Danger in daily life

Keep your mouth closed in the shower

One of my favorite daily rituals in the states was my evening shower. Clean, bleached, soft, white towel? Check. Snuggly warm pajamas? Check. My indulgent shampoo, soap, and conditioner? Check, check, and check. That nocturnal practice, to me, signified the invisible shift from “duty calls” to “off the clock” and I looked forward to it each and every night.

Muscle memory kicks in as soon as I step inside that steamy cocoon of balmy mist and dunk my head into the warm waterfall of liquid relaxation. I would move through the process like a ballerina stretching through foot positions. It’s the same format each and every time: wash hands, wash hair, wash body, wash face, wash feet, condition, and DONE. A few times each year I seem to do something out of order for whatever silly reason and my entire shower is thrown off. Did I actually just wash my hair AFTER washing my face? The travesty!

One of my favorite parts of the shower, aside from the cleansing ritual itself, was singing. I would often opt for the bluesy, jazz toned songs, and admire how eerily similar my voice was to Adele’s. (You’d have to be there to truly appreciate it.) When my a cappella cantata was done, I would stand beneath the beautiful pressure of that Moen shower head, turn the water from hot to cool, then cold. I’d take a good gurgle of chilled water, swish it around my mouth, spit it out and turn off the water. Finito!

Do you have a shower process? I thought I was the only one who had to adhere to a strict regimen or suffer the mental consequences of going out of order, but I think there’s a lot of us.

Coming to India has greatly changed my showering schedule. It still signifies the same shift from work to rest, but the physical steps are abbreviated and just kind of crappified to be honest. Clean, soft, bleached white towel? No, but just a clean towel works. Snuggly warm pajamas? No, not really warm, but I place a hot water bottle under the covers at my feet. Snuggly? I guess they can be snuggly since I curl into the fetal position to retain as much body heat as quickly as I can. Indulgent shampoo, soap, and conditioner? Uhhh, nope. That’s a big nope. The hair cleanser of choice here, or at least the easiest one to get, would be Head and Shoulders brand shampoo and conditioner in one. I loathe shampoo+conditioners. Always have, always will. But, I have quickly become accustomed to my loyal all-in-one bottled shower buddy. As far as soap is concerned, I have 2 main choices: neem oil bar soap, or Pears brand glycerin soap. They are both pleasant enough, but I had become very fond of the Method and SheaMoisture brand coconut milk soaps (at Target, of course).

The hot water for our shower upstairs is brought up by a pump we had installed the first week we moved to the house. Initially we took bucket baths, and they are very dissatisfying. Ravi and I had been told that the bucket baths were actually romantic and a pleasant experience. What a whopper. They are far from romantic unless you think it’s precious to cower around a Home Depot style 5-gallon bucket like Gollum as your shivering and goosebumps prevent a lather from forming on your skin. You scoop the hot water from the bucket with a large measuring cup and as soon as you douse yourself, the water somehow pulls a degree from your internal body temperature, and you become more cold even quicker.

Ravi had lived a few years in Panama for the Peace Corps, and he recalled taking cold river water bucket baths outside, and he didn’t mind them in the least. To his recollection, those were perfectly fine. 20 years later, in India, even with hot, running water and the convenience and privacy of our own bathroom, after two nights of it he was a broken man. No complaints here.

We have small hot water tanks in each bathroom and a much smaller on-demand tank in the kitchen. These are electric, and you have to switch the heater on about 20 minutes before you want to shower and remember to turn it off when you finish. The tanks hold roughly 5 gallons (ca. 19 liters) of water, which gives us about a 4-minute warm shower. It isn’t record-breaking by any means, but after a day of walking dusty streets filled with diesel plumes, litter, and all kinds of poop, those 4–5 minutes are sheer 5-star luxury.

As far as my shower singing solos go, they can wait until we are stateside and no longer worry about the water-borne bad guys that are so commonplace here. That end-of-shower cold water gurgle hasn’t been on the docket since we arrived here, either, lest I accidentally swallow some unfiltered H2O and find out my typhoid vaccine sucks. #notworthit.

I hope I have given some perspective on a normal habit we all share and how I modify it to fit our current experience. So next time you are in the shower, please belt out a little Sinatra, some Nat King Cole, or whatever raspy soul-filled voice you love best. Take a nice mouthful of that clean water, or heck, brush your teeth in it. Do it knowing that you are living the dream of a 40-something year-old woman who is on the other side of the world, frantically washing her hair with Head and Shoulders shampoo+conditioner. This woman’s lips are pursed shut lest she swallow a rogue cholera-laden water drop. This woman, in case you didn’t catch it, is me, and at the moment, I am jealous of you.