You put it away in February. The week the mornings stopped biting, you folded the rajai, pushed it into the steel trunk under the bed, dropped four naphthalene balls on top and shut the lid. The sweaters went in with it. Done till December.
That was six months ago. Four of those months have been a Patna monsoon.
A closed trunk does not keep humidity out. It keeps it in.
Air moves through the gap under that lid. Slowly, but it moves. From late June to September the air in this city sits above 80 percent humidity for days at a stretch. It seeps into the trunk, the cotton and wool pull the water straight out of it, and then nothing takes it back out again. No sun in there. No breeze. No fan.
So the trunk works backwards. It lets damp in and traps it.
Open one in August and you smell it before you see anything. Flat, sour, a bit like old newspaper. People call that trunk smell, as if it comes with the trunk. It doesn't. It is mould, growing slowly on your quilt.
Mould needs roughly 70 percent humidity right at the surface of a fibre. Your trunk hands it that from mid-June onward. It grows in millimetres a week, silently, in the dark, along the fold lines where the cloth presses against itself. In February it was one spore. By Chhath it is a grey patch the size of your palm, and by then it has already eaten into the cotton.
You packed it away dirty
Nobody washes a rajai in February. It is cold, it is heavy, it takes a full day of sun to dry, and the cold is about to end anyway. So it goes in as it is.
Think about what is on it. Two months of you sleeping under it. Body oil off your arms and neck. Hair oil on the top edge, right where your chin sits, in a band you can usually see if you look. Sweat from the nights in Bihar's winter that were not actually that cold. Dead skin. All of it soaked into cotton and shut in a box for half a year.
That layer is food. Mould eats it. Silverfish eat it, and they especially like starch, so if anything in that trunk was starched before storage you set a table for them. The small ragged holes you find in a sweater in December were not made in December.
Naphthalene does nothing about any of this
Those white balls sublime into a vapour that insects avoid. That is the whole job. They are not a fungicide. They do not absorb water. Against mould they are useless.
They also do not last. In Patna heat a naphthalene ball is gone in six to eight weeks. You put them in around Holi. They finished in April. Every day of the monsoon since then, that trunk has had nothing in it at all except your clothes and the wet air.
Camphor is the same story, shorter. Neem leaves, shorter still.
The plastic bag is worse than the trunk
A lot of people wrap the rajai in a big polythene sheet or the zip cover the shop gave them, thinking it seals the moisture out. It seals the moisture in. Whatever water was in that cotton in February is still in there, with nowhere to go, sitting against the fibre in the dark at 35 degrees.
That is how you get the yellow-brown patches that were not there when you folded it. That is oxidised body oil and mildew, together, and they are hard to lift once they have had a summer to set.
What to do this week
Wait for a two-day break in the rain. Patna gives you one most weeks in August, usually right after a heavy night.
Open the trunk. Take everything out. Unfold the rajai completely and look along the creases, not the flat middle. Run your hand over it. Cold and slightly heavy means it has taken on water even if there is no visible mark.
Get it into moving air for four or five hours. A terrace line in the shade is better than direct noon sun for wool, which goes brittle and loses its stretch under Patna's May-to-September light. For a cotton rajai, two hours of real sun is fine and helps. Turn it over halfway.
If it smells even slightly sour, airing will not fix it. Sour means growth, and growth means it needs a proper wash with enough water to actually rinse out, then enough drying to go bone dry through the batting. A quilt in a home bucket does neither. It comes out three-quarters wet in the middle, it stays that way for two days in this weather, and you end up worse off than before. This is the honest reason people hand quilts and blankets to us instead of fighting them at home. It is not a small job.
Then put it back dry, in a cotton bedcover or an old cotton saree, not plastic. Cloth breathes. Add fresh naphthalene if you like, for the insects, and understand it is doing nothing else.
The real fix happens in February
Next time the cold breaks, wash it before you store it. Every time. A clean, fully dry rajai in a breathing cotton wrap survives a monsoon in a trunk without complaint. A dirty damp one does not.
Cold in Patna arrives about a week after Chhath and it arrives fast. You will want that quilt on a Tuesday night with no warning. Better to find out in August what is inside it than at eleven at night in December.