89/ 100 Sangeeth
Sangeeth, the Dhobi Dog.
Washing machines. We take them for granted. They sit in a corner somewhere underneath a worktop, encased in years of fluff, churning away without complaint. I have never been without one, and it would have been easy for me to assume that they are a universally-used piece of equipment in most people’s houses these days. In the UK, this may be true, but in India (and I am sure many other countries) hand-washing still reigns.
When we are travelling—whether in some far-flung country or closer to home in our campervan—I almost always hand-wash everything. I really don’t mind at all and actually find it quite restful in a way, although I don’t think I would be able to keep up that level of enthusiasm if I knew I would be doing it every day for the foreseeable future.
I’ve spent many an hour crouched over a bucket of soapy water trying to wring as much liquid out of my shirts before hunting around for any suitable place to hang them to dry. I have even honed my travelling wardrobe to include as many quick-drying items by companies such as Rohan just to make things easier. Having trousers that are dry in half a day is so much better than waiting three weeks for a pair of denims to be ready to use again. My other travelling laundry necessity is a universal drain plug from Lifeventure as sinks in India never, ever, seem to have one.
I even give some thought as to when and where I might be best doing my washing. Our last trip began in a smart hotel in Mumbai. I already knew there wouldn’t be any handy buckets, or nice airy balconies I could use to dry the clothes, so I was going to wait until we arrived at our guesthouse in Kerala before breaking out the detergent. My plan, however, was thrown into disarray when I managed, on the very first day, to acquire a mysterious large black circle on the leg of the trousers I had only really brought with me for hotter weather (i.e. Kerala). This wasn’t just a bit of dust or some splashed puddle-water. This was some kind of ultra indelible black oil that resisted every single cleaning product we could find in our room.
After a couple of days of trying various things to bring my trousers back to a wearable status I decided to do the unthinkable and pay for the hotel laundry service and, since we were washing the trousers, we decided to send along everything else that we had worn up to this point in our trip. In my mind I had visions of our lovely clothes being whisked off to some large industrial launderette full of fancy machines that could rid your clothes of every speck of dirt. What I didn’t realise was that, even in a nice hotel in the heart of a modern Indian city, our clothes were actually sent to one of the local open-air washing ghats where teams of people would wash everything by hand by beating our clothes into submission on stones. Who needs enzymes when you’ve got a wiry old man standing knee-deep in a bath of caustic chemicals…
The next day, a very sheepish hotel manager appeared with a beautifully wrapped parcel, tied with nice twine and complete with a pretty thank-you card. There had been a small problem, he announced. The clothes had ‘some marks’ on them he said. Thinking he was talking about the tenacious stain on my trousers we said we were sure it would all be fine and not to worry. Then we really did worry because the normally cheery manager added, in a very serious tone, ‘you really need to go and look at the washing and come and tell me what you want us to do’.
We unpacked the parcel of clean clothes to discover that must have been some kind of a bleach explosion in the laundry area. Almost every single thing we had given them had huge bleached patches all over them. We travel light and the amount of spoiled clothes was about 80% of everything we had with us. I was wearing the only remaining pair of trousers I had, and three of the four shirts I had were ruined. Fiona’s wardrobe had suffered a similar fate. The only thing that had escaped unscathed was, strangely (and luckily) enough, Fiona’s very favourite top that she bought in India a year ago.
To cut a very long story short the hotel were very helpful, accepted full responsibility, and sent us off to the ridiculously fancy Palladium Shopping Mall to replace as many of our clothes as we could, which they then paid for without any quibbling.
The photographs in this story are not from Mumbai. Our fascination about what these open-air laundry areas actually were meant that we paid a visit to Dhobi Khana, the one closest to our guesthouse in Fort Kochi. Dhobi means laundry, and is also the name of the caste that usually do the washing. This particular dobhi was relatively small with around twenty stalls, each having a large stone trough full of murky washing water and, standing in the corner, a large stone anvil with a convex surface. The man (here it was all men—the women seemed to do the drying bit mostly) would pull his lungi up to his waist, stand in the large trough and scrub and bash the clothes and linens onto the rock, using a bar of special laundry soap as the detergent.
The clothes were then dried on miles and miles of washing lines outside in the Keralan heat. Rather than clothes pegs they used two tightly twisted hemp ropes — poking the corners of the washing between the two strands to anchor them firmly. They insisted I had a go and, I have to say, it was definitely not as easy at they made it look as the laden ropes were so tightly twisted it was hard to get them apart. The ladies doing the drying had fingers strengthened by countless years of hanging up pillowcases. Interestingly, they like this method because it is incredibly quick to remove the washing when it was dry, or if it began to rain. One hard tug and it popped out of its little gap in the rope.
A plaque on the wall tells the history of Dhobi Khana:
In 1720, the Dutch government brought the ancestors of this community from different parts of Tamil Nadu and Malabar to wash the Dutch army’s uniform. The Dutch allotted 13 acres of land and set up around 80 traditional sand-bored ponds for the families for washing purposes when this place was known as Maiath Veli. Dhobi Khana was constructed in 1976 as compensation for providing 10 acres of land for a public play ground.
The dobhi dog, whose name is Sangeeth apparently, lives with the folk that toil in the laundry day and night. We passed by one night at 11pm and people were still washing away. I asked whether Sangeeth had a bed and the helpful chap there told be that he had no need for one because he could sleep anywhere he liked—presumably on a huge pile of clean sheets if he’s anything like my dog Chip.
