Boxes In Waiting

When 'Keep, Don't Throw' is your mantra. Because today will be another Sunday with house-cleaning possibilities that I will ignore. First written with friends in the Ochre Sky community.

Photo by viswaprem anbarasapandian on Unsplash

Mumbai 2009. We had moved on rent into our first big, three-bedroom apartment just around a year back. Now, my daughter had a room of her own and I had filled it with much love. Plus, a beanbag and a child’s cot and a brightly painted bookshelf. My parents-in-law were ensconced in their room with a small cassette player on one shelf of the cane clothes-rack that my husband and I had designed ourselves a few years ago, on the lines of the wooden aalna that is an integral part of traditional Bengali bedrooms. From sarees and kurtas to bed sheets and towels and pillowcases - everything could be draped there, and there was always room for more. For the first time, I had kept potted plants on the windowsill in the living room and in the afternoons, pigeons would come and drink water from the dishes under the pots. This would create tiny ripples in the water and throw gentle, dancing shadows on the windowpanes. The flat was on the second floor, at the height of the streetlamps outside and at nights, after lights-out, the streetlamps cast their soft, yellow light into the flat, keeping it from total darkness. In the monsoons, the lamps would catch the raindrops in their light before letting them fall to the ground to add to the slick and shine of the street below.

Late one night, my husband said he had something not-so-nice to tell me. My heart skipped a beat as I feared first for his health and then for his job. But it was neither. He was saying that we needed to move out of the flat ASAP as the house-owner wanted to take back possession of the flat. That set a ball rolling that just wouldn’t stop for the next five years or so. We moved to one rented apartment after another in quick succession, living in numerous lanes in Bandra, Khar and Santacruz, vacating our flat every time the owners needed their homes back. Once, it was because the building was not waterproofed, and the roof threatened to fall on our heads.

Anyway, the point is that every time we moved, I stuffed things into boxes that remained unpacked in the new house. Cardboard boxes. Many things, many boxes. Things that we did not need but could not discard. Baby clothes - tiny white linen dresses with the prettiest cotton lace at the hems. Books. More books. Old Bengali magazines. Toys broken beyond repair but oh, what wonderful memories! A little, brown puppy that you wound up to make it do somersaults. A hamster that was forever trapped in a transparent, plastic ball and looked dazed when you rolled the ball along the floor. Genius drawings made by my daughter’s friend in Grade II. Old greeting cards. Scrapbook projects made for school. Woollens from another time and place - hats and mufflers, cardigans and shawls. And my wedding trousseau, most of which remains unused till date, more than twenty-seven years later. Sarees that were too grand to fit my ordinary life. I did make dresses out of some of the sarees, but many of them remain buried in my boxes. (Even as I write this, I duck the punches from my saree-loving readers!) Every time we moved houses, my boxes grew in number till there were more than thirty of them. But please don't tell Marie Kondo! And although we have spent the last ten years or so in one flat, my boxes are still packed away behind doors, stacked up bang in the middle of the dining area, or in tiny lofts above the bathrooms.

And how they possess me now! With one voice, they ask: WHEN? When will I set them free? When will they have their day in the sun? When will I release them from cord and sticky tape? When will I tend to them again and show their treasures off to the family? Soon I tell them, soon! Silently, they wait.