The monsoon is gone. The grass at Gandhi Maidan is short and green again, and the Sunday matches are back. From now till March, someone in your house will come home every week with a red smear down one thigh and two green knees.
The red smear is the ball.
Every bowler in Patna shines it on the same spot, over after over. By the time the match ends, that patch of white has been rubbed a few hundred times. Then the trousers go into the kit bag, the kit bag goes into the corner, and on Wednesday someone finds them.
By Wednesday the stain is set. Let's get to it on Sunday.
What the red streak actually is
A leather cricket ball is dyed red and then finished with polish and grease so it holds a shine. Every rub moves a little of that outer layer onto your trousers. Dye, wax, grease, and your own sweat, pressed into the weave a few hundred times.
So it is a grease stain with colour in it. That matters, because it tells you what will fail.
Plain water fails. Water slides right off grease.
A scoop of detergent in a bucket fails too. It loosens the dye before it breaks the grease, so the streak spreads into a wide pink cloud. You have seen that pink. It is what happens when you skip the first two steps.
The order that works
Do this the same evening. Ten minutes.
Scrape it dry. Lay the trousers flat. Take a blunt butter knife and scrape along the streak. You will lift off a surprising amount of waxy red residue. Do not wet anything yet.
Break the grease. Turn the trousers inside out. Put a few drops of dishwashing liquid, the same Vim or Pril by your kitchen sink, on the back of the stain. Work it in with your thumb. Leave it for ten minutes. Dishwashing liquid exists to dissolve grease, and that is exactly the job.
Rinse cold, from the back. Run cold tap water through the cloth from the inside out. You are pushing the stain back the way it came in, not through the whole thickness of the fabric.
Lift the colour. If a pink shadow is still there, dab it with rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball. Hand sanitiser works too. It is mostly alcohol. Blot, do not rub. Try it first on the inside of the hem to make sure the cloth takes it.
Now the trousers can go in the wash.
The green knees
You dive at short leg. You slide into the crease. The grass pays you back.
A grass stain is plant sap: chlorophyll, which behaves like a dye, plus plant proteins. Heat sets both. So the first rule is simple. No hot water. Not in the soak, not in the wash, not from the iron.
Mix a little liquid detergent into a paste with a few drops of water and spread it over the knees. Most liquid detergents sold in India list enzymes on the pack. Enzymes break down protein, and that is what you want here. Leave it for twenty minutes.
Then soak the trousers for an hour in lukewarm water with an oxygen bleach powder. The chemical name is sodium percarbonate. It is sold in Patna as a stain remover or whitener, usually in a tub, at most general stores in Boring Road and Rajendra Nagar. It releases oxygen in water and lifts the green out without eating the cloth.
The mud comes off dry
Patna's soil is fine Ganga silt. When it is wet, it is a paste that works into every gap in the weave. When it is dry, it is dust.
So let the mud dry completely. Then brush it off with a dry, stiff brush, outdoors. Most of it falls away. Only then does the cloth get wet.
Rub wet mud and you push silt deep into the fibres, where it sits as a grey shadow for the rest of the season.
Put the bleach bottle down
Most cricket whites sold today are polyester or a polyester blend. Check the label.
Chlorine bleach turns polyester yellow. Not right away. Slowly, wash after wash, until your whites are the colour of milky chai and you cannot work out why. That old pair at the back of your almirah with the cream tint got that way from bleach.
Use oxygen bleach. Leave the chlorine for the bathroom floor.
The kit bag is part of the problem
A kit bag after a match holds wet trousers, a sweaty shirt, damp socks and pads, all zipped in together. In October Patna is still warm. That bag is a closed, humid box, and every hour the trousers sit in it, the stains settle deeper and the smell grows.
Empty it the moment you get home. Pads and gloves go on a chair by the window to air out. Clothes go straight into treatment. Leave the bag open overnight.
This is the one habit that decides everything else. A streak treated on Sunday night comes out. The same streak on Wednesday is a fight. By the next Sunday it belongs to the trousers.
If Sunday night is for sleeping
A full day in the field is tiring. Some weeks, scraping a stain with a butter knife at ten at night is not happening.
Then put the whites in a separate bag and tell the DoorWash pickup person it is cricket kit. We treat the streak and the knees before the wash, keep them out of hot water, and keep chlorine away from them. They come back white and folded, ready for next Sunday.
Either way, deal with the trousers the day you play. That is what keeps them white.