It must've been Dove but it's over now

Soaps tell stories.

They clean and all and add pink to self worth or ass to badass but overall, they are redolent with stories and TFM (total funny matter). The soap dish is much like the sutradhar, holding a lump of stories in all sorts of colours and shapes. The dharma of soap, much like that of churches, rains and waterfalls — is to clean. However, deep inside every soap hide a thousand stories and just outside, a hundred clues.

If ever you visit someone’s house and find the food finished, the booze suspect, the conversation pretty much neither pretty nor much and the host staring fairly frequently at the fan or outside the window, consider going to the bathroom (or all the bathrooms, one by one) and forming a meaningful, albeit temporary, relationship with the soaps in there. You will, I assure you, find it delightful and clean.
The men who stare at soaps, much unlike the men who stare at goats, will vouch for revelations in soaps that are nothing like normal, everyday visions. Floral to noodles and ayurvedic to luxury, hefty to skimpy and hand made to flung from a conveyor belt — soaps come with pedigree, lineage, chutzpah and a certain slippery mien. They tell much, bare all, deal with dirt yet remain pristine and bereft of blemish. Soaps are the modern day confession boxes, the post liberalisation conscience proxy, the modern metrosexual’s uber modern second chance. Soaps are also great places for stories, like I said some time, long time back. Little wonder we call them ‘bars’ of soap — where else but in a bar would you stand the chance of coming across so many stories of so many hues?

So what are these stories? Where do they hide and how do we read them from the clues? Questions that wrap themselves around our fingers like nagging stains, screaming for a redeeming release by having one last, dirty yet close fling with the soap bar before gurgling their way down the drain in a deluge of nirvana and wet moksha. Whoa.

Look out for these ones —

1. The white, large bar with curved edges and an enveloping fragrance. This one belongs, most likely, to an artist or a serial killer with obsessive, compulsive tendencies. Their engines have pretty much the same engineering. Believers in perfection and a supreme sense of adamant fulfillment, they keep their soaps exactly like their lives — in a perpetual state of crouching readiness.
2. The semi mangled, funnily coloured bar with any smell. This is for the bachelor or the car salesman. Always in a hurry and in search of the next and the hopefully best. Their baths are filled with suspended inaction or absolute action resembling all sorts of things. Either way, the soap has aged prematurely because it has seen a lot too soon. The pressure is too much with little light at the end of the hallway.
3. The brick with hair on it, smelling like a monkey’s armpit. This one belongs to an executioner with a skin condition. There is hardly any time to wash one’s hands with the guillotine resting against the sink and the phone ringing its head off. And the weekly baths are tortures too, what with the soap having to be dragged across the corpus with a stubbornness that has to outfight its own. Bloody.
4. The diamond in disguise, sitting like a scented señorita with its 4Cs intact — curves, complexion, coolness and causticity. This one owns a diva. One whose evenings are spent usually in anticipation of the nocturnal gymnastics and polite pirouettes that will compose the wee hours before breakfast. Only the devil, the deep sea, irredeemable loneliness and bankruptcy can scare it. Nothing else.
5. The bottle, with liquid soap. A complete waste of time. Try to read the fingerprints on it. Else, declare war on all terms that sound like shower gel, body bubble, douche whatever, bath lotion, cleopatra’s potion or anything of the kind. Soaps are geometrical, solid, 3 dimensional and, quite like Charlie Chaplin, selfless in their zeal to provide clean experiences. They must not, ideally, be replaced by bottled up emotions masquerading as shower gels. Someone should gel the cat, it’s about time.

And before I experiment with closing this, let me tell you about the soap that bent over to pick up its owner. Suffice to say, it will never do that again.