Mrs. Pi is an environmentalist. She stopped using the capsule coffee machine for the sake of the planet, buys laundry soap in bars to avoid wasting water, and tries to get her children to wash their hair with an eco-friendly soap she buys at a bulk store. Her children tell her they shouldn't put that on their heads. She plans strategies. She takes the half-full bottles and hides them. "He won't see the half-full bottle anymore!" she laughs devilishly inside. She doesn't use spray deodorant; she prefers the roll-on one, although she's not sure which leaves a bigger carbon footprint, and that makes her suffer.
But there's one specific day in the summer when she doesn't care about the planet. Today. Today she opens the dishwasher door and loads it, filled with esma. Then she opens the cleaning products drawer (with the five bins for recycling the waste) and reaches into the bag of individual, eco-friendly soap capsules. Just like last year—she couldn't remember—she pulls it out with disgust. Because of the heat, the capsules have stuck together, and some have burst and are now like dead jellyfish. She pulls out her fingers covered in yellow paste. Impossible to eat a whole capsule without bursting three. She washes her hand, covered in environmentally friendly cleanser, and searches the same drawer for any of the other ones left, the hard, blue, and not at all eco-friendly ones. There it is, intact, trapezoidal, with a promising red heart in the middle, which must be a cleaning agent that kills fish.
Praise God, she tells herself. She places the blue capsule in the compartment, slams the dishwasher door shut, and—yes, that's right—sets the "Eco" program (which takes longer but uses less water). In winter, in the cold, when the eco-friendly capsules don't stick together, you'll be a planet-conscious person again.
