In this extract from my forthcoming book, To the Brink, I am privy to a whole new perspective on the meaning of suffering while biking India
“Malamūtra, excrement, is so intrinsic to life in rural India that for some it constitutes their sole reason to be. I saw a thirteen-year-old boy who should have been at school squatting under a cow’s backside instead, his job being to wait until the thing shat. When finally it did, he caught the deluge in a rudimentary baseball mitt fashioned from an old grocery bag. Like an expert pastry chef he then mixed in some straw and spanked the steaming matter into four dung-patties before laying them out in the sun to dry for fuel.
