Its spring cleaning time! I quite enjoy the process, for it is a time of joyous discoveries and emotional reunions! Long-lost sock-twins hug each other tightly; while runaway buttons return to the family fold. That’s when I discovered it – a crumpled square of fabric, tucked right at the back of a drawer! It was a relic of my schooldays – a lost handkerchief.

Handkerchiefs (hankies, for short) existed in the days of yore when tissues had not been invented. Unlike the uniformly bland and anonymous tissues, hankies had personality. And individuality. They came in pastel hues and crisp whites; in floral prints and checks; and were machine or hand-embroidered. There were plain durable cottons for daily use, fine cambric ones for special occasions, and lace-edged dainties for very, very special ones!

The multi-tasking hanky

The hanky became a part of our lives from our first day at school. We arrived in the morning with our hankies pinned to the bosoms of our school uniform. And there they remained, safe and pristine, while we wiped our faces on our more accessible shirt sleeves!

As we stepped out of nursery, we were allowed to unpin the hankie and tuck it in the waistbands of our skirts. It was an important milestone, for easy access to the hanky unleashed our latent creativity. No square of fabric has ever multitasked as our hankies did! Here’s a very short list!

• wiping grubby hands, leaky noses, sweaty faces and copious tears – (in ascending order of growing up).
• cleaning the chalky blackboard when the duster disappeared, which was often.
• cleaning our shoes – which was not quite so often.
• blotting leaky fountain pens and creating permanent Rorschach-like patterns in royal blue ink.
• bandaging frequently-grazed knees and elbows.
• tying up errant braids which had thrown off the shackles of ribbons.
• pelting each other with make-believe snowballs aka balled up hankies
• blindfolds for Blindman’s buff – only the largest (usually a borrowed ‘gent’s hanky’) served this purpose.

We took our weekly wealth of 10-paise coins to school, tightly knotting it in our hankies and exchanged it for the forbidden sticky sweets and tangy pachaks sold outside the school gates. The coins and sweets are both gone – much like the lost handkerchief!

the magical memory aid

But beyond these menial tasks, the hanky wielded magic. We needed no wands, we had our hankies. Here’s how it worked. You took your hanky and twisted it between your nervous fingers, just so! Simultaneously, your lips silently uttered the secret incantation. Forgotten lines of Shakespeare, Sanskrit grammar and algebraic formulae would emerge from the deep recesses of your brain where they had disappeared! Of course, you had to do it exactly right. Tragically, the technique has been lost forever, along with the lost handkerchief!

short lives

Like Bo Peep, we lost our hankies and didn’t know where to find them. Most had escaped our clutches by the end of the day. Some lived on for a whole week despite the hard work. Occasionally one would last an entire month. We discussed their disappearance in hushed whispers in the school corridors. Rumour had it that the lost hankies were whisked away to the mysterious regions beyond the school backyard – to a land of lost souls and lost hankies.

The making of a hanky

Meanwhile, the school powers-that-be decided we would handle our hankies with greater respect if we had to sew our own. It was a delicate process. Crisp white cambric was meticulously measured, squared and cut. Our needlework mistress would exhort us to ‘pick up only two threads of the fabric’ to create the perfect near-invisible hem. Then, a cluster of lazy-daisy blooms, a crochet edging, and voila, the handkerchief was ready!

Once we had a matching set of seven, we could display our work at the year-end exhibition. Our boxed set stood beside knitted mufflers and scarves, tea-cosies and tray covers, pillowcases and sundry other articles which qualified us as being ‘convented’.  

Romancing the Hanky

In the long summer holidays, inspired by Victorian romances, we sought to recreate our own dainty squares. I learnt the beautiful art of tatting to create frothy lace-edged hankies in pastel hues of yellow, blue, lavender and pink. That was the easy part. What I never could master was the subtle art of using them as the heroines of the novels did. Dabbing delicately at the corners of one’s eye, for instance, or seductively wiping one’s lips. Such lessons were, rather sadly, omitted from our school curriculum. Similarly, they never did teach us the crafty technique of dropping a hankie for prince charming to pick up. Romance was, well and truly, dead!

The days of that lace-edged, embroidered, monogrammed token of feminine elegance are well and truly over. As I waved a sentimental farewell to the lost days and the lost handkerchief, my eyes misted over. I dabbed at them delicately – with a handy tissue.