The Knowledge Glutton: In which my hunger for knowledge trumps my distaste for discussing poo.

WARNING: Don't read this post during dinner, in church or as a bedtime story to your children. In fact, you may just want to take your laptop into the bathroom with you.

My friend Andy told us recently about a mystery co-worker who's been leaving cups of water next to the toilet in the men's room. Here's how he put it (he's a stand-up comedian):

Everyday this guys feels a shit coming on and he's like, "lemme bring a cup of water in with me to quench my thirst while I'm pinching off this mad loaf. Gotta stay hydrated. Ok. Let me just set this down next to my left foot while I,"

*clench, growl, push, gasp, feeeeeyart, turdblast, sigh*
*wipe, wipe, wipe*
*zip*

"Oh hey, my water. Yeah, like I'm going to drink THAT now. Duh."

Quite a conundrum. But it rang a bell. What was that thing called in Kuala Lumpur? Why do I want to say mandi or mandee?

You see, I taught English in Tokyo for a while. Japan is a world-leader in toilet technology now, with toilets that stop just short of taking care of the intestinal peristalsis for you, but it's still possible in some places to see the old-fashioned squat toilets that have long been the standard in much of Asia. For Westerners, and people with bad knees, these toilets can take some getting used to. What are you supposed to do with your pants? What if you (*shudder*) lose your balance?

Still, even Japanese squat toilets offer toilet paper.

In many other parts of the world, though, toilet paper is not the norm. I first heard about this, I think, when I read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. One of the characters, who I believe was Indian (it's been a while), was horrified to discover that Westerners, after a BM, do not wash their recently befouled backsides with water, instead preferring to use dry pieces of paper. Just as horrified, perhaps, as a Westerner is to discover that in much of India, Africa and the Arab World, defecators use... their hand.

After I left Tokyo, I backpacked around Southeast Asia for a while, and usually thought to have a roll of toilet paper with me, just in case. But it's not second nature for an American to bring toilet paper with him to the bathroom, and I was unpleasantly surprised, in a hostel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to find next to the toilet not a roll of paper but a basin of water. Yikes!

Anyway, when Andy told me about the mystery cup of water, I thought, maybe that cup was supposed to stand in for that basin I wrestled with back in Malaysia. What was it called? After way too much searching, I finally figured it out. I was mostly right: it's called a bak mandi (lit., wash basin) or just mandi. I finally found it on this post on a site about getting jobs in Indonesia, and this hilarious self-portrait an Aussie photographer took of himself in an Indonesian bathroom, or kamar mandi.

The average Indonesian home doesn't have a shower or bath, but rather a bak mandi, a water basin built into the wall of the bathroom. In the bak mandi floats a plastic scoop which is used to pour water over the body while standing on the floor of the bathroom (not in the bak mandi). This is very refreshing when the temperature is sizzling. It is not uncommon to take these three or four times daily to cool off. Indonesian toilets are of the squat variety, and though toilet paper is sometimes available, it's important that it be disposed of in the trash, not the toilet (their plumbing systems can't handle it).

Apparently, the bak mandi can be a big basin built into the wall of the bathroom, or it can be, as I saw, a small plastic tub. It's interesting that the post above suggests that the scoop (or gayung) would be floating in the bak mandi, because I stumbled upon one website where there was a raging debate as to where the scoop should be placed after you finish it. The consensus from the Malaysian Miss Mannerses was next to the bak mandi, upside down. (If it's floating around in the water, you would have to fish it out and foul the water with your dirty hand.)

You may have some questions at this point. One might be, "Wait? Are you talking about Indonesia or Malaysia?" Well, Malay (Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages. Malay is spoken in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, and the local version was made the official language of Indonesia in 1945. (The majority of Indonesians are of Malay descent.) Both languages serve as a sort of lingua franca in these ethnically diverse countries — including hundreds of regional ethnicities and populations of Chinese, Indians and Arabs — though English is dominant in Malaysia and Singapore.

And this whole business about using your hand to wipe yourself? In most places where this practice is still common, it is customary to use your left hand. Your right hand is used for greeting, eating and passing things to people. This fits with the historical connotations of the left as bad (from which we get the words sinister and gauche) and the right as good (adroit, dexterity, the rights of man, etc.) Islamic code seems to take this idea to extremes.

All this from my trying to remember what that thing in the Malaysian bathroom was called. Actually, that isn't the half of it. Here are some of the interesting facts I stumbled upon along the way.

The first recorded instance of manufactured toilet paper is from 14th-century China. It was made for the Emperor.
It wasn't until the mid-19th century that Americans started manufacturing toilet paper. Before that, they used such items as corn cobs, leaves and pages from the Farmer's Almanac (which was sold with a hole punched in the corner so you could hang pages on a nail in the outhouse).
Englishman Thomas Crapper did not, in fact, invent the flush toilet, but he helped popularize it. The word "crap" already existed, dating back to the 15th century.