Kishore Singh: Washing dirty linen

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Because I have made a virtue of travelling light, I am unable to understand those who pack for every emergency, and then twice over, so they end up lugging huge suitcases while I have to stuff my bags with crumpled newspapers just so they won't cave in. Though I must confess mine was a lesson learnt at some cost.

On a trekking trip, while others had packed an extra T-shirt and socks at most, my rucksack was splendidly (and, as I learnt to my dismay, heavily) stuffed with the kind of things no one else had thought to take along: night suit, dressing gown, pair of slippers, magazines to read, a choice of belts for the spare jeans "" you get the picture.

Where others went up hill and down dale with a jaunty step, I huffed some and puffed more, leaving behind a trail of clothes that must have puzzled those who followed, but at least I learnt that a can of deodorant did more duty than shirts and towels, especially if you had to carry it all yourself.

When my son announced this week he was coming home from college by train, instead of by air, I put it down to well-earned austerity and complimented him. I should have held back any comments though, for when he reached home, it was not so much him as his baggage that was the more visible. He came up the stairs trailing three hefty suitcases behind him, all quite full and all quite heavy. That explained his choice of transport: any airline would have charged him as much as a semester's fee to ferry those bags from Pune to Delhi.

Any hope that he was carrying his notes to study during the vacations, or gifts for the family, were quickly dispensed when the bags were opened in quick succession, leading my wife to throw open the windows of the apartment to let out the stale odour that emerged.

"What on earth," she asked, "do you have in there?" What he had in there, it transpired, was three months of unwashed clothes. This despite paying a woman to come and wash, as well as having a washing machine in his apartment.

Looking at our disbelieving faces, my son sought to explain: "That suitcase there," he pointed to the first one, "has the clothes I wore in January, when it was cool, and which I thought you might want to handwash in Delhi. So I packed them into a suitcase and put it away, while I wore my college uniforms through February. But since I did not need the uniforms in March, when we had our exams, I packed those and put them in another suitcase, so you could wash those too when I came home to Delhi."

His third, and by far the largest, suitcase consisted of clothes he had either worn recently, or which he said were clean enough to wear. This last, it turned out, was a mere euphemism for dirty shirt collars but clean fronts, so they joined the growing pile in the living room, requiring the washing lady to protest that it would take her a week as well as overtime to clean them all.

At this my son, who is nothing if not a perfectionist, showed her a pair of jeans that was smudged with colours that must have run off other garments in the washing machine. "This is what you did to my clothes the last time," he protested, "and if it happens again, I will only take back new clothes as replacement."

Which is why my wife has declared that she is personally going to be doing the laundry all through next week. I suppose it helps that she actually likes washing clothes.