After my other trip to India, laundry was the one thing I was certain would go well for me. Maybe I was grubby from travel and my standards were lower, but I remember my clothes coming back clean, crisp, and on the same day.
This is now
We have tried three laundries. None of them manage to have clothes ready for us on the date stated on any consistent basis. We could get them to deliver instead of walking several blocks to check, but then you have to be here to answer the door.
Sometimes, my clothes smell less clean--though different--than when I dropped them off. Whites and brights are lost causes (the socks in the photo are from when I first arrived). If I want something white, I bleach it at home. Anything I don't want stretched or stained, I wash in a bucket in the shower and dry on the balcony.
The ironing is good, except when clothes come back with iron marks. The irons they use are generally pre-Depression Era devices that involve coals. We see women with large, flat carts pressing clothes on the street. IEverything comes back ironed--even sheets and towels.
All articles when finally returned--the record is three weeks and four visits to get back two pairs of socks--have tiny, hand-written tags matching the receipt. The wee tags are probably important because our clothes get dropped off at the cleaners, someone picks them up, and then they are taken somewhere to be washed in some body of water. We see women and children standing in the gutters washing clothing, though I have not seen any of mine there yet. I like to think my laundry is higher-end and maybe I get tap water instead of gutter water.Washing clothes in the bucket gives you an appreciation for 1) North American water systems (yes, even Houston), and 2) the spin cycle. The water is cloudy from the tap and sometimes smells weird. I hand wash with Tide, and it dries out my hands. Wringing out a bucket of clothes is tedious and boring.
Dear May Tag Man, Are you single?
We could buy a washer for a couple hundred bucks, but I'd still be faced with wringing, and my clothes would still have to line-dry. All those "Spring-Fresh-I'm-A -Housewife-and-Happy-in-the-Sun" ads are crap. Line-dried clothes smell like mildew, pollution, or weird tap water, depending upon the weather, and they are crispy.
Dry cleaning is an inexpensive solution, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to dry clean all my clothes, in that even with US EPA standards, dry cleaning shops become Super Fund sites. I can't imagine India has any regulations (or any that are heeded), so I'll only use it for my white dress shirt.
On the bright side (sort of), my father tells me that my washer is limping, so when I come home, I may get to buy some sexy, new front-loader. Rrrrrowwwlll!
