Twice now within the last fortnight I have seen shopkeepers taking currency notes and dipping them in Dettol solution, supposedly to get rid of any coronavirus that might be sticking to them. One was a mangshowallah, the other a mishtiwallah...
My mother reminded me of my great grandparents on my father's side. My great grandpa pursued a legal career in a district court, and apparently earned a pretty penny. Great grandma was a devout Hindu housewife, with many and very fixed ideas about things that were clean and unclean. So though she had no objection to her husband bringing home pots of money every evening, there was a rigid protocol about how the money and the moneymaker must be cleansed before being allowed to enter her house. While the husband was sent off to take a bath in gangajal and change into a fresh set of clothes which were never worn outdoors, the lady sat on the porch, painstakingly cleaning every guinea (they paid lawyers in coins a hundred years ago) in sacred gobarjal with her own hands before they were in her judgment fit for her use. If she were to come back today, wouldn't she say
নতুনটা আর কী দেখালি ?
Excuses change, but people's weirdness apparently does not. At least coins were less subject to damage through manhandling than notes are!
.JPG)
