Washing

Warning! This entry contains nudity! (Though not in picture form.)

Last week, as I approached my neighbours' house (the same neighbours mentioned last entry) I heard the familiar sounds of washing and laughter. With a full household and no machines of convenience – such as the washers, dryers, dishwashers and showers we use at home – there is a nearly-continuous stream of washing going on. There are the tubs: plastic basins, in many colours and sizes; buckets, both metal and plastic, again in many sizes; and the big metal bathtubs, used for heavy-duty laundry and the bathing of adults. In due course, any number of household items are thrown into the tubs, covered with water, and scrubbed diligently with Sunlight soap until they are clean. Shirts, pants, underwear, socks, blankets, sheets, carpets, towels and dishcloths – cups, plates, spoons, frying pans, cast-iron metal pots that sit over the fire and get crusted with mealie-meal – small basins inside of larger ones – hands, faces, babies – everything.

Last week, however, as I rounded the corner, I saw something new: G being washed by her older sister. G is my favourite of the daughters, my garden assistant and quiet observer, who helps me sweep the floor and eats popcorn while watching movies she doesn't quite understand. She's a bright girl, and we get along well – most of my weekends are spent with G, working together in the garden. She is about twelve. Her sister, N, is maybe sixteen.

I thought, when first I noticed them, that N was just sitting on the step and holding the soap for her. After all, a twelve-year-old is perfectly capable of washing herself. But no - N was holding a bar of tough-looking soap in one hand, G's slippery, ticklish leg in the other, and vigorously scrubbing away as G shrieked with laughter. I laughed with them, and chatted a bit about their baby sister. It's not an odd thing to see my neighbours in various states of undress, and neither of us feel uncomfortable about it – but it was a surprise to me to see G being so decidedly washed by her sister.

Being washed by another person is something, in Western culture, that comes to an abrupt halt as soon as you are old enough to wash yourself. In general, we are so self-conscious of our bodies – our precious skin and fat and hair and flesh – that we rush our bathing, spending as little time as possible scrubbing and prodding and touching our embarrassing physical selves. In the past, having someone else bathe you was considered a pleasure, a luxury. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, all had servants or slaves to bathe them, to clean each crevice of flesh and then anoint the body with oils and perfumes. Sisters and mothers bathed with each other, chatting and scrubbing backs, washing hair. Public bath houses were common, or communal family baths. In many parts of the world, this still exists.

When I was in India, I went for an Ayurvedic massage in Kerala. The massage itself was a strange experience – I was laid out on an ancient wooden table in a low-ceilinged, oppressively hot room, the accumulated oil of thousands of previous massages having seeped into the wood and turned it a deep, lustrous mahogany brown. My masseuse was an old woman both shaped and coloured like a walnut, who spoke only Malayalam and gestured for me to undress and lie down on the table. She gave me a tiny g-string to wear, like the disposable underwear you get to try on swimsuits: a thin strip of fragile, paper-like cloth, tied around the waist with cheap string. She poured copious amounts of oil over me and performed her massage. Afterwards, she gestured me into a wash-room off to the side, and indicated that I should sit down on a small plastic stool. I perched on the stool, apprehensive – the whole experience had been so decidedly odd that I wasn't very relaxed at all – and without further ceremony, she began to wash me. Buckets of water splashed over my head were followed by energetic scrubbing with the ubiquitous green Medimix soap, then more water, then more scrubbing. She washed my hair with shampoo from an unmarked plastic bottle and then carefully oiled and combed it.

What did I feel? What was I thinking? I don't know. I hadn't expected to be washed. When she showed me into the room, I assumed that I would wash myself – for a moment I had the uneasy suspicion that she was going to stay and watch while I did – but I didn't realize what was really going on until the first bucket of water broke over my head. The masseuse performed the task with such impersonal efficiency that I couldn't possibly object, and she had clearly carried out this wholly unremarkable part of her job so often that there was no embarrassment, just the simple shock of a completely unfamiliar physical sensation. I hadn't been washed like that – businesslike, scrub, rinse, repeat – since I was a toddler.

Washing another person is a physical intimacy rarely allowed back at home. Why? Like cleaning ticks off of a fellow primate, it is a helpful favour, and like a massage or an embrace, it is a pleasant expression of intimacy or love. But nudity, and familiarity with our bodies entirely, is not generally accepted. It's something paradoxical to me – public breast-feeding, or having a bath in your front yard, are no problem here. Back in North America, they would be horrifying. Imagine walking back to your house and finding your neighbour in metal washtub in her front yard, splashing around with a bar of soap – with her sister scrubbing under her arm! Or being in a board meeting with a local NGO and having the chairlady whip out a breast and start feeding her child – while still addressing the rest of the board? Inconceivable. And yet, many of my friends here have been shocked and appalled by their first visit to a Western-style beach in South Africa, where men proudly strut around in Speedos and women barely cover their bits and pieces with neon string bikinis.

For further strangeness, let's consider the act of greatest physical intimacy that two adult humans engage in – sex. Surely, after the extreme intimacy of having sex, bathing each other should be a pleasant and comfortable activity? But I would venture to guess, based on study, anecdote, and first-hand experience, that most couples do not bathe each other, and would even consider it weird or awkward to do so. I mean, many people won't even have sex with the lights on. Why not? To add my voice to the chorus of complaint: we shouldn't be ashamed of our bodies, or our physical, animal selves. We don't all have to make love like porn stars, celluloid and perfect. We don't all have to be mothers like Victoria Beckham, with scheduled Caesareans and bottled formula from day one. We are the human animal, the “third chimpanzee,” dirty and flawed and mammalian – bathing and breastfeeding and hard-wired for the joy of touch. Celebrate!