Of Sunday baths and stone bathrooms!

There was a time when the word 'shampoo' was synonymous with Sunsilk- in it's pre-highfalutin avatar. It was a simple bottle (don't remember though, how it looked) but shampoo usually meant Sundays. Mom would massage amla oil into our hair the night before and we'd take enormous joy in the washing off ritual. Our bathroom (pre-renovation) was a little stone alcove with a wooden door, with a straight built in shelf which housed the basic- shampoo, soap. It had a bulb for no-nonsense lighting and a lovely stone lattice high in the wall which acted as the exhaust - with those old golden aluminium taps you see only in school books and villages now. We loved the bathroom.  But more on the shampoo now- Sunday morning baths were a little longer, as we scrubbed out the oil and toweled ourselves dry. Those were the days of no-conditioner and air-drying the hair. So all of us would comb our hair and dry it under the fan or under the sun- in winters.  Alas. When we renovated our house, the little stone bathroom was demolished and in it's place was a spanking new one- with tiled floors and walls and metal shower heads and a matching exhaust fan. It also had a big built in shelf with compartments for everyone's soaps and shampoos and conditioners- yes- by this time those long sleek tubes had made their way into our bathing routine- as well as sockets for the hair dryer. No more drying hair under the fan or sun- we could have beautiful salon-like hair in a matter of minutes. Though we were awed by such opulence (it took very little to amaze us in those days), guess which room my sister and I most missed? The little stone bathroom and it's fond memories of the Sunday bath!