Many years back in school I had read Victor Hugo recounting
the point of view of a cobbler whose shop is strategically placed below the
ground level. From the small window of the place the cobbler could see the
people walking in the street; not their faces but their feet and the shoes they
wear. In the story/novel (Les Miserable) Hugo speaks of the 19th
century France. Though the country had already two centuries into its colonizing
efforts elsewhere, in the streets of Paris nobody had seen people from
elsewhere. Hence, from that nether world of shoes the cobbler could identify
each person who walked in the street. Shoes could tell the stories of the
people who wore them. Vincent Van Gogh painted a pair of shoes and Martin
Heidegger explained the life of farmhands by simply looking at those shoes. By
looking at their Sunday best and the netted veins in the hands of those three
black men in the photograph John Berger told us which class those anonymous
personalities belonged: the working class. Despite their best clothes they
cannot hide their coarse palms that tell the stories of their daily toiling
with life. A quarter of a century back I was standing in a queue at the Baroda
railway station, conversing with the friends who too were with me in the queue
to book tickets to their home towns and were talking happily in English. A man
in the next line looked at curiously and with a little bit of irritation told
his companion, ‘Look, these days labourers too talk in English’. He thought our
deliberate choice of proletarian clothes (which is a pupa state when you are in
the university only to come out as tuxedo wearing professionals in a few years’
time) as a sign of our profession deprived of dignity and class. May be he was
too repulsed by the coarse hands, though he had obviously not read Berger and
we had!
I look at the ironing people on the road side. They set up
their shops (often telas so that they could come from somewhere and go back to
the same obscurity) as attached to some dilapidated homes whose occupants
desperately want to add something to their income by subletting these verandas
for these hapless young man who ‘press’ people’s clothes from morning to
evening. In the North people pronounce ‘iron’ with the ‘r’ heard. So it is
something like ‘airan’. In school we were asked to keep the ‘r’ silent. But
later in life the upper class taught me to roll the ‘r’s in order to sound
really educated. Hence, my friends started rolling ‘r’s’ even saying ‘Parippu
vada’ and ‘sambar’ (dal vada and sambar respectively) with rolling ‘r’s cutting
themselves magnificent fools before us. I should say I have never fallen for
accents. Let people reject me for having that rough and thick Southern accent.
But that is not the case here. I would like to make a connection between the
cobblers in the 19th century France and the iron men (;-)) of India.
With the Marvel Comics Iron Man has a different connotation and he has a face
of Robert Downing Junior. Therefore I would choose the common parlance ‘Press’.
But still there is a danger. The journalists perhaps would never like to be
equated with the people who ‘press’ their clothes too.
Language is one place where we could harness or loosen
subjectivities. Look at this people who ‘iron or press’ our clothes. They are
simply called ‘Press Wala’ But again the problem is PressWala could be
journalists too. So we extract the subjectivity from this act of ironing and
make it a verb. Hence we say, ‘kapda pressing ke liye de dena’ (give the
clothes for pressing/ironing). The people who press the clothes do not have any
name or face. I always think about my childhood when each person who did a
particular work in the village had his/her name. The press person was ‘Gopi
Annan’, the one who plucked coconut was ‘Tulsi Annan’ so on and so forth. Even
the fisherwoman had a name and still she has. In the cities we have only the
names of the service and add a bhaya or bahan to the service the subjective of
these service providers are formed. So the driver loses his name as ‘Ramesh’ or
‘Ghanshyam’ and becomes ‘driver Bhayya’, which at once connote a distanced
respect which is far away from the proximity of real respect and many miles
closer to the geographical locations from where these service providers come.
Press walas too do not have face or names.
When I say that I make a particular effort to chat up with
these people do not think that I am trying to place myself above the rest of
the people who do not do that. To be frank I too do not know the person who
presses my clothes every week. I make eye contact with him whenever I pass by
that way even if I do not have clothes to give him for pressing. I simply call
out to him and ask how he is doing. He tells me, ‘Going great’. This simple
human contact makes him happy as well as my conscience at peace. I know a boy
from one of the press families who later became my personal driver for a year
or so. His parents and relatives used to set up their press shops in empty
plots around which the apartments had already come up. They know where their
service is required. They go door to door collect clothes and deliver it on
time earning good will and good money. One day I asked him whether they could
wash clothes or not. He got literally infuriated and asserted that his family
was not Dhobi family. Dhobis are traditionally washers of clothes. And in India
we have large scale Dhobi ghats. Before the arrival of the Washing machines (it
should be connected to the growing middle class in India as well as the
increase in the number of working women who used to be the unacknowledged
in-house dhobis), dhobis were indispensible. Even after the introduction of
foldable ironing boards and very sophisticated pressing machines, most of the
Indians do not prefer to iron clothes for themselves. So this pressing sector
is still alive.
Young people who really do not belong to the Dhobi families
come to the cities and as they come to know that the people from their own
villages are working as pressing people in various parts of the city, they
would readily join the team first as apprentices and delivery boys and soon as
expert press-men. As the living standard of the localities increase these
people branch out and set up their shops in those areas and also recruit more
youngsters from their villages. In a pressing place where people have developed
some sort of faith in the person who does the job, more and more people start
giving the clothes and the clever boys of this clan soon start placing their
telas in the alleys and terraces adjacent to the main shop. So a pressing shop
gets automatically branched into a few outsourcing units. That means you
deposit your clothes in the shop and when you go to collect it, you may get it
from a couple of alleys away. Strategically inclined entrepreneurs in this
field try to get the ironed clothes at the earliest from the outsourcing units
and keep it with them for delivery so that they clients wouldn’t go and start
giving to the next alley press person. That means there are economic and
strategic relationships and hierarchies in this place too.
My point is to tell that how the press walas could identify
you slowly with your clothes. If you are sending your kurtas regularly even if
you send it with your errand boy they would understand where it is coming from
and whose it is. They would know the quality of the clothes, attitude of the
person and how he or she conducts with them directly. Hence, do not under
estimate a person who irons your clothes. He knows everything about you as your
personal doctor knows how weak or strong you are. Looking at the ‘health’ of
the clothes they would assess how parsimonious or extravagant you are. By
looking at your clothes they could even imagine what kind of job that you must
be doing. From a stain in your clothes they could understand what you were
doing with that particular piece of cloth. The profession gives them tremendous
insight about the people who wear those clothes. Any profession, if the
professional is keen, would give indications and directions to the
personalities, events and incidents. A press wala who toils day in day out is also
a human being who braves the summer heat and the pinching cold. But he has an
insight about you. When he irons your clothes, remember he is ironing your
personality.
(Images courtesy the Internet, for representational purposes only)
1 comment:
loved it!
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