What I miss about India being in America - Clothesline

Written on Tuesday, 3rd September 2013

While coming to America post marriage, I thought my day to day life would be much better than in India in all respects. Not even a year has passed by since I have adapted to the American way of living, and I am already finding myself yearning back for little old sweet things about India.One of them is the joy of seeing clothes drying up on a clothesline in the summers of India, waving happily in the air and the sun, only to become pleasant smelling and crispy warm and dry. Especially the feel of  loops of sun dried cotton towels rubbing gently against the skin and the cozy texture of the cotton pillow covers gained while drying up in the sun with a peculiar fresh smell wafting from them.

I was first introduced to my husband formally by my family, so as to decide whether we like each other enough to enter into a wedlock. Our first conversation of the arranged marriage process was related to our immediate lives. The ever raining weather of Seattle was one of the various things he told me about, so as to give an idea of how it would be like to live there if I say Yes. I love rains, but not the perpetual ones. Brief showers remind me of tears full of happiness and joy, but longer ones remind me of tears full of anger and mourning. Automatically, quickly & mentally I started listing out all possible problems that I may face during my would-be initial housewife days due to the wetting watery weather. And then followed a conversation of our lifetime, never to be forgotten!!!

I asked him, "If its always wet and grey out there, what happens to the clothes? how do you dry them up? don't they start to smell or get discolored with the sun at bay for long?" He told me that the dryer comes in handy. Of course yes why didn't I think of that! I cursed myself silently for being stupid enough to forget the humble dryer in front of a geek! "Oh yes that's always an option when it rains" I blabbered. "Dryer is the only option there" he said. "Pardon me???" I wondered whether I had just heard 'only'. Drying up of wet clothes was proving to be an embarrassingly confusing matter for me like never before, that too at a horribly wrong time!!! I had a feeling that he must have already started chuckling at me secretly out of amusement thinking that 'drying watery clothes' was the best thing I could come up with in the first date!!! I had a dreadful feeling that we will have no further meetings after this, thanks to my dim wits, even the dimmest of them, which I had left behind hanging on the clothesline in my balcony!!!

But a gentleman he was. Sensing my ignorance, he humbly replied "Yes dryer is the only option there because people are not allowed to keep a clothesline outside." I took a deep breath at that moment, thanking my stars, that he was not amused at me and I still had a chance! But wait!! No clothesline??? But how could it be?

I had heard that in America, people did what pleased them, like legalize marijuana. And still no clothesline! America is the most powerful nation and could nuke any country, along with their clotheslines, off the face of the earth if irked. And still no clothesline! They occupy a big geographical chunk of the North American continent with a lot of space to fit in a population far less than India and possibly far less smaller clotheslines. And still no clothesline! America boasts to be a successful amalgamation of varied ethnicity and a land of immigrants having an equally varied historical and cultural knowledge of erecting clotheslines. And still no clothesline! This was hard to digest.

Hoping that these little indigestible cultural aspects wont turn out to be gaseous enough to explode, we decided to get married. I came to America in the winter of February 2013 and since then I have been using the dryer. Although the clothes pulled out of it are hot and dry, but they are crumpled with some of them developing lint on the surface and not so sunny smelling. Some of the clothes have tags of instructions attached to them that advice humans not to put them into the dryer. Its a trouble drying up such clothes indoors. They need to be hanged out of sight in the bathrooms or the laundry rooms with a tub or a bucket below them to contain the dripping water. Towels need to be hanged similarly, though water doesn't drip from them.

Summer came and the sun was no more shying away by hiding behind the clouds. In used to come the sun through the patio in the east in the mornings and through the windows of the kitchen and the dining room in the west in the evenings.Along with the summer came my in-laws. Not even a week had passed by for them that my mother-in-law was already hit by the little nostalgia of convenient, cost cutting and energy saving clothesline. And there she was discussing clever plans of how we can dry up everything ranging from clothes to bathroom mats without letting our neighbors know. But I was not courageous enough to try them out. Hence, she used to take every opportunity to dry up some half dried clothes within the house when the sun shone in through the windows! I followed her league.

She returned to India but I still continue to do so sometimes. And still continue to miss the old, bold and brave clothesline bearing the weight of the water laden clothes in the scorching heat, only to lighten them up and bringing us the joy of sunshine the clothes had successfully captured!