Taming the Floods
For as long as I can remember, he has washed my mother’s saris, brilliantly coloured cottons and silks, soft and delicate. They are returned, wrapped up in simple cotton cloth, all ready to hang in her dressing room. Not a crease, a delicate smell of jasmine floods the senses every time I open the makeshift package. Despite the rickety outdoor washhouse and the poor conditions he works in, the clothes arrive back home always following the same ritual, always perfect.
He comes every Monday on his donkey cart to pick up the clothes. They lie like exotic birds, in a messy heap of rich hues in the back room. I can hear his bare feet on the carpet softly pad away with the load, leaving behind a handwritten sheet listing every item removed. Every Thursday, they are delivered back, the riotous colours tamed into a neatly folded pile, ready to be returned to the closet from which they had emerged.
When the floods came this monsoon season, they came like an avenging spirit invading the land, waters rising in fury, ravaging all in its path. The washhouse, or what was left of it, was buried in mud. The clothes hanging to dry clung desperately on to the line even as it was ripped away from the hook it was attached to.
Those weeks, my mother’s saris piled up in the back room. We waited for him to come for days but we knew deep in our souls that it would not be soon. We hoped for news and dreaded it at the same time.
When he finally entered the back door, I could sense the relief in the sharpness of my mother’s tone. This time, there was no neat bundle smelling sweetly of jasmine or harsingar in his hands. Dwarfed by the loss of his livelihood and his home, yet I could tell his desolation at having lost my mother’s saris was immense.
Silently, my mother gestured to him to come out to the garden. Along the far wall, she had lined up rows of different kinds of plants. Instead of clothes, this time he packed his cart full of saplings. I heard her tell him to plant them by the river, in the red earth, the taller trees at larger intervals and bushes in between. She told him she hoped the roots would soon stretch deep into the soil, binding it, a natural wall against the elements.
Both my mother and the washerman know that the dark waters will come again as the glaciers melt and the dry, parched land is overwhelmed by the sudden overspill of rain and rivers. But they also know that the trees they plant will hold the dying earth lovingly in its roots and breathe life into it again. They both know, trees and soil working together, will one day coax the waters to calm until the desolation they once caused will become a distant memory, the floods, hopefully, a rare occurrence.
