This is her dharma, her duty, her place in the world. A task handed down from mother to daughter, for generations. Manual scavenger: a coy term that bears little relation to reality. There are other words to describe what Smita does for a living: she collects other people’s shit, removing it bare-handed from the dry latrines, using only a stiff reed brush and a metal scoop, all day long. She was six years old – the same age Lalita is now – when her mother took her along for the first time. Watch, then you will do the same. Smita remembers the smell that assaulted her, sharp and violent as a swarm of wasps, an unbearable, bestial stench. She had vomited on the side of the road. You’ll get used to it, her mother said. She had lied. You never get used to it. Smita learned to hold her breath, to live without breathing. You must breathe freely, the village doctor told her, see how you’re coughing. You must eat. Smita lost her appetite long ago. She no longer remembers what it is to feel hungry. She eats little, the strict minimum, forcing it down in spite of herself every day.

And yet the government promised toilets, right across the country. They have not come here. In Badlapur, as elsewhere, people defecate in the open. The ground is filthy, everywhere: the streams and rivers, the fields, polluted with tons of excrement. Sickness spreads like wildfire. The politicians know it: what people want, before reforms or social equality, are toilets. The right to defecate with dignity. In the villages, many women are forced to wait until nightfall, to go out into the fields, exposing themselves to the risk of attack. The most fortunate have a corner set aside in their yard, or at the back of their house: a simple hole in the ground, euphemistically described as a ‘dry latrine’. These are the latrines that the Dalit women come to empty every day, bare-handed. Women like Smita.