The Case of the Iron

"I have noticed you have this tendency to let problems fester until they get out of control," said a friend of mine casually over tea at the office cafe.  (I once came down to the office cafe to observe the kettles of various curries and vegetables they had bubbling away for the lunch rush.  I noticed that both the spinach curry and the egg curry were brilliant green.  I'm not a Dr. Seuss character and I don't enjoy green eggs, so I asked what had happened.  "Well, we wanted to add some green coloring to the spinach curry," said the attendant.  "Yes, but what about the eggs?" I asked.  "We missed," she replied.  A few weeks later, I was wandering down the hall to the cafe when I noticed a mouse running frantically through the hall.  Interestingly, he was running away from the cafe.  I failed to take this as a sign.)

At any rate, I sat up straight in my chair.

"That's not true!" I fumed.  "Besides, that's a bit rich.  I'm still new to this country and I'm young."

"You're not that young," sneered my colleague, who moved in with a guitar-playing atheist boyfriend at age 19, much to her conservative parents' chagrin.

I denied this, but recently her words have come back to haunt me.  After fifteen months of living in Delhi, I finally have to admit that some of my constant confusion may be the result of willful idiocy.  In fact, if I were to star in my own Aristotelian drama, a decision "to let things fester" would probably be my tragic error.  

Consider the case of the irons.

Some clothes, I have recently been forced to accept, require ironing.  I denied this all throughout high school and even college.  Sure, other people pressed their clothes, but mine fell into neat folds on their own, ready to wear.  It was if there were magic straightening gnomes living in the fibers of all my garments, or so I told my sorority sisters.  My resulting rumpled-ness was less remarked upon, if only because I went to college in a very cold town where everyone wears a jacket - even indoors - for half of the year.

When I first moved to Delhi, I was elated to find a "dhobi" stall right outside my front gate.  After a week, I merrily gave them a couple of my dirty T-shirts to wash and iron.  Two days later, the dhobi returned the shirts.  The creases were crisp, the shirts looked clean.  Next week, I repeated the method.  This time, the creases were a bit more haphazard.  I sniffed the T-shirt.  It did not smell washed.

"Where do you wash the clothes?" I asked cautiously.

"In your house," said the dhobi.

"But I mean, where do you wash my clothes?" I asked again, thinking maybe I'd misunderstood him.

"In your house," he repeated.

I furrowed my brow, but I was new to the city and unwilling to reveal my ignorance.

"I don't think my dhobi is washing my clothes properly," I complained bitterly to a friend.  She stared at me, eyebrows arched in surprise.

"That's because a dhobi doesn't wash clothes," she replied.

Me: What?

Her: They only iron clothes.  Expecting them to wash clothes is like expecting a butcher to cook Chinese food.

Me:  I've been wearing dirty clothes for two weeks and didn't notice?

Her: You really didn't notice?

I can explain my confusion.  When faced with uncertainty, I always revert to linguistics.  (A cop might look at a suspect's motives, I'd look at his etymologies.  Of course, if you follow this logic far enough you'd think most crimes in the English-speaking world were committed by Gaulish tribes from several centuries ago.  But no method is foolproof.)  In Hindi, the word "dhona" means "to wash," and I assumed "dhobi" came from the same root.  So actually, my belief was more along the lines of expecting a butcher to deliver goat meat (Also, a tailor to deliver thin pieces of wood or a carpenter to deliver wagons.)

But once I found someone else to help with washing clothes, I settled into a pleasant pattern with the dhobi.  Until a few weeks ago, when things mysteriously changed.  They stopped delivering my clothes in the morning.

I tried to fix matters.  Usually, when someone in India doesn't do something, it's because they've decided they no longer want to.  I didn't pick up on this subtle signal, and resorted to going down and asking the dhobi to deliver my clothes, waving from the rooftop to indicate I was home and ready to receive clothes and various other tactics.  Instead of saying no, the pained-looking dhobi kept telling me my clothes would arrive "in five minutes."  Needless to say, the five minutes were never up.

The second time I dropped off clothes and the pick up time stretched out forever, I marched down for an explanation. 

"We were just about to send them," the old man began.

"Actually, we no longer deliver clothes in the morning," his daughter cut in.  "We only deliver in the evening."

"I work until very late at night," I said.  

"Too bad," said the girl.

The new rules struck me as needlessly vindictive.  I lived not even a minute's walk away, and there were at least five members of their family at the stall on any given day.

For weeks, I complained to friends about how the dhobi had no professional ethics, in exchanges like the following.

Me:  The dhobi has no professional ethics.

Friend:  Isn't "professional ethics" kind of a big phrase to toss around?  You're talking about people whose place of business consists of two pieces of plywood and a tarp.

Me:  So?  "Professional ethics," at its linguistic heart, only means to act in the spirit of someone taking the vows of a religious order.  How is that too much to ask?

Friend:  *weird choked sound*

I developed elaborate revenge fantasies in which the police came to raid the dhobi's stall.  Desperate for help, the dhobi turned to me to intervene.

Dhobi:  Please tell the policeman we are good people!  Please!  We have nowhere else to turn!

Me:  Now you know how I felt when you refused to deliver my clothes in the morning!

Etc.

Unfortunately, neither complaints nor fantasies were ironing my clothes.  I started piling all my clothes that required ironing in a corner of my room, where they collapsed into wrinkles while I stared at them with a sense of mournful tragedy.  An occasional dust bunny bounced down the pile, like an alpine skier attempting to descend K2.

"Why don't you just buy an iron?" a friend asked.

"But where?"  I wailed, as if locating an iron were like answering the question of man's purpose in the universe.

"Delhi is full of irons," said helpful friends.

Finally, driven to distraction and nearly a month after the feud with the dhobi began, I was on my way home from viewing an apartment in one of Delhi's well-known market areas.

"Can I buy an iron here?" I asked, carefully.

"Uh, yeah.  There are five shops at least.  Just go down to the street and turn right."

So I did.  In the first electronics shop, I told the guy what I needed and he showed me five different types of irons, Indian and foreign-made, with spray nozzles and without.  I purchased one, came home, and went about ironing my clothes with the merry abandon of a laundrywoman possessed by the devil.

"It's great!  I can iron my clothes whenever I want," I trilled to my friends. "Anytime!  I just plug it in and whoosh!"

Finding and purchasing the iron took a mere two minutes.  But worrying about the iron?  That took serious time.