The Man Who Stopped Washing

Sixty years without a bath. That’s the number your brain keeps snagging on—not the animal dung he smokes instead of tobacco, not the campfire he uses to burn his hair instead of going to a barber, not the rusty barrel he drinks from somewhere in southern Iran. The sixty years is the thing.

Amou Haji is eighty years old. He lives outdoors. His skin is the color and texture of the earth around him, which by this point might amount to the same thing. He smokes a pipe filled with animal feces. He burns his own hair when it gets too long. In interviews—and yes, journalists have found him, because of course they have—he says he is a happy man. The photographs back this up. He doesn’t look tormented. He looks settled.

There’s a version of this story where Haji is a cautionary tale, and in a lot of countries he would have been institutionalized decades ago. But there’s another version where he’s just a man who decided, at some point, that cleanliness was not among his requirements for a life. That the things we consider baseline necessity—soap, hot water, a drain—are actually just agreements, and you can opt out if you’re willing to live with the consequences. He opted out. He has been living with the consequences for six decades and by his own account feels fine about it.

I’m not advocating. I showered this morning and I’ll shower tomorrow. But there’s something in Amou Haji’s face that makes the whole hygiene-industrial complex feel slightly less inevitable than it did before I looked at his picture.