Thankful in India :: Traveling Laundry

I have written a few times now about the things that I am thankful for while traveling in India. I promised to finish up this series with a top ten, but first I've got a few stories to tell. And so as we wind down the year, I'm going to complete my list of reason to be thankful while I was traveling in India.

We were in India for several weeks traveling around the Northern part of the country, which was long enough to need to have our clothes laundered. Pretty much any vacation longer than 3 weeks you run out of ‘essentials.’  And so 2 weeks in, we sent our clothes out to the hotel's dhobi wallah (loosely translated means 'laundry worker'). One thing we'd noticed as we traveled was that there was laundry hanging from trees, or Indian women beating it against the rocks near rivers. But we told ourselves that this was just how the locals did their laundry, and that our laundry was of course cleaned as we might traditionally do at home in the US. You know at some sort of laundromat - although I confess I never saw one. 

Funny thing was that when our clothes came back at night there was a tell tale sign of how all laundry is done in India. There would be a smudge near a collar, a small twig near an elastic band. Nothing really quite noticeable, but nonetheless it was there. The wonderful thing about it tho was that every thing, and I mean every last piece of our laundry came back lightly starched, ironed, folded and smelling sort of earthy. I did really love that. 

As the weeks went by, I looked for my items hanging from a tree, or perhaps hit up against a rock by the river, but I never did see anything that looked like my clothes. There were entire networks of people who did laundry. Who moved it from one station to the next. From the washing near the river, to the drying in the trees, to the tent cities where they were steamed and pressed before returning each item to its owner. How it all ended up where it needed to go is such a mystery to Western eyes, but I did not lose one item.

So one of the many things I am thankful for while traveling in India was never seeing my underwear hanging in a tree, and that all my laundry traveling through the local laundry network ended up beautifully cleaned, folded at the foot of my bed each time I sent it out.