He found the perfect laundry machine. It was light blue, 30 years old, and sturdy. The woman selling it had no use for it as she was going to leave the country.
“It is very much free,” she had said to him over the phone the day before. There was no question after that. He was going to take the machine.
He found her house at the lip of a narrow street holed out in many places. Roofs on either side of the street were reddened with dust. In the rainy season, the road was sure to be a mess as motorbikes zooming past would splash reddish-brown water on their grey fences and the red soil would thicken into a paste that would send clumps of dirt up the wheels and the heels of trousers. As he was loading the machine into a small tricycle, the buzzing of motorbikes on the road was split by a loud crack. Then, a wail. People started to gather. Someone had been hit. Ten minutes later, he watched them load a bloodied body into the tricycle he brought with him to ferry the laundry machine home. It took him another hour, and half a month’s pay from the job he was wasting away at, to put the machine in a truck and take it to his house.
The house was where he finished work at 1am. Where he worked as a “chat support agent”. But really, he was earning less than 50 cents an hour replying to desperate men on numerous dating apps. He had been given a script, folders filled with suggestive photographs, new ones for each persona, and a new story each day.
The model was simple:
First, create a platform where men would think they were talking to real women. Next, buy pictures from women who did not mind what you did with their identities. Then, get a story artist to develop stories and write scripts. Then, find an even more desperate person to deliver the content.
Note: Ensure to pay them a low wage, but if they sell any content, give them a commission.
At first, he made the interactions enjoyable. These men were lonely and desperate and would lick up every modicum of personality he brought to the script. But after a few months, some pay cuts and several changes to the rules of how he earned, he stuck firmly to scripts and closed for the day.
Like many of the young people around him, his potential was being wasted serving a no-growth career in front of his computer, at his desk, in his room, in the dingy house, rented from a landlord who never fixed the mould problem, within a fenced area around other fenced areas, at a corner of the quarter where everyone had a ventilation problem, in the district that everyone who did a blue-collar job in the city returned to, in a state abandoned by its country, and in a country that had abandoned itself.
There were too many layers to peel to free oneself from the dire situation. But one had to start somewhere. And after he thought long and hard about it for almost a year, saving every penny he could, he decided to start the laundry his family had spoken of. After two or three trials, he believed that he had figured it out. So, he was grateful to leave the house and its blackish grey mould that appeared again each time despite several chemical treatments.
Seven days later, he slipped a mask across his face as his defence against the air hanging over half a decade of dust as two men offloaded three laundry machines from a truck into the house left to his brother and him. A house whose soul had departed for almost a decade now.
Nearly everything had been taken from the house before he was handed the keys to it. All of the upholstery was gone, so was the ceiling fan. A gaping hole hung where the kitchen sink used to be, and several countertops had sunk. Few of the lamp holders still worked. But their ceramic casings, which his father had screwed into the walls, were cracked from manhandling by the thieves.
When he opened the windows, dust rose into the air and cast little shadows across the light. He rinsed his itchy eyes with water from the well, which he also sprinkled around the house, taking care not to splash any of it on the old TV in the corner of the room that must not have been to the looter’s taste. By the time he got to the door of the master bedroom his parents once shared, his chest grew heavy and his throat itched. He may have inhaled too much dust despite the mask. Instead, he turned around and went to inspect the kitchen.
If he replaced the kitchen sink and a few pipes, screwed in new bulbs, cleared out the debris, removed the damaged wood from the counters, painted the walls and scrubbed the floors, the house would be functional. There was so much grass to be cut too, but he was not determined to do this alone.
He went to a market and found workmen for the jobs.
He moved the old television into the bedroom he had shared with his brother and then set his computer on a workspace. The living room held both washers and an old table he would use to iron clothes. He hooked up the small generator to the house and filled it with petrol. Next, he ran power into the house. Then got some coal for the metal iron because one never depended on electricity in these parts.
He was nearly out of money when he was done, but the house was ready to start a new life as a laundry office, which he would now run alone.
On day one, he walked around the area, giving flyers out to people.
Bring your clothes today, get them the next day, express is double the price.
He set his prices slightly higher than other laundry shops closest to their district. His reasoning was that, as the only laundry shop in the area, residents would bring their laundry to him instead of going farther out. He put his number boldly on the back of each flyer, created a social media account and deployed several posts consistently for 30 days.
Nothing happened from days one to seven.
A call came in on day eight.
Someone asked for a ridiculous discount on day 13.
Nothing happened afterwards. Not even when he put up a sign.
The remaining money ran out on day 31.
On day 33, he begged for his job back but could not get it, so he started working for a colleague for half his former pay.
By day 39, he took one of those exploitative loans, all of which he spent on day 45.
He ate once every day until day 49. Then he stayed hungry for the next two days and was fortunate to still be alive when a man wearing a green jacket brought some clothes and asked if he could wash them and deliver them in the evening. This, he did immediately.
The plan was to wash clothes at night while working through the day, but this had to be done during the day if he was to deliver by late evening. So, between scripted messages to desperate men on the internet, and heat from a metal box filled with hot pieces of coal, he managed to pull through and deliver the clothes by evening.
He did not see that man again until about three months later. By then, he had cut the prices in half and barely got by on the customers that trickled in.
With just two machines – one doubling as a dryer – and just one person ironing, laundering clothes for a small community took an entire day. He barely had time for his other job. And when he had to choose, he chose the laundry, much to the disappointment of the colleague who had given him the leg up. To copy lines from a Word document into a chat window was easy. But watching the clothes spin around in white foam as they washed and rinsed, clipping them on the metal clothesline behind the house, and straightening them out under a hot steel plate felt a little better.
His brother used to take on the responsibility of ironing everyone’s clothes in the house. School uniforms and church clothes, their mother’s linen gowns, all straightened under the hot block of steel he pressed against them.
Like, linen is fibre and resistant to heat. And that is why when we wear linen we do not get hot and we do not get cold. So you sprinkle some water, and not just iron with the spray of steam from the iron. Linen is too tough for that. It has to be as wet as when the cloth is soaked in water. For best results. So you soak it in, and then you don’t just iron, you press. You can run a hot iron over softer fabric like cotton, but for stronger material like linen, you press. The fibres will relax under the heat if pressed. That is how you can reach the fibres underneath.
He had once burned this brother’s shirt, earned a laugh, a lesson on how to scrape charred fabric from the face of a pressing iron using toothpaste, and an opportunity to try again. Just like then, the steam rose into his face as he pressed the iron against a green linen shirt, and his eyes watered.
He would not see the man for a while after this delivery, but more business started to pour in. So he crafted a list of rules of sorts, borrowing ideas from the numerous stores he saw online.
Collections for next-day deliveries stop at 12pm.
Delivery of items received from 12.01pm, assured in two days.
Except express deliveries.
For items that need ironing, give at least two days.
Heavier items like blankets may need five to seven days.
Items left uncollected after six months may be handed out.
Beside the gate of their house stood a small security post, which had a window facing the street. He used his profits – after food, power, debt payment, and supplies – to expand the window into a door, having a walk-in for people to leave their items.
Suits. Pyjamas. Bedsheets. Blankets. All rolled in. Someone brought a rug once. Another person asked if he washed cars. From his little corner made out of detergent, steam, and clear plastic bags, the lives of the people in the resurging community played out.
He knew when the young man from three streets away, who rode a white motorcycle and had three girlfriends, lost his job because the suits he laundered turned into slacks, his shirts became sweaters, and the stains became tougher to wash out, as well as the burns.
A young wife started to bring her husband’s clothes every week and did not bother to look them over when she picked them up. When she stopped coming, he heard gossip at the small kiosk that she moved out of the house, barely five months into the marriage.
He hurt himself with a razor blade found in the pocket of a child’s uniform. Since then, he started to shake the items down, finding money, rings, betting tickets, ATM cards, a chequebook, which he returned to the pockets of the washed clothes.
His favourite customer was the woman who regularly brought a light blue basket of clothes containing the same ones the man in the green jacket had brought the first time. Then a young girl started to bring the basket over. Always brimming with clothes, sheets, towels. Always on Thursdays or Fridays to be picked up on Saturdays or Sundays. When he declined an invitation to their house, she exchanged some food and drink along with his regular payment for the basket of clean clothes the next day. He was sorry to decline again.
He did not want to know these people beyond the melange of perfumes, oil splashes, make-up stains, mud stains, drops of blood as he laundered their dirty linen every day. Stories he overheard about them when he visited the kiosks to buy more detergent drifted into his ear and out his other ear.
One evening, someone knocked on his gate, introduced himself as the community leader and told him of a funeral happening the next day.
“All of us are visiting the house. Their loss”—the community leader shook his head—“is unspeakable.”
He was not very fond of funerals. Death was final and the ceremonies only prolonged the pain. No need to increase that which one had to grieve. Wiping things with already dirty clothes made the clothes harder to clean.
A bad taste developed in his mouth when he was ushered into the compound. It had nothing to do with the chicken coops rising on either side of him as he walked towards the house at the end of the property.
He recognised a red ankara dress he ironed two weeks ago, worn by a woman he had never seen before. There was that faded deep green suit from the pastor, whom he had never seen without a Bible. He entered the house.
Past the foyer, inside the living room, he caught the smell of sweat and bodies, the dim light of three yellow incandescent bulbs, upholstery arranged in a square, and the sound of wailing from its centre. Women sat on the floor, heads bowed towards one woman who sobbed loudly, and beside her, a face he thought he had seen from somewhere. Men sat on armchairs, staring at the ceiling in silence. Opposite the door he had entered from was a wooden console comprising shelves that ringed a large television. Beside the television was a large framed picture of a nine-year-old boy in a school uniform, whose face bore a bashful smile. He recognised the features shaped around the smile from an older face. More importantly, he recognised the school uniform – the red-checkered fabric made of pure cotton that he thought was too expensive for a child to wear to school. He had treated the uniform with lemons in hot water because bleach would be too harsh. It was always among the light blue basket of clothes he received at the shop weekly.
Beside that picture was a portrait, and the face of his first-ever customer in the green jacket, with its collar lined in orange, stared back at him. This was the house he had been invited to.
Right there, in the living room, somebody started to wail. Once again, his throat constricted, and his chest grew heavier, as when he approached the master bedroom of his house. He turned around and started to thread through the bodies between him and the door. But before he could get out of the house, the world blurred to grey and he blacked out. He would learn, after he woke in one of the rooms in the house, that he had slumped. This was explained to him by an elderly woman who was awake long before dawn and who let him out of the house. He had told her he was fine, but he had a slight headache, and their house made him shiver.
He waited for dawn but the shivers did not stop. The sounds of the morning blurred into the pounding in his head. A cloud of heat enveloped his body, and the only way he could bear all the discomfort was to close his eyes.
*
In his fever dream, he is trudging through a valley, heavy with clothes he can’t take off because a lashing rain is falling from the sky, the sky that is also an ocean, wetting the ground as far as he can see.
He dreams this once in a while: a tired day from work, or in the rainy season when a customary fever visits. In the dream, he would escape the valley only when he woke up. But this time, warmth bleeds into the dream, and as the warmth doesn’t belong in a cold dream, it starts to burn him. It burns off the layers of clothes protecting his body, and once the rain touches his skin, it sizzles and steam rises, clouding thickly around him before reaching for the ocean in the sky.
Once this pale white steam reaches the sky, it foams. And in that state between sleep and waking, while his head is racked with several painful quakes, the steam foams when it reaches the sky, and bubbles like numerous eyes looking down on him. These bubbles form shapes that dance around, contorting into a moving picture.
Slowly, he recognises a scene from memory.
The alternating rectangles of an unpainted brick fence terminating at a pillar. A gate made out of metal slats, held together by metal sheets, between that pillar and another one. A small window cut into the fence. The head of a woman poking out of the structure of slats. He recognises the shape of his mother’s shaved head, and her unique way of stepping out of the gate, head first then her whole body followed.
This was eight years ago when the village brimmed with people upon the discovery of limestone on the other side of the mountain. Miners appeared as if overnight, and the house his father had been building was quickly completed when he left his job as a storekeeper at the failing steel mill to join the miners. He often returned from work, his clothes whitened by limestone dust, his mood much brighter than ever as the money was better.
His mother took full charge of the new home. Having wanted a house of her own for ages, she put all of her energy into running it, setting everything in the place she had created for it.
There is no other place to dream except your own house. There is no better place to fall sick than in your own house. If you take care of the house, it will take care of you in return. Houses know these things.
She set his brother to manage the cleaning and the washing. He had a talent for fabric. With his fingers, he could feel the difference between 100% cotton and a cotton-polyester blend.
One is softer when you run your hands through it. The other one feels like it should be heavier but it is not.
He was the go-to authority to mend shorts and shirts as he knew his way around a needle, especially when it was attached to a machine.
As for him, he did everything their mother did, helped his brother with the laundry and their father with maintenance. He ran most of the small errands. The small house chores were his to do so he could have free time to study and achieve the grades their father wished.
The image dissipates and the frothing sky forms another. The house porch with its roof held by four square pillars. Two pillars are leaning but they hold the roof just well. A chair sits between the pillars. He recognises his father’s broad shoulders, and his brother sitting on the ground beside the chair, leaning on the pillar. He cannot see what his father looks like anymore but he remembers the words from that night.
You cannot be a miner, Sifa. You can be better. Look at me. Six months and my body is no longer what it used to be. Have you heard me cough at night? It is painful. But I won’t be there for a long time. I am just saving money ehn. When I leave, we will start a business that we can run as a family since we now have a house. If we work together as a family and do our part, we will get more than a house out of this life. We can even pay for your small brother, Mirin, to go to school in the UK, ehn.
His father’s words had filled them with all the hope they needed. These were the days when their mother hummed as the morning air circulated through the house from the windows. Where three goats turned into seven goats and they grilled one over a drum, and invited everyone. Where sweet potato leaves were cut for gwate. Where his elder brother wondered if the people in the community would ever need a laundry because everyone had the time to wash their clothes.
This was before their father’s voice grew deep and hollow, and instead of foaming with stories about his grand plans for their family empire when he returned home, silence flowed out of him. Not even stories about the hands crushed at the mines, backs breaking under the carriage, or men coughing for weeks before they expired. Not even about wages promised to compensate for the increasing work. His father simply stopped speaking as if all the joy had been rinsed out of him.
And then he started to read back to his father the letters written to the company.
These letters started with appeals for not-yet-given compensation, and then grew more agitated, longer and more furious. One evening, men assembled in the house. More men gathered the next week. Sometimes, they left their clothes for his older brother to wash, mend, and iron. But that was not the reason they came. They discussed matters in hushed tones that he was not supposed to worry about yet.
One night, he woke to the sound of chanting.
The morning after, work stopped at the mines.
The week after that, a protest bubbled.
And after a week of “We stand by our demands,” a new set of men started to walk around the settlement.
The next week, a bunch of armed men in khakis broke their gate down, seized his father and took him away. This was after a dark column of smoke had risen for two days from the direction of the mines. His father never returned home.
He remembered his mother leaving the house early in the morning, sometimes with food, sometimes with clothes. Each time she returned, her shoulders hung a little lower and the light in her eyes, a little dimmer than the last time.
Then she could not go out of the house, and his brother started to leave the house in the mornings and return in the evenings, growing angrier, speaking to himself as he stormed around the house. His moods became brutal and his tongue became acerbic. But to this day, he would take the darkness that subsumed his brother over his brother’s sudden absence.
The next day would welcome a slew of extended family, and then imams, medicine men and even pastors to help their mother get out of bed. But she just did not wake up one morning. She was buried the following week, and he had to go to his aunt’s house, then an uncle’s, then a cousin of their father’s, and back to the original aunt.
In the years that followed, he completed secondary school, and while at school, he worked shifts in a kitchen. Sometimes, he slept in the kitchen. He worked tirelessly, studied endlessly, worked on assignments for a number of his classmates. Anything to wipe his mind of thoughts about the house, for which his uncles secretly sent petitions to courts to hand over to them. But it remained locked until a year ago, when he turned 21 and an old lawyer handed the keys to him. And then some money, which he used to rent a house.
Having his own space felt better than the hostel or his aunt’s house, where he slept in the kitchen or on the porch most times. But in his own space, he grew to fill it and soon did not want to leave it. Then he started to notice the black mould.
When the images in the sky shaped by lather disappear, the ocean pours down and he is inundated by darkness for a long time.
*
The banging on the gate was loud enough to wake the dead. As he was not dead yet, he lifted his groggy self out of bed, grabbed a cloth, covered his head, and went out into the late afternoon. His eyes had barely accustomed to the light outside when he heard dissatisfied voices.
His customers.
For three days, they had knocked on the gate and tried to reach him but he was unavailable by phone. For three whole days he had slept, shut off from the world.
Some took their unwashed clothes back home. If he was not ready to run a business, he should not start one. Others gave him another chance. They cared that he was sick but the inconvenience remained nonetheless. His fever had completely abated, so he spent all day managing their grievances. As the evening began, just when the sun had let off its heat, a young woman came into the shop. She introduced herself as Youna and said she had lived here 10 years ago. She produced a parcel from her bag. He had no doubt what the block-shaped parcel was.
“Sifa asked me to give this to you. He wants to thank you for returning to put the house back in shape, Mirin.”
Mirin blinked. Sifa was alive.
*Photo by Vasiliy Kraskovskiy on Unsplash