’s bin when he comes calling every morning.

But on certain days, I know that she has this mad urge to toss the garbage bags into the middle of the street from our verandah in one deft motion. She does it, too. That’s why I so often get hit on my way to work by plastic bags from other verandahs of a variety of micron counts containing stuff I don’t want to know. The sins of parents always descend on their children.

But when it comes to men and dirt, it’s a different story altogether. They are mainly bothered with their own waste — and when they get rid of it, it’s sheer and straight-from-the-heart. It’s like triumphant self-expression.

One way of doing it is spitting. Indian men, with their expertise and variety, have developed it into high art. I get demos of several kinds of spitting every day.

It is difficult for a woman to travel in an ‘auto’ sandwiched between two men. But I can’t make up my mind which is worse — to live in the fear that the elbow belonging to the man on the right may soon be grazing my midriff, or the apprehension that he may start on the throat job any moment.

Then it starts. The man on the right shifts a little, becomes still and stares ahead. Then there’s the sound of a small engine starting. The man is working his phlegm. He has summoned up all he had in his deeply congested chest and before you know, it’s squirting out in a jet of red liquid from his mouth. It spray-paints the street and the right sleeve of the auto-rickshaw and fills the air with the smell of paan masala. I am dead.

The man on the left is turned on by now. It’s raining and I know he is looking for the right puddle. Men like to spit on puddles — they like to make a little splash. He chooses the puddle, and a soft ball pounces out of his throat and describing a perfect arc, lands on the water. Plop. It’s called the gift of the gob. My only consolation is that he doesn’t know the Yiddish proverb that says “Don’t spit into the well — you might drink from it later.”

You think I am being sick? Well, I go through it every day.

There are explanations. One of my friends used to tell me that some men think it’s a mating call. She was bewildered by a man greeting her with the throaty exercise every day outside her house, till she realised that he fancied her.

In the film Share Chuattor, too, the oldest member of the mess, who was officially so morally disapproving of women, would blow his nose with a passion to draw the attention of a nubile Suchitra Sen.

As my auto passes Keshub Chandra Sen Street every day, two men come out of a pice hotel, look straight at me, and blow their nose. You think that’s a coincidence? I think they fancy me.

I have concluded, therefore, while women are embarrassed, which leads them to plastic bags, men love their emissions so much that they don’t consider it waste at all. Rather, they think them to be their gift to the world.

l this has taken a toll on my bearing. I don’t want to come between a man and his happiness — so I step very gingerly. Whenever I see a male neck readjusting itself — it may belong to the man in the other auto, or the street vendor whose stall I am passing, or simply the man approaching me, I squeeze myself back into the seat, retreat or take a little leap, depending on the circumstances. The police will stop me one day.

But the greatest problem occurs when I, from the vantage point of my first-floor verandah, see men “relieving themselves” on our boundary wall. I can’t even stop them for fear of what I will see. So they go on decorating the wall. That is why unlike other countries, we can never rid our vocabulary of the strange phrase “committing nuisance”.

That’s why for their next garbage drive, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation is being advised to include a clause encouraging more women to go to work, so that the men can stay at home and look after their children and the trash bin.