Launder for Love

First off, I’d like to say that if my second child (emphasis on “if”) is anything like Aamir, I am going to perform matri-suicide. Five years from now, I pray for a little girl who will quietly play with her color sets in the corner.

Now some deep thoughts on the mundane. There are solely 2 advantages when you do laundry in the Himalaya. First, your clothes dry in an average of 10.5 minutes because the combination of sun, heat and desert climate pretty much zap away any moisture in your clothing like a Laundry Superheroine Goddess with zappy rays emanating from her head. Plus, there’s bleaching for whites with UV rays like laser beams - although take heed lady-of-the-house, your blacks fade to light gray in one sunlit exposure.

Second, hanging clothes on a clear night when I’m on the roof underneath the blanket of the Milky Way – and yes, you can see every. Single. Pinpoint. Of a star - is a truly breathtaking combination of the sacred and mundane; while securing my hubby’s undies to the line, the black sky is a glittering dome, and I feel I can grasp at the darkness and part the clouds, and the top of my head is littered with starlight. There is something reassuring about taking that vastness and bringing it into yourself, and my actions take on a very Zen nature. I’m pinning wet clothing to the line, nothing more, nothing less, and feeling very relaxed that I can do so little and just be wonderfully, silently, growing into myself again. Aamir has noticed these twinkling lights – he’s spontaneously broken out into renditions of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” which has given Abbass and I amazing bursts of happiness.

(My son is now delicately aligning a blue ribbon into the crack on the wood stairway and telling me there is “poo-poo” inside. Beware the “poo-poo”. One of the main hazards of raising a toddler in India is that the puddle he just stepped in contains a toxic waste melange of cow piss, dog poo, human spit, henna, detergent runoff, maggi noodles, antifreeze, sari dye and/or dead rat fur. Yes, I saw that the other day for real. One visitor told me cow piss wasn’t that bad because urine, in scientific terms, is sterile. Thanks, I know. It’s just that the cow ate out of the trash bin that contains all that toxic stuff, including gallons of male piss coming out of the laborers from Bihar who attend the Bollywood cinema next door, which apparently, for all its years in existence, does not have a proper urinal despite the 3-hour showings.)

Photo: Do you want YOUR child to hold the offshoot of this between his toes?

Now for the dark side. Himalayan laundry expands Indian Standard Time. That’s right. The task has the amazing ability to extend my “laundry day” to ALL day. Yes, all fucking day. This is why I cuss Mother: The first task is waking up and eyeing the red indicator light on the switch to see if there happens to be electricity that morning. I have one chance in three. Second is beating my sister-in-law to the washer, which is impossible. She’s a Ladakhi woman and she’s making bread at dawn for god’s sake which she kneaded with her knuckles the night before, and already has a huge kettle of ginger chai prepared with fresh cow’s milk for her robust Himalayan children. Her bare, leather fingers can pick up boiling pots. My first-world wimpyness (just sitting on a stupid computer all day) is no match.

Then it’s operating with Murphy’s law: I’ve made it to the washer, I have detergent packets ready, my soapy hands can’t open the plastic packets with my teeth, and the electricity goes down for another 5 hours. During this moment, the churning washer slows down like a big, dying cow and the suds crackle like Rice Crispies in dissolution. So sad.

Finally, it’s the plain fact that spots don’t come out with an 8 kg. washer by Samsung. I can pick up this machine with my two hands and carry it to the opposite corner if I happen to not jive with the feng-shui in the washer-room closet that day. It’s a plastic shell with a Dutch water wheel in the middle, but a cute little thing, and obviously manufactured by Asians with its small yet functional proportions. The water runs black and yet, after twisting the sheets with my hands and wee biceps, rinsing the load again in a bucket of fresh water to ring out the soapy water, and carrying up the laundry up a steep flight of steel stairs to the roof to dry, I’m hanging out all my lovelies and finding shmears of black dirt running in rivulets across my white towel. The damn spinner is broken again (that’s the manual term for “dryer” here).

Photo: view my whites in all their glory.

Aamir can continue looking like a nomadic child from the lakes area. I have American dollars in the bank, time on my hands, many meditations and confessionals to work out while squeezing a fresh pillow case out with waters from the sacred Indus. I’ve told myself many times here already that I can choose whether to allow the dailies bother me in India, and grace over them with quietude.