I have known odd balls of tissue or even kerchiefs in the pockets of my freshly laundered pajama suits and often admonished myself for not having emptied my pockets. Once I had several loose coins in one laundry lot in the machine. They made a racket but came through unscathed, only brighter.
With the meticulous care I had since then exercised I had no chance of beating my own record of washing mishaps. At least that was what I told myself — until the other day.
The morning after my return from the U.K. two weeks ago, after a 15-month stay with my children there, I woke up groggy and somewhat disoriented by jet-lag. My apartment in Thrissur had been readied by a loving niece, who was waiting for me there the previous night. The place was spick and span with freshly laundered curtains, freshly scrubbed surfaces, freshly cleaned windows. The odd things around were the clothes I had worn on my travel and a few soiled items I had bundled away in a cupboard before I left, and discovered that morning.
Even before my usual morning cup of tea I gathered them all and put them into my washing machine. I made sure the trouser pockets were empty. I switched on the machine and went to make my tea.
Later, when I went to pick up a floor wipe I had left on top of the machine, I noticed a 20-rupee note washing up against the glass front of the machine, like a floating leaf. As I sought to puzzle it out, a couple of 10-rupee notes joined it. I couldn’t figure that out at all.
Long after the machine had done with the washing, I retrieved the three currency notes, which now rested peacefully at the edge of the pile. I spread them out on the dining table. As I went about picking the clothes out, more currency notes began to surface. I had almost got to the bottom when a dark object came into view. And as I picked it up (now with trembling hands) I forgot the clothes and set about trying to minimise the damage as best as I could. Below the black thing was a neat pile of… well, never mind. White specks of paper dotted the clothes.
I had barely finished when the doorbell rang. It was my niece. She seemed amused at the sight of my handiwork on the dining table: a dhoti folded in four and weighted down at corners with books, and the fan in full swing. She turned her gaze to me.
“See for yourself,” I said. As she moved a book and lifted one corner of the dhoti her eyes popped out. ‘Keep still, there are two more layers,’ I said. She lifted the second layer and repeated a hand-to-mouth act. What she saw below the third one seemed to take her breath away: ten 500-rupee notes, clean but damp. There was utter disbelief in her eyes. To top it all, I held up to her my little black book that looked like a freshly drowned kitten.
‘That is your passport!” she nearly screamed. “I saw that in your shirt pocket last night along with your boarding card!”
“That, dear, was the problem,’ I explained. “I never ever put anything in my shirt pocket while in the U.K. because there I always have a jacket or something else over my shirt. By habit I did not empty my shirt pocket this morning. Never mind, no damage. The passport is about to expire anyway. I vaguely remember taking out from my hip pocket an envelope containing money, in order to tip my wheelchair help at the airport and pay for my cab. I must then have put it back in my shirt pocket...”
My son-in-law Richard had the last word on it. “I knew achhen (father) is a true Indian,” he told my daughter. “The first thing he does getting back home is laundering money!”
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