She tells you on a Tuesday, at the door, hands still wet.
Ghar jaana hai bhaiya. Chhath hai. Aathvein ko nikal jaayenge, bees tarikh tak aa jaayenge.
You say theek hai, because there is nothing else to say. Then she goes down the stairs and you start counting.
Twelve days. Fourteen if the train back is full.
They are the worst twelve days of the year for a Patna house to be without the person who washes its clothes.
Look at what is stacked inside those two weeks
Durga Puja. Diwali. Chhath, four days behind Diwali. Three festivals inside four weeks, and the laundry from all three lands in one gap.
Think about the actual cloth.
The Puja clothes come home from the Dak Bungalow pandals at one in the morning carrying crowd sweat, generator smoke and somebody's chow mein. New kurtas get worn three nights running, because they are new.
Then the guests. Your chachi's family arrives from Muzaffarpur and sleeps in the drawing room for six nights. Four extra bedsheets. Six towels. The light dohars that have been shut in a trunk since February and smell like it.
Then Chhath, which is a cleaning festival before it is anything else. The house gets scrubbed top to bottom. The curtains come down. Everything near the prasad has to be clean in a way that is not up for discussion in a Bihari house. Nobody in your family will let that slide because the help is away.
And the weather has turned by then. Mid-November in Patna, the sun is behind haze by four and the mornings are damp. A pair of jeans takes two days on the line. A bedsheet needs one full clear day, and you will not get many of those.
The pile grows on the worst possible schedule.
She is not going to skip Chhath. Don't ask her to.
Her mother keeps the fast, or she keeps it herself. She stands in the water at Chhapra or Hajipur at sunrise with her whole family around her, the way she has every year of her life. The ticket was booked in August. If the train is full she will go standing, or catch a bus from Bairiya at midnight.
This is the fixed point in her year. Everything else moves around it.
Pay her the full month before she leaves, and don't negotiate it. Then go solve your own problem, which is real and which is yours.
Three things people try in November
Doing it yourself. Sunday morning, bucket out, sleeves up. Fine for one Sunday. Twelve days of two adults' clothes plus guest bedding is not a Sunday. It is roughly four hours a day of soaking, scrubbing, wringing, hanging, bringing in and folding. You have a job. You also have relatives sitting in the drawing room watching you do it.
Letting it wait. The heap goes behind the bathroom door and you tell yourself she will handle it on the twenty-first. Two weeks of festival clothes sealed in a heap in Patna humidity is how a silk kurta picks up a smell that never leaves and how a sweat-soaked collar sets for good. And she is one person. She cannot do fourteen days in one morning.
Sending it to the press-wallah. He irons beautifully. He does not wash. You still have the washing.
Decide it in September, not on the eighth of November
This is a scheduling problem. Solve it early, like one.
Ask her this week when she leaves and when she is back. Write both dates on the fridge. She already knows them. Every didi in Patna already knows them.
Then split the work into three piles.
The festival outfits. Get them washed and pressed before Puja, not after. The good silk, the zari saree, the kurta for Dhanteras. Send those out in the first half of October while the city is still calm and turnaround is fast.
The guest bedding. Sheets, pillow covers, the dohars from the trunk. Send them a week before the relatives land, not the night they land.
The daily stuff. Shirts, trousers, towels, school uniforms. That load never stops, and that is the one you want on a fixed pickup right through the gap.
Book it before the last week of October. Every house in Kankarbagh, Rajendra Nagar and Boring Road hits the same two weeks without help, and most of them work this out on the first Monday of November. Be early.
DoorWash picks up from your door and brings it back washed, dried properly and folded. That is the whole service. In those two weeks, it means your evenings stay yours.
What you are really buying
Clean clothes are the small part. You would get those eventually, in some tired December form.
The bigger thing is the festival itself. You get to stand on the terrace on Diwali night instead of wringing out a bedsheet. You get to walk to the ghat at four in the morning with your family, watch the sun come up over the water, come home and sleep.
And when she walks back in on the twentieth, tired off the train and rested from home, she finds a house that ran without her. Not a mountain waiting for her.
Ask her the dates this week.