Over five thousand years ago, from about 3500 BCE to about 1700 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization rooted in the Indus river valley spread out over 280,000 square miles, nearly the size of California and Nevada put together. This civilization covered parts of present-day Pakistan and India.

This civilization brimmed over with more than a hundred cities built with perpendicular streets, one after the other, as far as the eye could see, it was perhaps the first planned city in human history. Huge reservoirs of water were scattered in the city with steps on all four sides for people to step down into and bathe in. Shiny tiles made bathroom walls which looked remarkably like our own modern bathrooms today. Each house had its own bathroom. This civilization had a sophisticated sewage system which removed waste on a curved inclined planned drain coming out of each house structure from the bathrooms and the kitchen into a shared clay covered drainage structure between the public road and the household–––these still beautiful and elegant drains covered with red clay tiles, presumably to contain the odors, continued onto the plains outside the city. Most improbable, a systemic form of weights and measures worked consistently across 1500 miles, eerily similar to our modern national bureau of standards.

For a long time now, I have been fascinated with the idea of sewage. What is sewage? Where does it come from? What is the history of sewage systems? My larger questions have been around: What is waste? What are the cultural constructions of the idea of waste? How does each culture imagine waste? How do we even see it? How do we learn as a culture to deal with it in all its manifestations?

In the winter of 1988, I went to Pakistan. It was not easy for me to get there, I discovered. At the time I was still an Indian citizen and a US green card holder. It took me seven days of eight hours a day waiting in long lines at the Pakistan Consulate in New Delhi to get a visa to go to Pakistan for exactly seven days. It was extremely frustrating. I had not foreseen this blockage of my desires. The consulate staff laughed and did not believe me for six days. When I kept coming back day after day and did everything they asked me to do, they were not moved by my genuine desires to see those ancient sewage systems. On the seventh day, when they realized I was not going to give up, the last high level consulate official I was told to see, who was just under the Ambassador status, said, as he stamped my blue Indian passport, shaking his head, disbelievingly, but with wonder, “You really want to see those old sewage systems?” I smiled at him in joy, almost in tears, and said to him, “you will not regret this. I promise I am not a spy for India. I want to know how our own ancient civilization knew how to deal so well with waste and why our modern Indian civilization does such a miserable job of it.”

I wanted to visit the ancient Indus Valley archeological sites of Mohenjo-Daro, which was near Karachi, and the other major site in Harappa near the city of Lahore. I wanted to see these ancient sewage systems for myself. I had studied them in two South Asian archeology courses with Professor George Dales at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in the fall prior. Professor Dales was going to be there, along with Dr. Mark Kenoyer, who was a just freshly minted Ph.D. research scholar trained under Professor Dales, both deeply involved in archeological digs at Harappa for many years.

I was stunned when I got there. I had studied this civilization from afar, but seeing the spacious middle class seeming brick houses, the complicated seals that seemed to have meditating figures sitting under a pipal tree (still sacred to most Hindus), the huge beautiful waist-high pots that interred their dead. I was moved by these earlier ancient people, who with the few fragments we had of their lives, seemed to grow in my imagination, larger and larger than I had assumed before. There was a female dancer figure, whose raised legs reminded me of the bharata natyam dancing style; a male figure with a thickly bearded face, who was termed by the archeologists as “the priest”, and the beautiful, spacious bathrooms, with shiny tiles so much like our own, with fired pottery circular pipes that took the used up water on an inclined plane outside each house. This pipe led to a curved slide-like shape made with fired clay that just so slightly slanted down so that gravity did its trick; this was covered with fired pottery rectangular pieces so that one could imagine taking it off and cleaning it so easily. Their sewage systems were way more sophisticated and effective when compared to what many Indian modern cities had.

Then suddenly, the entire civilization disappeared. Archeologists surmise from the evidence they have gathered that perhaps it was because the river Indus moved away, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, and the cities never accommodated to the river moving away from them. Another theory is that the civilization was devastated by frequent and overwhelming floods. It seemed some kind of major environmental disaster.

The archeologists wonder: Did the changes of the river patterns enable the disappearance of an entire civilization?Who were these people who lived there? Did they know their end was coming near? Did they try to prepare for the worst of the times? Civilizations do come and go; we know that from archeology.

Now, we see our own huge, turbulent Rivers in the sky, the scientists of climate say. Will we be able to reimagine our own civilization before the rivers in the sky move too fast for us to do anything about it? Will all we have left is to write a civilizational obituary?

Can we use our imagination in the middle of this pandemic, when the entire modern civilization seems at a standstill, when we are all facing this immediate potentiality of death, can we rethink how to live together, so that all of us have equitable access to food, housing, jobs, opportunities, regardless of race, class, caste, sexuality, gender, ability, etc. Some of us are much closer to the pandemic and poverty than others; the way our societies–––our work, our labor, our housing–––, are organized, or not organized, right now very well. Can we keep the whole surviving, rather than just bits and piece.

The Black Lives Matters protests are rethinking in utterly remarkable and unexpected ways our modern relationship to crime, punishment, jails, police. It all boils down to how everyone, from humans to other species to landforms–– mountains, rivers and oceans–– get equitable support to thrive, both economically and ecologically. How do we keep it all in mind at the same time, so that we do not make the same mistakes as we have done in our past?

The word is the commons, the idea of the shared ecological and cultural spaces we all hold and treasure in common. It is both the literal and metaphoric operating metaphor of the new world we want to create.

I do hope that we will get through this coming election, that we will all push for all of us to vote, to be counted, to be a part of the whole. It feels like a civilizational moment, like 1968, like 1980, like 2016 and so many, many others, like 1619, 1857, and so many more.
May we look in the mirror and see ourselves embedded in the larger commons of land, water and air, and understand our proportional place within that and act accordingly. May we figure out how to work together towards this single-mindedly with all the layers of collective goals in mind, all at the same time.