Old Indian homes from the country’s colonial past – often raved about in style glossies – usually have elegant, long, spiralling iron stairs at the back. These were meant for the sweepers or the waste pickers, mostly from the lower castes (the dalits or so-called ‘untouchables’), to use to collect waste. In my parents’ 1980s house, we didn’t have a back staircase.
My parents were both middle-class, educated professionals, and yet they also felt it necessary to wash the stairs after Cheyt Lal – our neighbourhood waste picker – had been to collect the rubbish and clean the toilets. Fast forward to 2019. In my modern highrise, filled with upwardly mobile, iPhone-toting couples turned out in impeccable, branded clothes, people still drop their packets of waste during the daily collection into the waste picker’s drum from a safe distance, making sure they don’t touch the person.
