It is forty-two degrees outside the civil court at Kachahri. You are standing in a white shirt, a black coat buttoned over it, and a white band at your throat. The date will take four minutes. You have been outside since ten.
Ask yourself one thing. When was that coat last cleaned?
Most advocates in Patna cannot answer. The shirt goes into the bucket every night. The band gets a rinse when it looks bad. The coat goes on a hook behind the door and waits for tomorrow. Some coats in this city have been worn for six years and cleaned twice.
The coat is a sponge with your name on it
A black coat is wool blend on the outside and polyester lining on the inside. Between them, in the chest and the shoulders, there is a stiff canvas layer that holds the shape. That sandwich is built to sit against a body.
Your sweat goes through the shirt and into the lining. The water leaves. The salt does not. Neither does the oil from your skin. Season after season, that builds up in a thin crust under the arms and across the upper back, and salt is not soft. It cuts cotton and polyester fibres slowly while the coat hangs in the dark doing nothing.
That is why linings split under the sleeve first. It looks like wear. It is chemistry.
The reason nobody cleans it
Because you have heard the stories. Somebody put a coat in a washing machine and it came out smaller. Somebody scrubbed one and the chest went wavy and never sat flat again.
Those stories are true. Wool shrinks in hot water and agitation. The canvas inside the chest buckles when it soaks and dries fast. The shoulder padding bunches into lumps you can see from across a room.
So the coat gets nothing at all. That is the worse choice. A coat cleaned properly twice a season lasts ten years. A coat that is never cleaned goes shiny at the elbows, stiff at the collar, and starts smelling of a person who is not you by the second summer.
The band tells on you
The band is two strips of white cotton sitting on a sweating neck for six hours a day. It is the smallest thing you wear and the most visible. From ten feet away, the judge, the clerk and your client all see it before they see your file.
White cotton against skin goes cream, then grey, in about three weeks of daily wear. Starch makes it worse. Starch is food, and it holds sweat in the weave instead of letting it rinse out, so a heavily starched band greys faster than a soft one.
Own three. Wear one, wash one, keep one folded flat in your bag. Wash them alone, not in a load with dark clothes, because a band picks up colour from everything. Fifty rupees of cotton is protecting a career you spent seven years building.
The almirah at eight in the evening
Here is the thing that kills coats in Patna, and it takes ten seconds.
You come home damp. You hang the coat inside the steel almirah and shut the door. Outside it is August and the air is at eighty percent humidity. Inside that shut almirah you have created a warm, still, wet box with a wool coat in it.
Two weeks later there is a grey bloom on the shoulders that brushes off and comes back. That is fungus, and once it is in the lining you cannot smell your way out of it.
Give the coat an hour on the back of a chair with a fan on it before it goes anywhere near the almirah. That one habit does more for a black coat than any product you can buy.
What actually works
Air it every single evening. Fan, chair, one hour, then hang it on a broad wooden hanger. Wire hangers put a dent in each shoulder that no press will remove.
Keep two coats if you appear regularly. Rotating them halves the wear on both and gives each one a full day to dry out. This is the single best money an advocate spends on clothes.
Brush the hem. Road grit from Bandar Bagicha and the walk from the parking sits in the bottom four inches and grinds the weave every time you sit down.
Dry clean it twice a year, and always once before the long break, never after. Storing a dirty coat for eight weeks is how you feed moths and fungus at the same time. Store it under cotton, not plastic. Plastic seals the moisture in and yellows the lining.
We pick it up
You cannot take a coat to be cleaned during court hours, and by evening the shop has pulled its shutter. So it never goes.
DoorWash collects from your door in Patna, dry cleans the coat properly, washes and presses the bands separately, and brings it back on a hanger. You do not miss a date. You do not carry a coat on a scooter in the rain.
Six years is a long time to wear something without ever cleaning it. Fix that this week.