My wife said that the new maid wanted to know if we had a washing machine before agreeing to work for us. The way we wash our clothes has changed over the years. My grandparents never used soap to wash clothes. They took bath in the village pond. They pummelled their clothes on the granite steps of the pond and rinsed them in the water. To avoid polluting the water, detergent soaps were not used in the pond.
Later, my mother used soap bars to wash clothes at home. Dirty clothes were soaked in water and soap was rubbed on them. Each cloth was thrashed on a stone slab mounted on a brick platform. After a good whack, the clothes were rinsed in cold water twice and wrung hard and hung on a clothesline to dry under the sun. Dark coloured clothes were dried in shade to avoid fading of colours.
Some families gave their dirty linen to dhobis. Dhobis took them to river banks or lakes and washed them in the traditional way: bashing clothes on stones lying on river banks and drying them on the sands of rivers. Some put the white clothes in boiling water to make them white as snow. Bluing products were used to lessen the yellowing of white fabrics.
If the blue was not properly diluted, some laundered clothes came back with bluish stains. Some used starch to make the cotton dhotis and saris stiff. It was common to find some clothes with holes when they came back from the dhobi, though no dhobi had ever admitted that it was his fault.
When people started living in flats, having a stone slab was not possible in tiny bathrooms. So, a flat wooden contraption similar to a cricket bat was used to pound clothes spread on the bathroom floor. Somehow, the belief that dirt parted from clothes only if they were given a good wallop, lingered on over the years. Some bathroom floors in flats started leaking because of beating clothes on the floor.
Then came the washing machines with built-in driers. Liquid detergent is poured into the machine which has soiled clothes. The clothes are washed, rinsed and water is drained by the machine. Then the clothes are transferred to the drier and dried. Unlike sunlight, electric dryer shrinks some fabrics abnormally. Washing machines take up plenty of water to wash and rinse.Water is becoming a rare commodity in many towns. Very soon, science may have to come up with a trick to launder dirty linen without water in an electromechanical device.