“It’s getting late,” hollered the daughter. “When do you plan to come out?” I had been in the shower, admittedly, for a long time. As a child, bathing was a different kind of experience.
At my grandparents’ house, the bathroom had a raised platform on one side with two mud and clay stoves, the choolah kind. On it were placed huge copper pots, glistening pink around their necks and black with soot at the base. If the firewood, lit below, was a little wet, the whole bathroom would be filled with smoke, and the eyes would burn. It would be like a suana if there was no smoke—warm, snug, with plenty of boiling hot water and the smell of burning wood. You just helped yourself to the water, pouring from the hot pot into a tall, brass cylinder-like bucket. And a tap above replenished the cold water in the copper pot.
Once, when we were visiting someone in Kumbakonam, we had to draw cold water from a well, conveniently placed in one of the rooms and not visible to the rest of the house. Women bathed in the cold water wrapped in a single width of their sari, and all of them talked, laughed, and bathed around the well.
The copper pot was eventually replaced by a ‘boiler’ powered by coal. This was moveable and travelled with us to each new home. The customary finger-tip test to check the temperature of the water became life-threatening with the advent of the immersion coil. “It is quick, and you get hot water, but it is life-threatening,” my grandmother rued. I was petrified of it as I had heard of people who had been electrocuted!
On an odd day, there was plenty of water, it was because we were “treated” to an oil bath. They would first mercilessly rub oil into our hair, and a few drops would go into our eyes as well. And if we still survived, then all over the body. The steaming hot water would come next almost scalding us. The dreaded shikakai came next even as we yelled and cried. It would almost always go into the eye, and how it would burn!
Now, as I squeezed out the shampoo, I thought of my grandmother. Does she know how easy my life has become?
The geyser came soon after the immersion heater, with new problems! “Should I turn on the geyser?” “Who left the geyser on? You know the electricity bill from last month?” And new fears replaced old ones, but getting hot water was simple and quick.
Cut to the present. I shouted breezily to my waiting daughter, “Okay, I am coming out,” as I thought I could bathe again in the evening, for the water was centrally heated. No problem. “Water is scarce; use only half a bucket of water to bathe,” said my husband, reminding me of another new problem.