Documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s curiously titled film Q2P does just that. A film on the lack of public toilets in the city.
In a city known for its hectic pace and sensationalism, everyday stories often escape notice. But once in a while, someone chronicles Mumbai with all its inadequacies and compels us to be grateful for the little comforts of life.
Documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s curiously titled short film Q2P does just that. A documentary on the lack of public toilets in the city, it makes the audience feel grateful for the accessible and clean commodes in their own homes. “The toilet is a prism in the film. When you see who has to queue to pee, you figure out who has a stake in the country’s development,” says Vohra, who has linked issues of gender, class and caste with that of sanitation.
Though Q2P begins as a quest to find the number of accessible loos for women in Mumbai, it makes a comment on the fact that for a woman of a certain class, even something as basic as answering the call of nature is a struggle. But since it is not only the poor who have to put up with a battle with their bladders, the film shows the affluent class using toilets in five star hotels by posing as guests. “When we think of women’s issues, we only do so in the sexual context and talk about rape and violence. But isn’t the inability to pee in peace a form of violence?” Vohra asks.
She brings to attention the ground realities in Mumbai, which has aspirations of becoming a world-class city. But the city of the future appears around us in pieces, like in a dream. Who is dreaming this dream? wonders the film, moving from the glass-and-steel facades of the Bandra-Kurla complex, to the garbage strewn on the beaches, to the men queuing up at a public toilet meant for women. Then come images of a rundown toilet in a slum where women carry candles in the dark. Elsewhere, students and teachers in a municipal school admit that they control the urge to relieve themselves in filthy toilets and often end up with urinary infections.
Q2P, which points out that public toilets are still more accessible to men than to women, leaves the viewer pondering over whether free toilets would mean freedom for women from the shackles of caste, class and gender.
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