Dishing the dirt on old-time bath time
THERE are some among us who will deny their bathing rituals. As kids, we took a “head bath” on a Saturday. That meant washing hair as well. The rest of the week involved an odd assortment of personal hygiene.
There was the “body bath” that kept the hair dry. One option was a full splash with soap and a full scrub.
A variation was a face cloth wipe from eyebrows to toes. A third option was face cloth applied to eyes, ears, underarms and naughty bits.
The most minimalist was the daily washing of feet. This was usually accomplished at the outside drain with the soles rubbed clean on the abrasive concrete. Why the feet and nothing else is a mystery.
Back in the day in my beloved Bangladesh market district, we had running water. Needless to say, we used it rather too sparingly. One explanation was that weekdays were far too busy to devote to leisurely baths. We took turns on Saturday to go full house.
The period from the 1960s to the early 1980s in Chatsworth was millennia before hot-water geysers were affordable. The bath water was sometimes boiled in a large pot on the stove. That was best avoided as it chowed power. It also damaged the ring plates on the prized Defy. The second option was the electric immersion iron that was hung on the side of a metal bucket.
The great ritual was heating water in metal drums on a wood fire in the backyard. That chore fell to either the eldest or the youngest lad. One after the other family members took their turns in the toilet that doubled as a bathing facility.
Accompanying the drum was the battered chombu. This varied from a proper metal or plastic jug to a jam tin. You wet the body with a jugful and then soaped all over. There was no fancy soap. Carbolic soap, a green or red option that was handy for the laundry, or long bars of the trusty Lifebuoy sufficed. The soap was left to dry in sun. The harder it got, the longer it lasted.
The scrubbing ritual was harsh, usually accomplished by coconut husk or coir and latterly the bags in which oranges or cabbages come. Long before it became fashionable, we also had loofahs harvested from the back garden.
Bangladesh bath-time stories could fill a book. Others have written about their rituals. Garret Fagan wrote Bathing in Public in the Roman World published by the University of Michigan Press. He talks about Roman bath time as a mass social event where public nudity was not frowned upon.
More recently, Bruce Smith and Yoshiko Yamamoto put together the beautifully illustrated book, The Japanese Bath. They write that in the West a bath is a place to cleanse the body, whereas in Japan one goes there to cleanse the soul.
Being on the shy side, my district folks are not likely to go for the public bathing bit. But there are those who are shy to bath in private too.
Find Higgins on Facebook as The Bookseller of Bangladesh, at #Hashtagbooks in Reservoir Hills and Books@ Antiquecafe in Windermere.