An Ode to Soap

I am sure that I have scared away many a person from an already paltry pool of readers with this very original title.

If you have persevered till the second line thinking I am about to unleash a deep, philosophical musing on the meaning of life with analogies to soap, then I must warn you. This piece of writing is just what it suggests: how supremely grateful I am right now for having that block of something to wash my body with – Soap.

If you are still here, despite the title, despite the ominous lines above, then I beg of you: Do stay and soldier on.

It all started with a delightful book – the Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (You must admit that I am but an amateur when it comes to coining strange titles). In case the book needs an introduction, here it is –

The book narrates the everyday lives of very ordinary citizens of Guernsey, Channel Islands during the German occupation of it which lasted five years – from May 1940 to 1945. Only, when you read it now, there is nothing ordinary about it. The entire story slowly unravels, person by person, through letters written by them. It is a unique book, with no dialogues and only letters written by the characters to take the story forward.

There is wit, there is humor and there is heartbreak – but it doesn’t hit you all at once. There are hints of darkness in their lives, of atrocities they experienced – all masked with rural ruminations with catchy, funny observations. Along with food, diary, music, laughter, radio, shoes and a ridiculously long list of things, the Islanders didn’t also have one other thing – Soap. We can imagine starvation quite easily, but we never stop and think about stench, do we? It is always the tiny, common things we never think about.

Though I squirm to even hint of any similarity (How can one compare a full, nutritious meal three times a day to turnip & potato soup for 5 years?), our generation did come very close to experiencing a nominal scarcity during the lockdown months. Favorite take-outs were closed, mothers had to manage lunches without vegetables and what not. How would it have been, I now wonder, if we did not have soap? What would we have done if we were told, “Here, your family can have one bar of soap a month. Oh alright! Maybe a few spoons of powder to wash your vessels and clothes, if you like.”

Here’s what happened to a girl in Guernsey without soap –

The poor girl had lice, which without washing (as there was no soap) exacerbated into scabies and eventually had to go to the hospital to get her head shaved and cleaned; her dearest wish was that no one should ever experience the shame of a seeping scalp.

The Islanders, and their clothes, were not clean for so many years of their lives. How hard it must have been, when with already empty stomachs, they did not even have the pleasure of getting a pleasing whiff of lime from a block of soap dipped in hot water.

But however cruel our race is, none can deny its resourcefulness. If a pig died of a disease (you cannot eat a dead pig dead of disease, you can end up dead yourself), the Islanders  tried making soap out of melting pig fat from the carcass, and added a bit of paprika and cinnamon for smell. And accomplished all this without the internet, without recipes, and without the faintest clue if it would succeed. They only relied on vague memories of their mothers doing it in a forgotten era.

My mind promptly constructed a vivid scene –

A fabulously dirty me – replete with long hair housing a colony of worms which popped out if they felt like basking in sunlight – staring uncomprehendingly at a stub of pig fat. I wouldn’t survive at all. (Indeed, I had stupidly not known that fat, including human fat, can be used for making soap).

So here I am, once I recovered from the traumatic nightmare of lice and worms, with grateful tears and reverently paying homage to my Biotique Orange Peel Scrub Soap (without any animal fat, I checked). I went a step further and honored this invention in the only way I knew how – by ardently writing about it.

I’ll go a step further.

Since you are mind bogglingly still here, I beg of you do something else –

The next time you go take a bath, feel the hot steam through your very pores. Listen to the ripples of water and hold your soap carefully in your hands. Take a deep sniff and luxuriate. Take another sniff for good measure. Maybe you can even sniff at your armpits after the bath and feel smug about the smell.

It feels good, doesn’t it? Ah! The simple pleasures (nay, luxury) of life!