What is Cleanliness?

3rd October, 2013

Being a cleanliness freak, the hand sanitizer carrying variety, I found some of the things that people do in villages to be really odd. They would wash their feet with water and then walk over mud barefoot, clean the feet on the pairdaan and then enter the house. Their feet wouldn’t be clean at all because the mud that would stick on to their feet. I couldn’t understand why they bothered to wash their feet with water at all. I never washed my feet and would just try to clean my feet with the pairdaan as much as possible. I was not used to walking without slippers and I felt so unclean going to the loo or crossing the angan without them.

Walking barefoot on stones and broken pieces of tile was so difficult for me but the women of the house would move around with such speed that I was amazed.

Today, we left for the fields to study the crop pattern, seeds, fertilizers and manure of our village.  After walking for nearly 2.5 kilometers, everybody got tired and started looking for a place to sit. They found a few stones under a tree and decided to sit down there. I could not bear to sit on them because there were too many red ants on them. The stones were also surrounded by a lot of slush and I decided to stand. But then it was really odd standing all alone. Everybody started asking me to sit and I could not refuse. For nearly half an hour, I could not follow the discussion. The only thing I was obsessed about was my clothes, chappals and the ants that would keep climbing on my body.

I guess a few people sensed my discomfort and they offered to go back to the house to continue the discussion but I refused. As we were returning to our house, I saw women carrying gobar. They did not seem to realize that they were basically carrying feces of an animal. For them it was a daily chore. And then the thought struck me, does cleanliness mean obsessing about every speck of dust on your body or is it letting go the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ concepts drummed into your head by the city and sitting on the zameen aram se? Is it being 99.99% germ free or is it feeling clean from within?

Whatever it is, from that point onwards, mud, dirt, slush, gobar and insects did not seem to matter at all. I bid goodbye to my dear old hand sanitizer and worked in peace.