Please do not let the title of this tale mislead you, this anecdote has no relation whatsoever to that historical pass situated somewhere between the North West frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but alludes to a different kind of passage which will become clearer as we go on.

My first ever introduction to an electronic toilet seat was in Tokyo, Japan. Landing there for an event accompanied by the usual crew of performers, dancers and models and my dear gay friend who was the choreographer for the show. We were tired, hungry and jet lagged and the first thought in our minds was a shower and food, so grabbing our room keys we proceeded to our temporary abodes to do just that.

Hardly had I taken the first few puffs of my cigarette (Japanese hotels are very kind to us smokers) when the telephone began to ring, picking it up, I proceeded with  the usual greeting; my civil hello was met with an echoing sound in return, accompanied by the gurgling of water and the voice of my choreographer, a couple of octaves higher than usual. “Have you been to the toilet,” he screeched. Now I am used to personal questions flung at me considering the rather bohemian free spirited circles I move in, but this was puzzling to the say the least. Why in heavens name would my toilet visits hold so much interest as to warrant a telephone call. “No, I haven’t,” I replied.  Having got that fact out of the way, curiosity getting the better of me, I asked him, “where are you?” “In the toilet, ” came the reply (that explained the gurgling and echoing!) My next question would have been, “what are you doing there,” but I stopped myself just in time, realizing the many different answers I could get. None of them appealing to a person on an empty stomach and a wild imagination. Instead, I simply replied, “ok” the kind of ok one gives that leaves an unasked question hanging in the air. At this point my caller began waxing lyrical about the toilet. “I can sit here for hours,” and “can we take one back with us,” were some of the lines in this ode to the toilet seat I was forced to listen to, all the while wondering if my friend had been at the mini bar and indulged in the intoxicating delights it offered unwary travelers. I was by now consumed by curiosity and quickly ending the call proceeded to the toilet to investigate whatever marvels awaited me there.

At first glance, I wondered if one needed some kind of license to operate this miracle of modern technology. It had a row of buttons with little icons with images of gushing water, left and right arrows, all of it attached to the side like a giant remote control, and another tiny one after that, and an infra-red light just above the bum line. Furthermore, where the toilet paper usually reposed was a big box with a number of control buttons, and of course all the writing was in Japanese, so I simply had to rely on my deductive powers to figure things out on the go, very much like the Egyptologists on their first entrance to the pyramids attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs that adorned the tombs of the Pharaohs.

Anyway, I gingerly placed myself on this marvelous piece of machinery and got down to the business of going about my business and having concluded my meeting I now attempted the grand finale and began pushing buttons. This is when all hell broke loose, pipes and tubes began peeping out at me, looking at them from my vantage point they looked quite deadly.

Water began spraying to different parts of my lower extremities some in spurts, some in long extended intervals almost as if there was a fire down there. Then came the piece de resistance, a steady stream of water that began as a tickling sensation and then a strong jet straight up the Khyber Pass, when you least expected it. I now understood my dear Choreographers waxing lyrical on the phone and his reluctance to get off this (what to him would have been a multiple purpose) machine. I managed to extract myself from this modern contribution to hygiene by deciphering some of the icons that would have made a code-breaker proud, firmly deciding to stick to traditional methods in the future; I am rather old fashioned that way. But a thought did cross my mind while writing this, just suppose if the spread of Covid19 could be prevented not by washing of the hands but by washing, “south of the border,” to put it delicately, what a boon this would have been!