How to Clean an Indian Floor

I’ve moved into my flat, but it will be a while before I’m really LIVING in it. It's on the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) campus in Hyderabad colony, the name for the particular group of flats. I’m about 30 minutes' walk from the Faculty of Social Sciences where I’m working when I’m not going to town. The most prestigious professors and administrators occupy quite luxurious houses laid out in several rows nearby called the Principals’ colony. Hyderabad is much less luxurious than that but amply comfortable. It houses middle level administrators, readers and lecturers, and visiting folks like me. My flat has two bedrooms, a study, two bathrooms, one Indian style, one Western (thank you, though a friend swears by regular use of Indian style). The Western style has a toilet alcove, shower room (water faucets on the wall, hot water tank above and what my colleagues call a “geezer” (geyser), which makes me grin, and a sink alcove. Two outside balconies, one small, one larger and more sheltered--therefore cooler--but it’s already a little hot to sit outside comfortably by 7.30 a.m. The walls are kind of lemony. There are ceiling fans. Each window is shuttered and fitted with burglar or monkey bars (depends on your sense of what to worry about), though it’s a no crime area except for bike thefts.

I have a nice new red refrigerator sitting in the dining room because that’s where the plug is. It doesn't work, which makes it hard to eat at home right now. I have a two-burner hotplate in the kitchen and a filtered water system that empties into the sink and is separate from the regular tap. A few mornings ago I cleaned the floor Indian style. (It being India, there are many styles. This is a method used around here by traditional women who work as maids and cooks.)

You fill a bucket with water and sling it, and I mean sling it, over the stone floors and then use a long-handled wiper (think of a car wiper blade almost a yard long fixed perpendicularly to a long handle). All the grit and dust dissolve in the water, and the wiper pushes it along. The floors are pitched to make the water from all the rooms in the house eventually move toward drains in the kitchen and bathroom. This is hard work since you have to wait for the bucket to fill from the tap and carry it, sling out the water with what i would call controlled abandon(there is a certain pent up aggression that gets joyfully released by this), and go back for more. It takes quite a number of buckets (the joyfulness margin of utility diminishing correspondingly).Wrestling the wiper is hardest of all. A lot of aerobic muscle goes into slinging and wiping to send all the water full of grit and dust on its appointed path. It took me about two hours to clean the floors this way. Frankly, I flunked the Indian wife test. There were big puddles left where I didn’t wipe properly, and I certainly didn’t get all the grit. I was drenched in sweat the whole time (it was over 90 degrees inside) and I had to periodically retire to the one air-conditioned bedroom for a bit of a breather.

You do it all barefoot as you do everything inside barefoot. You can tell if any grittiness is left with your bare feet, which are enjoying padding around in all the water, though you have to step carefully because you’re walking on slick stone, and could fall and crack your skull open. It’s kind of like Ganga flooding the house. The current goes into every room and rinses it clean—-purifies it--and blesses the house with smooth clean floors.