Dhobis Wallah

When you travel in India there’s hardly and need for more than once change of clothes. Every day there will be a knock on your door and the laundry boy will collect all those dusty, sweaty clothes you wore yesterday, and every evening those same clothes will reappear – washed and ironed with more loving care than any washing-powder-ad mum ever lavished upon anything. And all for a few rupees per item. But what happened to your clothes between their departure and their like-new return?
Well, they certainly did not get anywhere near a washing machine. First of all they’re collected and taken to the dhobi ghat. A ghat is a place with water, a dhobi is a washerperson, so the dhobi ghat is where the dhobis doing their thing with thousands of articles of clothing.
Then the clothes are separated – all the white shirts are washed together, all the grey trousers, all the red skirts, all the blue jeans. By now, if this was the West, your clothes would either be hopelessly lost or you’d need a computer to keep track of them all. Your clothes are soaked in soapy water for a few hours, following which the dirt is literally beaten out of them. No multiprogrammed miracle of technology can wash as clean as a determined dhobi, although admittedly after a few visits to the Indian laundry your clothes do begin to look distinctly thinner. Buttons also tend to get shattered, so bring some spares. Zips sometimes fare likewise.
Once clean, the clothes are strung out on miles of clothesline to quickly dry in the Indian sun. They’re then taken to the ironing sheds where hundreds of ironers wielding primitive irons press your jeans like they’ve never been pressed before. Not just your jeans – your socks, your T-shirts, even your underwear will come back with knife-edge creases. Then the Indian miracle takes place. Out of the thousands upon thousands of items washed that day, somehow your very own brown socks, blue jeans, yellow T-shirts and red underwear all find their way back together and head for your hotel room. A system of making clothes, known only to the dhobis, is the real reason behind this feat. They say criminals have been tracked down simply by those telltale ‘dhobi marks’.