winnie!!

Last year, after a prolonged period of compulsive hand-washing, I walked into my dermatologist’s clinic with an itchy red rash all over my hands. Mercifully, the rash had limited itself to the back of my palms – it hadn’t spread beyond my wrists. It was painful nevertheless, and my incessant trips to the wash basin were making it even worse.

The dermatologist, who is pretty matronly in nature and familiar with my skin-abuse shenanigans, took one look at the abstract art of my making and asked me, “How many times do you wash your hands with soap every day?”

It took me a whole minute of kindergarten-style finger counting to reach a figure. “About 18 to 20 times a day,” I ventured nervously.

She sighed in Dolby digital and shot me the look of a disappointed parent. “You have been torturing your poor hands,” she admonished me. “Which sane person does this? I am a doctor who deals with infections all day and even I don’t wash my hands so often!”

I gulped. I had known all along that my hand-washing was on the excessive side, bordering on maniacal. But I hadn’t anticipated that it would lead to dermatitis i.e. an actual skin ailment that requires medication to heal, not to mention enormous reserves of self-control.

I stepped out of the clinic with the guilt of an alcoholic. As instructed by the doctor, I picked up a huge-ass bottle of Cetaphil hand wash on the way home. The gratuitous soaping and foaming had to stop. It was rehab time.

Alas, this was easier said than done.

Cetaphil is, for all practical purposes, a poor step-sister of soap. It may be well-intentioned and gentle as a mother’s touch but it simply refuses to lather. No matter how much of it I poured onto my hands, it always left me feeling unaccomplished. If washing hands was my orgasm, I was pulling out too soon. It always left much to be desired.

Six months of hard work later, I had almost made truce with my OCD demons. I still hated my soulless saviour but continued to use it nevertheless. Soap had been minimised, sanitizers banished. With a little help from an imported hand cream that costs two and a half kidneys and contains organic shea butter mixed with the soul of a 14th-century saint, I had succeeded in keeping the dermatitis from making a return visit.

But, but, but – guess what was fated to happen just as I was learning to make peace with my wash-time nemesis? The coronavirus outbreak.

That’s right. There is a potent virus in the air now, people are rushing to make their wills, supermarkets have run out of toilet paper, and it is suddenly okay to soap away to glory.

After spending six months trying to break my cray-cray habit of turning my hands into sandpaper, I am now told that I can happily revert to my masochistic ways. Wash your hands with soap, often and thoroughly, says the PSA pasted outside my dermatologist’s clinic – the same dermatologist who had warned me that my skin would peel away if I did not stop tormenting it with antibacterial concoctions.

Life has taken a U-turn.

For years now, I have suffered from an overwhelming urge to wash my hands at the smallest pretext. Dumped a day-old laundry in the machine? Wash hands. Touched an elevator grill? Wash hands. Picked up a pair of (clean) socks? Wash hands. Touched a currency note? The screen of my phone? The laptop keypad? My scalp? Wash hands.

I generally wash my hands before dinner, and after dinner, and then again after cleaning the kitchen slab, and then one last time after dumping the dishes in the sink. If a stroke of bad luck (such as our domestic help Sakubai’s quarterly home trip) requires me to do the dishes, add in another couple of rounds of hand washing. Add to this the monthly annoyance of my period or seasonal troubles such as the flu and you have a frenzied woman who’ll spend half her waking hours rigorously disinfecting her palms.

I have always been aware that though this affliction of mine sounds amusing to hear of, it has the potential to snowball into a chronic disorder and reduce me to dysfunction. I have read accounts of people grappling with extreme OCD who find it impossible to conduct even the most mundane tasks without sanitizing and re-sanitizing their environs. I have always feared that if my reflexes are not consciously rewired, I might end up just like them.

And this fear was exactly the reason why I worked diligently over six months to tackle my misophobia. Because, what if I eventually morphed into a female Sheldon Cooper? What if being a germaphobe led me to fixing a ‘spot’ on the couch, or eating spaghetti every Thursday for the rest of my life, or worse still, creating bowel movement schedules? Holy crap on a cracker, I did not want to become that person.

So here I am now, freshly reformed. But in a curious twist of fate, I am now being encouraged to walk right back into my addiction.

All around me, I see people feverishly rubbing their palms with scented alcohol. My neighbours are moving around in N95 masks. The soap dispenser in our bathroom is perpetually in need of a refill. Even the security guard downstairs, who used to make a trip to the toilet and back in three minutes flat, now takes a good quarter of an hour.

Where does this leave me? Had I been the old me, I might have ripped the skin off my bones by now. But in my born-again avatar, I am no longer paranoid like I used to be. I still wash my hands more often than the average person does, but I am no longer precariously close to sanitary insanity.

It is difficult to predict how the CoVID-19 situation is likely to evolve in India in the coming weeks. But if the rate at which cases are presently mounting is any indication, things are likely to escalate majorly in a matter of days. John Keynes did mention that in the long run we are all dead, but did he define exactly how long the run was going to be? For all we know, the run has run its course and we are about to be clean-bowled.

Given how uncertain our future is, just how much sense would it make to resist soapy temptations at this juncture? Should I maintain my newfound resist-dermatitis-till-I-die stance when I may actually die of resisting dermatitis? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to surrender to the lure of foam and froth if that is more likely to keep me alive, itchy blisters notwithstanding?

I have been mulling over this predicament for a bit, and have finally come to the conclusion that if my life risks being truncated by a rogue virus, abstinence is pointless. What use are pretty hands on a dead woman? If I am to die soon, I would rather soak in the soapgasms while I can.

Throwing caution to the virus-infested wind, I enter the bathroom now. I see the soap dispenser winking at me, turning me on harder than a porn star would an incel. Cetaphil is sulking from a distance but I ignore its death stare. I walk up to the basin, reach out for the soap – 100% chemical-laced, with all the sulfates and parabens in the world – and press hard, rubbing my hands in unrestrained glee.

My palms are soon covered with a familiar foam that my senses have long been lusting for. A feeling of total satiation takes over my senses, combined with a heady sense of release relief. I haven’t felt this excited disinfected in months.

As the great Rumi once said:

I’ll submit happily to the dance of death, I don’t want a second chance.