The Istri Wallah

I'm sitting in my bed in the dark. Writing this blog before I go to sleep after another long day. There is no silence. A few birds, the horn of a rickshaw, the guards bell. I hear a wedding party in the distance and up close the tapping of my keyboard.

My Tuesday was good. My day seems to finish at 9.30! I get the bulk of my work done for the project in that first 1 1/2 hours, then I have my tea break and by 10 I'm unsure of what to do. I help Kim with whatever she needs doing, but that's not much at the moment as she's really on top of everything herself. We had finished making the props and puppets yesterday, but we have a few more repairs to do tomorrow morning as two of the puppets fell apart. They're old Andhra Pradesh puppets made out of leather that are punched with holes of various shapes and sizes resulting in such amazingly intricate detail. But, they've not been looked after at all and have been left for years, dried out and crumpled up in a dusty cupboard. Although we've done a small restoration on them; oiling them and stitching back on broken limbs and sticks, they're just in really bad condition and today a hand split in two. I've fixed it again, but don't know how long it'll last...

But, today is the end of my Wednesday, and not my Tuesday which seems so long ago now. Time passes very slowly here. The best part of my day was when I went to the Istri Wallah (istri is iron) to get our clothes ironed. They're all into ironed clothes here and our stuff comes out pretty wrinkled after Kumari washes them. It also sometimes comes back stained - all our whites are now streaked with blue! D'oh.
Anyway, they'll sometimes take it to an istri wallah if we want to and give them extra but when we last did our clothes came back just as bad as before so we thought we could find one near Darpana and just get it done ourselves. After finding out where one should be, but never was there, we finally discovered she only turned up after 4pm. So today I took the two pairs of trousers and kurta to the istri while mum and Indira were rehearsing as I didn't have much else to do. I thought I'd go on a wee adventure!

At about 5 I headed down the street and, it's only round the corner from the theatre, found the lady who irons the clothes. Her stall is opposite the barbers. I love the barbers. It's just a wooden shack with a chair, I think I've described it before. It's excellent. Her stall is just a plank of wood propped up to be a table under a tattered rag to shade her. Surrounding her are piles of ironed and unironed clothes wrapped in bundles made up of older clothes. This old lady turns to me as I arrive and mimes to me to put my items on her table. She speaks not one single word of English and I can still only say a handful of Gujarati words which are of no use in this present situation (they're mainly for rickshaws, dabi-baju, jamni-baju etc). She looks at my 3 items, looks at me, shoots out a red stream of Pan spit from her mouth, turns back to me, confirms it's 3 items, says something in Gujarati and starts to iron my clothes. I take a seat on a stone bench and watch. I love it. The iron is heated by coals, I've never seen one before. It's so heavy and I can see her using her entire body to lift the iron on and off the clothes. It's also very big. There's little care in details such as pleats, but maybe that's because it's impossible to pay attention to such details with such a hefty contraption. She pulls the iron from one end to another, heaves it off as she adjusts the clothing, on again and pulls it back. She looks at me and smiles. While I wait I gather a small crowd of people. One man, teeth stained with pan, asks me "what country?" and sits down on the bench with me. His mouth is full of tobacco leaves and they fleck his teeth and his lips. I keep thinking he'll spit all over me while he talks and it distracts me from what he's shouting at me. Like a stereotypical english speaking tourist travelling to a non english speaking country, he thinks that if he shouts at me in Gujarati/English I'll understand what he's saying.

Where I'm from repeats like a broken record as both he and the istri wallah are convinced i'm from London or USA. I know I shouldn't be stubborn about Scotland, nobody knows where it is, but I don't want to be confused with being American. I say UK, then do a little England is next to Scotland mime. They nod as if they understand and say "yes, yes" but it's not long later we have exactly the same conversation again. At one point the man seems to get angry that I don't know Gujarati and only know English and doesn't accept that I can say "kemcho?" as being even nearly good enough to warrent a smile. But, when the istri wallah asks me "kemcho?" and i say "majama" he suddenly shouts something along the lines of me being able to speak Gujarati after all and why did I not tell him, so I have no idea...

Anyway it was a pretty interesting experience! And my clothes came out ironed at the end of it.