Joint venture: The dhobis who wash together, live together

For the residents of Dhobi Ghat, washing clothes is a part of their communal responsibility

KARACHI: Birds of a feather flock together. In Karachi's case, so do dhobis. Among them, they share the responsibility of ensuring clean clothes for their clientele, dividing the chores among themselves, helping each other out and running the business as a community on the whole.

While most citizens rest well into the day to avoid the burning temperatures outside the cool of their homes, the dhobi families living at Garden along the Lyari Expressway enjoy no such luxury. No public holiday offers them respite; religious and cultural festivals only increase their workload manifold. "We take turns for our days off. I take an off from washing duty on Tuesday, which I mostly spend delivering and picking up clothes from homes," says Raza, a resident of Usmanabad and a young dhobi at work.

Home to one of the oldest and traditional professions of the city where the work involves everything from picking up clothes from households, washing, ironing and finally delivering them back, not to mention watching each other's back against criminals in the surrounding areas, the Dhobi Ghat at Garden is an area of constant hustle and bustle.

All in a day's work

The average work day starts at 7am and goes on until 5pm. Clothes are separated and labeled properly to avoid mix-ups and losses. The ones that are to be hand washed are stacked in one corner while the ones that require machine wash and the use of bleach and chemicals are classified separately. The use of soaps and detergents with dhobis is fairly limited as the strong, caustic chemicals suffice and create enough lather for washing. "The machine area of the Dhobi Ghat is separate from the other general areas. Usually they charge Rs250 per 100 clothes on a daily basis. We all work together," says Raza.

While communal professions are widespread in Karachi, the Dhobi Ghat at Garden is an excellent specimen of how entire families work from top to bottom to make a simple-looking task of washing clothes possible.  The men and young boys work in the 'field' while women are contribute to the workload from home. "It's not a safe area. At the end of the day, we take the clothes back home and the women assist in ironing," says another dhobi, Saeed, as he slaps a big piece of cloth against the wall of the washing compound to remove the stains off.

With sounds of scrubbing and slapping echoing in the background, the dhobis say that the Lyari Expressway has never hampered their work except at the time of construction when they were asked to move out of the area. "The number of families has decreased as many moved to other places such as Gulberg, where they do the laundry at their homes," said Raza, adding that this was what they had been doing for generations.

Speaking about a recent incident when a fellow dhobi's body was found lying among the laundry poles, Raza said such occurrences used to be a norm once but had decreased in frequency of late. "The police came hours later and reprimanded us for moving the body. But he was one of us. We couldn't just leave him there."

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2015.