Open your almirah. That sharp, medicinal smell that hits you in the face is not something coming off the ball. It is the ball. In the air, in your kurtas, in your lungs.
Naphthalene does not melt and it does not drip. It goes from solid straight to vapour at room temperature. That is the whole trick, and it is why the ball shrinks month after month and leaves nothing behind on the shelf paper. Nothing disappeared. It moved.
In a Patna May, with the room sitting at forty degrees from noon till nine at night, it moves fast. You put in eight balls before the summer. By July you have five. The other three are in your clothes.
What it is supposed to do
Naphthalene vapour repels clothes moths. At high enough concentration, held long enough, it kills the larvae. Both of those words matter. High enough. Held.
That means a sealed box. A jar, a taped trunk, a zipped bag with no gaps. The vapour has to build up and stay built up for weeks. That is the condition under which a mothball does its job.
Your almirah is not a sealed box
You open it every morning to pull out a shirt. Your mother opens it at noon looking for a towel. There is a gap at the hinge and a gap under the door, and the whole thing sits in a room where the fan runs all night.
Every time the door swings, the vapour walks out. The concentration inside never gets anywhere near what a moth would care about. So the ball keeps evaporating, you keep smelling it, you keep believing it is working, and it is doing almost nothing to insects.
What it does reach is the cloth. Cotton absorbs the vapour. Any hair oil or sweat residue left in a collar absorbs it harder, because naphthalene loves grease.
The moth is not your enemy here
Clothes moth larvae eat keratin. Wool, silk, pashmina. Count the woollen things in your house. A few sweaters, a shawl, maybe a blazer. They live in a trunk for eight months a year and nobody touches them.
Now count the things going bad in your almirah in August. The kurta with grey spots along the fold. The sheet that smells sour before you have used it. The bag with white bloom on the strap. That is mould, and it is there because Patna air sits at eighty percent humidity for four months.
Naphthalene does not touch mould. It has no effect on fungus at all. Silverfish, the little grey ones that shoot out when you lift a pile, eat starch and paper and glue. Naphthalene barely bothers them either.
So you have a chemical fighting an insect you mostly do not have, while the thing actually eating your clothes carries on.
Why the good kurta smells like a hospital
You keep the wedding kurta at the back, the one you wear twice a year. It sits closest to the balls and gets aired the least. Two years in there and the smell is not on the cloth, it is in the fibre.
One wash will not clear it. Wash it in warm water with a normal dose of detergent, rinse it twice, and then hang it in moving air for a full day, in shade. Air does more than soap here. For plain cotton, an hour of direct sun helps. For silk or a zari border, keep it out of the sun and give it two days in the breeze instead. Expect to repeat the wash once.
Do not iron it before the smell is gone. Heat drives the vapour deeper.
The shelf with the baby clothes
This is the part worth taking seriously. Naphthalene absorbed through skin or breathed in can break down red blood cells. In an infant that shows up as anaemia and jaundice, and the risk is much higher in a child with G6PD deficiency, which is not rare in this part of the country.
Vests and nappies stored in a naphthalene almirah carry the stuff against a baby's skin all day. Keep every baby item on a separate shelf, in a separate cupboard if you have one, with nothing chemical near it. Wash and sun anything that has been sitting in there before it goes near your child.
What actually protects clothes in Patna
Store them clean. Insects come for sweat, food, hair oil, not for cotton. A kurta worn once and hung back looks fine and smells fine to you, and it is the one that gets eaten.
Store them dry. Not almost dry. If a shirt goes into the almirah with damp in the seams, it seeds the whole shelf.
Use cotton bags for the good clothes, never polythene. Polythene traps the moisture that is already in the cloth and holds it against the fabric for months.
Open the almirah wide on a dry day and let the sun into the room. Two hours of that in October does more than a year of balls.
Keep a few silica gel packets on each shelf, the ones that come with shoes and electronics. Dry them in the sun for an hour every month and they work again.
For the wool going into the trunk in March, wash it, dry it hard, seal the trunk properly, and then a repellent has a real chance because the box is closed. That is the one place these things belong.
Everywhere else, you are perfuming your clothes with a chemical and calling it protection.