Sometimes technology is better than tradition.

Going overseas for two months has its share of complications, not the least of which is doing your laundry. We don't have a washing machine in our apartment (which really is more like a hotel room than anything else), and there aren't exactly laundromats anywhere to be seen. In India, your clothes get washed by the dhobi. Thus, every few days, we leave our clothes in the laundry basket and they come back, wrapped in newspapers, cleaned and folded.

The only difference is that some of the results have been puzzling. For example, a good number of my socks and shirts tend to come back folded inside out. One would think that might be self-explanatory, but apparently not. While our dress clothes have been nicely ironed, it seems that our socks (and jeans, apparently) have mysteriously lengthened. The more we wash them, the longer they get.

The reason for the lengthening is how they wash our clothes. My guidebook for India sums it up quite nicely:

The dhobi will take your dirty washing to a dhobi ghat, a public clothes-washing area (the bank of a river for example), where it is shown some old-fashioned discipline: separated, soaped and given a damn good thrashing to beat the dirt out of it. Then it is hung out to dry in the sun and, one dried, taken to the ironing sheds where every garment is endowed with razor-sharp creases and then matched to its rightful owner by hidden cryptic markings. Your clothes will come back from the dhobi absolutely spotless, though this kind of violent treatment does take it out of them: buttons get lost and eventually the cloth starts to fray.

Indeed, that seems to be along the same lines as what my poor socks have endured. It kind of makes me wish for laundry machines back in America. On the other hand, I suppose if the worst thing that happens to me is longer socks, I'll be doing pretty well!