My cousins living in the USA visit us occasionally. They screw their faces when they see us drying our washed clothes on a plastic rope in the open space outside my house.
“You are lucky. In America, we would be penalised if we hang our clothes in public view,” said a cousin.
“Then how do you dry your clothes? Sunshine is the best source to dry clothes as well as to kill germs,” I said.
“Display of wet undergarments in public even if it is to dry them is considered indecent and immoral, deserving a penalty in the country we work,” said my cousin.
I felt extremely happy that I am not forced to migrate to a country for a living where they don’t allow you to wash and dry your dirty linen in public.
In my childhood days, I had seen my grandparents wash their clothes in the village pond where they also took their bath. Grandfather dipped his dhoti in the pond and hit it on the stone steps of the pond to remove dirt. Grandfather’s dhotis were always yellowish, because they were never introduced to detergents or bleaching agents.My grandmother also followed the same practice to wash her sari and blouse.
Dhobis used canals, ponds and rivers to wash dirty linen in bulk. They dried clothes on the sandy banks of rivers and canals. It was widely believed in rural areas that if you thrashed soiled clothes on a granite slab, the clothes would part with dirt sticking on them out of sheer fatigue. After I grew up, I moved to cities for a living. In city flats, one doesn’t get a granite stone to pound clothes on. Soon, a washing machine was acquired to wash clothes.Then I found my wife not using the laundering machine.
“Shirt collars, sleeves and pant seats need to be brushed to remove the dirt. Washing machine is good only for rinsing unsoiled clothes,” said the wife.
She soaks the clothes in a bucket of soap water, uses a brush to scrub the dirt out of shirt collars and uses the washing machine to rinse the clothes. We still had to wring the clothes by hand, and hang them on a clothesline to dry before they could be pressed with a hot iron.
When we lived in Delhi, some people employed servants to wash clothes. Servants were armed with flat wooden bats to thrash wet clothes and frighten the dirt out of linen.
I found one objection to the method of banishing dirt by beating the daylights out of clothes. The roof of my bathroom started leaking. I called a civil engineer to repair the roof. He opined that my bathroom roof had developed hairline cracks due to the clothes being beaten up on the upper floor bathroom.
He suggested that I should request my neighbour living overhead to stop thrashing clothes on the bathroom floor. Otherwise, even if he repaired the roof of my bathroom, it would still leak and I should not blame the engineer for sloppy work. However, my upper floor neighbour refused to see reason in the argument.He could not believe that dirt could be removed without beating up the clothes. He said that his servant did not know how to use a washing machine. He found fault with the structure of the house for the leak in my bathroom. I was forced to vacate the house.
Now, I am living in a house with plenty of space around the house to hang washed garments on a clothesline under the sun to dry. I and my clothes are in peace now.