A Winter in India

We are thankful for the people who do the laundry. We take it to a little place in Bengali Market, where someone sews on little cloth tags that identify it as ours. Then it disappears to people called dhobi wallahs, who separate it by color, soak it, beat it, scrub it and hang it to dry. It then gets ironed by other people, some of them in the alley behind our apartment. They are there til 8:30 at night, a woman sorting, and a man ironing with a hugely heavy-looking cast metal iron. Somehow it all comes back and its all spotless, and it all looks like this, whether its the dishtowel, or the dress shirt, or the undershirt or a polypro T-shirt. Each shirt is folded around a piece of tissue paper, and pinned. We actually do have a washing machine (cold water only) and I do use it for some things but it is just too nice to pass up laundry like this.