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Updated: June 4, 2025
He rinses the stocking in the water, beats it on the stone so far as his limited supply of strength will allow, rinses it again, beats it again, and finally casts it on one side when the process is complete, as he sees his father do. He is almost a full-fledged dhobi as soon as he has learned to talk and walk.
Washing is very cheap, like most things in India which depend on labour. The usual custom is to pay so much a month, for which sum you may send to the wash as many articles as you like. In Poona City Rs. 2 is the usual monthly payment that is to say, 2s. 8d. in English money, but Indians who employ a dhobi pay much less.
All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and persons of colour?
And as the dhobi often finds himself misled in his attempt to follow this uncertain guide, he adopts signs of his own for his regular customers, and with coloured thread, or even ink, makes marks on the clothes intelligible to himself, and not always conducive to the appearance of the garment.
Those Europeans who are not men of science call it the hill-wagtail on account of its habits, or the dhobi bird because of its unaccountable predilection for the spot where the grunting, perspiring washerman pursues his destructive calling.
I had a room in the best boarding house in Calcutta, in which lived young civilians or competition-wallahs as they were then styled, studying the languages prior to being drafted somewhere up-country, barristers, lawyers, merchants, and brokers. For this I paid Rs. 90 per month. My bearer, khit, and dhobi cost me a further Rs. 20 the two first Rs. 8 each and the latter Rs. 4.
"'This writing would only add to your troubles, I said. 'Here, let me destroy it. And, turning to the red ashes burning in a brazier near at hand, I dexterously substituted a fragment of paper, on which I had been figuring my accounts, for the paper received, from the dhobi, placing the former on the glowing charcoal embers and bestowing the latter in the security of my girdle.
And yet there they are Boggley's bearer and my ayah I can see some reason for their presence a kitmutgar to wait on us at table and bring tea in the afternoon, another young assistant kitmutgar who scurries like a frightened rabbit at my approach, a delightful small boy who rejoices in the name of pani-wallah, whose sole duty is to carry water for the baths, the dhobi who washes our clothes by beating them between two large and I should say, judging by the state of the clothes, sharp stones, losing most of them in the process, and a syce or groom for each pony.
However, on the whole we were not so badly off, though on a few occasions there was really not enough to eat, and some of the meat was tainted, as the freezing apparatus had got out of order soon after the ship was captured. There was no longer any laundry on board, as the dhobi had been killed.
But the thought came to me in the night that perhaps the paper might tell something about the ring. So all this day have I searched among the bushes by the stream where I beat the clothes on stones and wash them. And behold, I have found that for which I have been seeking. "Hereupon the dhobi loosened the loin cloth beneath his upper garment, and extracted from its folds a tiny roll of paper.
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