Tissue is an issue

When my son-in-law conveyed through his wife, my daughter, that he needed hankies from India, I was a wee bit surprised. Was this stuff not available in New York where they stayed and which, I was visiting?

For me, however, packing two dozen hankies was no big deal as its cost, weight and the volume of space it occupied in my suitcase were almost nil. I was happy too that my damaad had, for the first time, placed a demand on me in 14 years after he married my daughter. This, I thought, could be set off against the dowry which anyhow he hadn’t sought.

The fact that he asked for hankies showed that this stuff, perhaps, was neither sold online nor offline. Then what do Americans do if they have to wipe their hands or face? I was intrigued as I packed them in the suitcase. I found the answer after I landed in that mega metropolis – the Americans use paper napkins.

From kitchen to the toilet via the dining table, paper napkins rule the roost. Americans wipe their hands, faces and bottoms with paper napkins, also called tissues. And, in that process, they save millions of gallons of water. Clean minded people elsewhere may hold a hanky to their nose while sneezing but Americans sneeze into this soft tissue and wipe their nose with it.

It is not that this sprawling country is in dearth of water. Both, hot and cold water gushes out of the taps 24 by 7, save in a few desert areas. So, there are no sumps or overhead tanks or borewells in houses, to which we Indians are so accustomed. In the toilet, what the water does to an Indian is done by the paper to the American. Later, when the hands are washed clean – this time of course with water – it is the paper again that keeps the hands dry, and not the towel or the hankie.

Bulky statistics have been compiled about the thin tissue paper. According to the venerable NYT, the length of tissue paper used by America runs into 700 million km per year. Even as I was digesting this vital piece of statistics, Wikipedia confronted me with the news that each American used 23 kg of tissue paper every year which was 50 per cent more than the average of other Western countries. Surely, the Yankees love their tissues.

It is big business, too, with tree farms supplying timber for the production of this vital drying and cleaning tool. With one tree producing 45 kg of toilet paper and more than seven billion rolls of toilet paper sold every year in America alone, calculate the number of trees that are felled in the US to meet this need! So why do the Americans need  handkerchiefs, at all?  

But, my son-in-law needed them because he still had a use; after all he is  an Indian! Old habits die hard.