The Bundle on the Top Rack

The iron was hot by five. The gate would not open until six, and until then the street belonged to the crows, so Savithri stood in her doorway with the iron in her hand and watched them take the rubbish apart.

There was no reason to be early. Nobody had ever asked her to be early. But the coal took time to go grey, and the electric iron, when the current came, had a way of spitting a brown mark onto a cuff if she did not warm it slowly, and a brown mark could cost her a week's work. So she came at five and pressed her own blouse, which did not need pressing, and waited for the gate.

At six the gate opened. At ten past, the first boy came out with a bundle tied in the string she had given him on Saturday: four shirts, two trousers, and a bedsheet that had been slept on through a fever. He stood with his hands in his pockets while she wrote on the brown paper in tailor's chalk.

S. KARTHIK.

"Thursday," she said.

"Thursday," he said, as though agreeing to something larger.

By seven there were eleven bundles on the counter and enough light to see the chalk dust on her fingers. The shop was a lean-to against the compound wall: a tin sheet on four poles, a plank counter, one shelf, and a board she laid across her knees to press on. On the shelf sat a steel bowl of starch with a cloth over it, a tin of spare buttons, a pencil tied to the counter with string so that no boy would carry it off, and the notebook with the red cover.

The notebook was the whole business. Every bundle was written there in pencil, in her hand, in the order the boys arrived: name, pieces, the day it was promised. She did not write roll numbers because the boys said them too quickly. She wrote the name as she heard it, and when a boy said he was Karthik she wrote KARTHIK, and when the next boy said he was also Karthik she wrote KARTHIK 2, and neither of them ever objected, which she took as a kindness.

Inside each collar, with the same chalk, she put a letter. A, B, C, as far as the alphabet went, then A again. The letter meant nothing except that two white shirts on the same rack would not go home with the wrong boy. Twice in eleven years she had given a shirt to the wrong boy. Both times the boy had come back the next morning with it folded, saying nothing, and both times she had carried the shame of it for a week.

The work itself never changed. Collar first, then the cuffs, then the body. Buttons face down, always, so the iron does not put a shine on them. A shirt is not finished until it is cold, which is why the boys who came at six got their clothes at six and the boys who came at seven got theirs at seven, and nobody was ever given a warm bundle to carry through the rain.

There were boys who wanted extra starch and boys who wanted none. There was a boy who counted his buttons every Thursday and had once found one missing and stood there holding the shirt out, not angry, just waiting, until she found a match in the tin and sewed it on the spot. There was a boy who wrote his own name in the notebook in careful English and then apologized for his handwriting, and she told him his handwriting was better than the printed paper.

Then came the bundle that was different. It arrived on the first Monday of the rains, when the road outside the gate turned the colour of tea. The boy was thin and in a hurry and did not look at the notebook while she wrote. Two shirts, one pair of trousers. Inside the collar of one shirt, in blue marker, there was already a name. Not a chalk letter. A name, in a hand much younger than hers, the ink gone soft at the edges from washing. She had to sound it out.

Thursday he did not come. The next Thursday neither. On the Friday she pressed the bundle anyway, because an unpressed bundle on the counter is a thing that gets in the way of the day, and she wrapped it in brown paper and tied it and put it on the top rack, which was where waiting things went: a bedsheet from March, a jersey nobody claimed, a school bag that had sat on the counter for a whole afternoon and then gone home with a watchman's daughter.

She asked the guard at the gate. Boys go, he said. Transfer, drop-out, father's shop. Nobody tells me. The second time she asked, he did not stop walking.

The weeks did what weeks do. The top rack filled and emptied and filled. The bundle stayed. Twice she brought it down to the counter to look at it and twice put it back. Once she took the shirt out and pressed it again although it had already been pressed, and stood with the iron in her hand afterwards, unable to say what she had just done or why she had done it.

In November the rain came properly. Rain on a tin sheet is not a sound, it is a hand over the mouth. For three days nobody could hear anybody, and the boys stood at the counter shouting their names, and she wrote them down wrong and corrected nothing, and the clothes went home damp regardless of what she promised.

On the last Thursday before the semester broke, a boy came for four shirts. While she counted his pieces he asked, not looking at her, whether anyone had left a shirt behind. A white one, full sleeve. His roommate had gone home in September and had not come back, and his things were still on the bed, and nobody had come for them, and the warden had started asking.

She said no.

She said it without looking up, which was the only way to say it, and he nodded as though he had expected that, and paid, and went in through the gate.

The iron was still hot. She took the bundle down from the top rack and untied the string and opened the collar to the blue name, and then she folded the shirt with the collar turned in and pressed it once more. Collar first, then the cuffs, then the body. She set it back on the rack where the light from the gate could reach it, and closed the shop, and the rain, which had stopped at six, began again.