Our Tuk-tuk driver decided that after the exertion of fishing (my exertion, not Gordon’s), we might like to visit a laundry. It certainly wasn’t high on our bucket list, actually it wasn’t anywhere on our bucket list, but the driver thought it would be interesting, so we agreed.

Dear readers, cast aside any ideas you may have of what a laundry looks like, because what ever your mind conjurers up, it will not be this

It is more like a long line of toilets, but lets hope that is where the comparison ends.

We enter the laundry through a pair of gates and our first sight is the washing that today’s customers have dropped off to be washed. This is obviously a thriving business. An amazingly colorful pile of clothes sit on a concrete ledge, directly in front of several huge trash cans. It doesn’t seem like the perfect place to drop of your favourite sari, but perhaps all the customer cares about is how it is returned to them.

But if they saw what we are about to see, they may have second thoughts.

And if they are under the impression that having them hand washed means that their clothes are going to be treated with the utmost care, they are sadly mistaken.

Each bundle gets delivered to a different stall. The stalls are numbered and each stall has someone waiting. The washing is almost always done by men for which the women should be very grateful. He stands ankle deep in a huge tub of cold dirty water. He often wears very little.

Notice the sign telling you this is a washing shed, just in case the employees forget what they are supposed to do here.

The washerman (that has a ring to it, doesn’t it?) takes one item from the pile, soaks it in the dirty brown water, gives it a quick rub with a grimy looking bar of soap, lifts it high above his head and whacks it down onto a large concrete slab.

Now you see why they wear very little, although this gentleman hasn’t quite worked it out yet

It is definitely not a kindlier gentler way to wash clothes. And to make it worse he doesn’t just whack it once. He continues beating the hell out of it until the piece of clothing begs for mercy.

You may remember in the last blog, we were invited to try our hand at pulling up the fishing nets. If they invite us to try our hand at this, then just for a change, I will allow Gordon to answer for both us. It will be a united and definite no!

Once the washerman has finished with the pile of clothing, whatever has survived gets taken to the drying room, which in this case is a large field strung with drying lines.

Each drying line is numbered to match the washing stall number, a dastardly clever way of keeping track of each customers bag of clothes

One area appears to be mainly sheets drying on the line and it must be said they look remarkably clean and remarkably white, but I am still not sure that I would like to sleep on them

Another area seems to be for the clothes and then a much smaller area, cleverly tucked way out of sight right at the back is for the unmentionables. There is nothing like a bit of privacy when this is what your underwear looks like.

But unfortunately there is no privacy whatsoever where I and my trusty camera go!

Once dry the items are taken to the ironing room, a huge open sided room lined with concrete counters where the women (it is almost always the women who do the ironing) do their work.

The irons are huge and made of cast iron. The top of the iron opens to allow burning coal to be put inside which keeps the iron hot

This time we are invited to try our hand at the task. As usual Gordon refused, seeing it as a job that only women should do! I, being much more politically correct, agreed. Very wisely the woman kept a piece of cloth on one side especially for the tourists to try their skills on. I picked up the iron and quickly learned this was not as easy as it looked.

The iron weighed a ton. Well actually somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds we were told, depending on the amount of coal that was inside. And it was hot. The trick was not to press down on the iron but just let it slide over the fabric, but wielding that thing for many hours a day must be exhausting. It’s no wonder the men stuck to the washing!

Outside we found an absolutely charming lady with a lovely smile who beckoned us over to show us how she loaded her iron with the coal.

She spoke no English but the driver translated for us. She told us there used to be many laundries just like this one, all over town, but this was the last remaining one. Unbelievably, she was 82 years old, and she had been ironing clothes at this laundry since she was a child. Her children kept begging her to retire, but she said she loved what she did. She was sure if she stopped working she would drop dead the next day.

She was an absolute delight and I hope she never has to stop working.

Back in the Tuk-tuk, the driver told us that her days are definitely numbered. Not because of her age, but because competition was opening up all over town and, he said, pointing at a nearby store front, it looks like this

I suspect we will find her working here next time we visit Cochin