Trash

Butterflies flit and dip around dew-traced spiderwebs. I can feel the light, filtered through the high trees, warming a pattern on my cheek. Nearby my host brother smiles silently as he tosses pieces of dirty styrofoam into the stream and watches them bob and dance.

My baabaa had asked me to help him repair a section of the path that had been washed away in last week's heavy rains, but I find myself transfixed by all the trash. Plastic bags, old clothes, odd pieces of rubber, and the occasional broken sole of a single flipflop--it clings to rocks and cakes its way into the mud. I pass by this stream every day, but only now have I really stopped to study it. Ganess eventually finds two intact (but burnt out) light bulbs, and when be break for tea we sit and toss them repeatedly into the water and race their twisty, backtracking progress for a few yards before snatching them up again.

When work resumes it quickly becomes clear that my host father is planning to use some of the trash as a sort of makeshift mortar to fill up the gaps in our shaky stone path. Reluctantly I help them peel away the layers of matted garbage and toss it, with shovelfuls of dirt, into the hole. The rest we just let float downstream. I feel like I should say something, or do something, but I can't. I'm just one person, and even if I cleaned it all there isn't any better form of solid waste management in Kalimpong. So, I just let it go, watch the water carry it out of sight, if not out of mind.

The streets of Kalimpong are lined with bands of glittering color: wrappers mostly, from candy or gum or little packets of shampoo. When kids stop at the dokans for cookies or mints after school, they immediately tare open the plastic and toss it aside. The concept of "trash" simply hasn't entered most people's awareness here. Hill people in the region have always just let their waste roll down the hill, in streams or with the wind and rain. It goes down the mountain and into the Teesta, which carries it away to pile up and decompose elsewhere, far from the beautiful Himalayan views that have defined the world here for centuries.

This might have even worked for a while, long ago, but not anymore. India never had what you could call a wrapper-culture until recently. It is only in the past couple decades that things have come individually wrapped in plastic, or that Indians or Nepalis have started consuming so many things mass-manufactured outside of their own home or village. If you roll these things down the hill, or toss them in a stream, they don't go away or decompose--they just stay there, waiting to be dealt with by someone else. But even just getting their waste down the hill is far enough for most Nepalis to stop caring, so the trash remains, coloring roadsides and riverbanks in a sickly brownish collage.

Darjeeling Town isn't much better, but at least they are trying. "Clean Darjeeling" programs have been off and on since the 70's. Every year since '96 a different group takes up the city's anti-plastic campaign. This year it is the police department, and all over town, in shops and on the streets, clever signs display slogans like "Plastic kills, don't litter our hills." They've also put out large bins at a few major intersections, which are emptied when someone gets a chance, but even this isn't a solution. The infrastructure to dispose of solid waste effectively simply doesn't exist here--India doesn't have many landfills or incineration centers, and certainly none near Darjeeling--and attempts to develop it inevitably get caught up in the tangle of short-sightedness and corruption that defines modern politics in India.

Composting offers a better solution. 70-80% of solid waste in Darjeeling is still decomposable. Unfortunately, few people have any understanding about the need to separate organics from plastics and biomedical waste. Plenty of people burn trash, but with little awareness of the health affects; asthma rates in Darjeeling have skyrocketed.

A couple of cities have tried to develop in this area, but most attempts have been myopic at best. One city spent several hundred thousand on a "composting machine"--essentially a barrel that turns occasionally. This seems much more concrete to politicians than actually trying to change people's habits and awareness.

One city managed it, however. Down the river from Darjeeling, where all the trash from the hills piles up, there was an outbreak of disease some years back: plague, black death, something new--no one seems to know what it was. But it killed plenty until the city dealt with its trash and muck--and that of other people. Now the town is spotless, and its citizens have developed an environmental awareness unknown in most of India.

In my room I've been keeping a trash bag of the wrappers from all the candies and biscuits that I've let myself indulge in. After a month, however, it is getting full, and last night I could swear I heard something rustling in it. I've been dreading dealing with this thing, but I can feel the time coming soon. I could toss it in my family's dust bin, which I think gets emptied into the river, or take it to the trash pile at the program house, which gets burned. This isn't a very good choice, but it seems to be the only one I have.

I'll find a way though, and then I'll come back to America and take refuge in the apparently clarity of distance. Problems like these seem so simple from afar. They aren't simple, though, and I don't want to just move on. But I'll come back and preach a little, and eventually the problem will get swept from my thoughts, like that styrofoam bobbing in the stream. Out of sight, out of mind.