While discussing kitchen and bath drainage for one of the bungalows at Nasrapur, my clients wondered if ecologically safe soaps were available in India – this after I suggested we drain the water directly into a plant bed and possibly grow a nice papaya tree in it.

We spent vacations at my mum’s ancestral village when I was a kid and I remember being fascinated that, quite unlike at our city home, drain-pipes from the basin and bath just went out through the wall and pointed in the general direction of a bush. That was all there was to it. My uncle – a qualified agriculturist – who had a bungalow in Pune did pretty much the same thing but he grew small trees there. I once pointedly asked him if all the chemicals in soap wouldn’t do some long-term damage to his precious garden. He explained that phosphates and nitrates in soaps are considered bad because they promote the growth of algae which, in turn, choke water bodies by depleting the oxygen in them. But these same chemicals also promote the growth of plants so, no, there was no thing wrong with the old system.

And any of you who don’t want to chance it and would prefer to just dump it in the septic tank to be on the safe side – grey water is the last thing your septic tank needs because it considerably reduces the latter’s effectiveness by diluting the bacterial action that digests the waste. If you must send it underground, please put it directly into the soak-pit instead.