field notes on bathing
main pagal aashiq bechara
The bathroom is always small, if it is your own. The dream is to have one of those big ones, clean ones. No dirtened grout. The buckets have varied. Heavy, iron ones, the handles would clang when dropped. Handpump, bucket, mug, all shades of greygreen, iron. As a kid, your bathing was an excursion for at least two more people – your uncle or father drawing up water from the well, or working the handpump, your mother carrying your skinny body and bucket to the shady patch on the verandah, and you, a glum kid, ready to be polished to do absolutely nothing that would add value to your resume.
After that came sturdy, durable plastics. City life. Blue, mostly. Rarely purple, or peach, like right now. It is a thing being reused, passed down from one friendship to another. Sustainability practices permeate all aspects – friendships and conscious practices alike.
Spring has skipped a little too many steps for now, and summer is holding the fort here. It is extremely hot. There is no ac, no cooler. There’s a ceiling fan, and a table one – another thing passed down as an act of love and care. No matter how much you try to not sweat, there are things you are supposed to do. Walk a mile for a thing or do, lay down together enough that it is worth running a couple more. There’s sweat, so much sweat. Two nights ago I came down with the heat, unable to bear it. I was told to sit, with water dripping down my body. Shampooed, conditioned hair went down the drain, along with the products, as I sat dying, a bit, just a bit. I let the scalp cool off. Smoked a cigarette. Let the tap fill the bucket in a slow manner, so that the rush didn’t drown the music playing outside. I was told to go underwater and put my face in the bucket. Take a big breath, go in. Feel like all those people in the movies who go through something that alters everything in their lives. You know which ones I am talking about. The song felt different underwater. Jo aadat pad gayi peene ki, to aag bujhi mere seene ki. Now that drinking has become a habit, the fire in my chest is satiated. That’s how I felt at the moment, the fire within me was trapped, and I needed to cool it off from the outside, as much as I could. Internal matters could be dealt with later, they weren’t big on the agenda, when you took the entire current affairs in perspective.
I have been taking two baths per day, sometimes more, depending on how big of a migraine I have been nursing, or if I have been over my daily cigarette limit. This heat is unbearable in ways that cannot be dealt with easily.
Years ago, I was drowning myself in a bucket to not hear screaming and fighting right outside the bathroom. To move to a place where it is just you, and to be able to find leisure in acts that were one’s protective measures, helps bear the brunt of everything.
Even before that, some essence of hysteria had made itself valid within my sense of self by showing me a hallucination when I took a dip in our village’s part of Ganga. I saw the same three idols that my mother has kept in her home, but the reason it meant something Bigger to the Big People in my life is because I had never seen those idols. Maybe I have dreamt my entire life and now I am reliving it, exactly the same, for the perverted pleasure of somebody out there. There is always somebody out there.
Last week I was in Mumbai, a city akin to New York (I say begrudgingly, being from New Delhi), and it was a tiring event. I walked more than necessary, talked more than I allowed myself, and what followed was a sleep that carried me through a painless night. I woke up to aching joints, and took a hot shower, washing away everything that would have meant something if I was still grasping at straws to feel something. But I had a home to go back to. I mean something to somebody now. I have something that means a lot to me now.
When we were young, my mother would mix the dettol antiseptic liquid in the water, and watching the white disappear into the blue transparency of the bucket was fascinating. The smell, something that still moves with me, no matter which city I dock myself at. Before going out for the night, to just sit and see the moon, the still water, the concrete turning into a puddle of nightlife, I took another bath. Dettol. Sandalwood soap. Scrubbed the places my ma would be harsh on, leaving me red, but clean and scented. My bathroom has bandaids stuck on the wall tiles, sometimes they feel like lizards from the corner of my eye, reptilian manifestations of some of my most irrational fears. I remember running around half naked as a kid, refusing to bathe in my naani’s bathroom, because of a beige phantom terrorising me to my gut. I remember my cat recently killing one, and nibbling on it by the foot of my mattress, and how I screamed, but the cause was dead, the proof in front of my eyes. The head was thrown along with the rest of the trash the next day. There was nothing to fear in the house for now, even if the bandaids seem to change their places every other day. A thing that covers your wounds should be allowed to be, even if it scares some other part of you. Painful moments pass easily, if you ease yourself into the water. Sit in the cold, sit in the room (temperature), sit with life dripping down you. There’s always a new, clean day for you to work upon.
I don’t know how to end this. It IS too hot.