Geetanjali Krishna: Using cleaner cleaners

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

It's that time of the year again when not spring, but spring cleaning's in the air. Houses are being painted, floors are being polished and shiny new stuff is being bought everywhere to greet Lakshmi, the Goddess of prosperity. But in our house, things happen differently. I grimly sort and clean. The children dolefully rummage through everything I've discarded. We end up keeping most of what I wanted to throw out.

This time, I decided to let them help me clean so they'd have no time for the junk heap I'd collected. So, I gave one brass polish and a rag and set him to work on my old brass stuff. To the other, I gave some cleaning powder on a scrubber, along with instructions to clean the bathroom tiles.

My cleaning lady was amused when she saw them at work. "It's nice they're helping you," she commented, "but all these chemicals cannot be good for their skin, can they?"

"No," I said, "but what else can I give them to clean with?" "In my village," she offered, "we use cleaner cleaners... for instance, a paste of cow dung and clay cleans walls and floor perfectly." My son looked aghast: "It must stink! Anyway, mom would kill us if we used it..."

She smiled: "it doesn't stink and doesn't harm the skin either. But, of course, you can't use it to clean your marble floors "" it's only for mud houses!"

Watching my little daughter cleaning the loo tiles, she said, "in the village we use any sour liquid to get stains off tiles." Vinegar was her favourite, she said: "it cleans everything like magic!" I decided to test her out, and fetched some vinegar. "Mom, it's like those fake ads on TV...," said my awestruck son a while later, when she triumphantly showed us sparkling clean tiles.

"Never use strong cleaners on marble," she said, "they absorb the chemicals and lose their lustre." Vinegar, she added, was also the best thing to clean mirrors and glass with. "Try filling it in a spray bottle with a bit of water and use it in place of your expensive glass cleaner," she suggested, "add it while washing curtains, and see what a shine they'll get!" She also used vinegar with baking soda to remove build-up in drains, she added.

"Tell me some more kitchen remedies," I begged. "To clean brass, use a cut lemon instead of this expensive brass cleaner," she advised. My children thought this was a great game. They scampered off to get my favourite Ganesha statue, and proceeded to douse it with lemon juice. We let it stay for a while, and when we cleaned it with a soft duster, the result was fantastic. "...that too without all that polishing!" said my daughter.

Realising she had us hooked, my cleaning lady moved to cleaning silverware. "Back home, most of our jewellery is in silver, and unlike you folks, we like it shining and not oxidised," she said. All one needed to do with old silver, she said, was to polish it gently with salt and a toothbrush. This worked too. "If the silver is stained, substitute toothpowder for salt!" she added.

"For people like me, using home remedies for cleaning is cheaper than buying the fancy cleaners you all buy," she said, as we finished our lesson in home remedies for spring cleaning, "but after all these years of using them, I feel they clean better and are are also safer to use!"

I nodded, absently filling a spray bottle with vinegar. She certainly had a convert in me.