An outstanding biography I have read starts with a description of a sound rarely heard in the city today. It is the sound of clothes being washed by hand, on a stone. The author describes the sound in order to give his reader a vivid picture of the place where the subject of his book was born. A common background sound in our country, Mark Twain once said India was the only place where people “break rocks with clothes.”
In the small town where I grew up, every house had, in the backyard, a stone on which clothes could be washed, scrubbed and pounded endlessly. However, the task of washing clothes (from bedsheets to hand-kerchiefs) was not done at home. They were handed over to a dobhi.
A tall wicker-basket held the soiled clothes till the day they were picked up by the dobhi. As the week progressed, the heap of clothes would rise. It was a sign that the dhobi would soon arrive. He would come riding his bicycle and for some reason, one pedal of the bicycle had the rubber blocks missing. He would enter the house and go to the basket as if it belonged to him. He would sort the clothes and count them. My mother would enter the details in a note book. For some strange reason as he counted each piece he would make a hissing sound. This sound was the reason I never missed this ritual. It would go like this: “Hish, hish, hish, hish, four shirts.” After the clothes had been counted he would wrap the entire bundle and tie it on the back of his bicycle. He would return a week later with a bundle of a different shape. Each item would be returned, thoroughly scrubbed, starched and ironed. After the number was checked money would change hands. Then the ritual of counting the contents of the basket (complete with the hissing sound) would resume.
This hissing sound intrigued me. I observed one of the servants from our village washing clothes on the stone block at the back of the house. This elderly lady too used to make a hissing sound each time she thrashed the stone with wet, soapy clothes. Perhaps, I thought, the hissing sound was part of the complicated art of washing clothes and made all the difference.
I never did discover whether that hissing sound had anything to do with the art of washing clothes because I never did see our dhobi at work in his ghat. To tell the truth, I did not even know there was something like a ghat where clothes were washed in bulk. What I did know was that when I dressed for school, the clothes were spotless and neatly pressed as were the sheets on my bed and the pillow cover under my head.
Five decades later, I found myself posted in my hometown. I gathered details of the likely location of the dhobi ghat. On a weekend, I set out to locate the place. After a long drive he stopped the car asked around and came back with the news that the dhobi ghat had disappeared a long time ago and been replaced with buildings and flats.
In one of my earlier postings, I came across another dhobi ghat in another small town. I stopped just to watch them at work. It was an amazing sight. Thirty men or more stood ankle deep in water rinsing and hammering clothes on granite. On stout lines hundreds of pieces of clothing were hung – fluttering like banners. Dried by the sun, they would be ironed to perfection. As arms flashed in the sun, I could not hear, but I could sense ‘hish, hish, hish’ like a war cry. Back-breaking work from dawn to dusk.
Once again our dhobi came to mind. I wondered if his story had a happy ending. Did at least a few of his dreams come true? I really hoped they did. I felt profound regret. He had brightened my eight-year old life in more ways than one. Yet I never said thanks. I did not even learn his name.
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