There are
times in everyone’s life ,even if they have been the side kick of Dawood Ibrahim all their lives ,when
Bhagawad Gita starts sounding true and one regrets not
having taken its teachings seriously ,
specially while inside the temples of consumerism called malls.
I have been
having these pre -enlightening moments every time we decide to shift house. In
last 8 years I have set up and wound up
house at 5 different places and
each time being in a different phase of life. Each time Hubby and I start up with
a delusional WOW , pretending to
be two great travel enthusiasts of NAT GEO willing to survive on a backpack , but as things start progressing we are reduced to two house holders, prisoners of
our own attachments to worldly things and trying to preserve the material
things of our house which would bring
even a Magpie to shame.
Once we decide to move ,for initial few days the conversations revolves around “ should we keep this or chuck this?” This phase of chucking things brings a great sense
of achievement .We throw expired
medicines, old magazines , clothes and shoes . These decisions are actually
easy to make as they are about the
things anyway out of use and are just lying
around for a long time as there was no urgency to make a decision.
There
are too many deliberations before
some decisions based on ground realities
whether to chuck , dispose ,sell or give
away certain things .We may have had some heated arguments prior to chucking
things but once we are
in full agreement about chucking
certain things and show them the door ,we are pleased as punch
to look at the cobwebs underneath them in the empty space they have created. After all ,it wasn’t a mere
material thing chucked ,it was a
victory over our tendency of attachment to material possessions.
The sight of dust and cobwebs never disappoint us. We gleefully hug each other after each small thing sent out of
the house. Out go his old study table and technical manuals and I hug him ; out go my
old magazines and physics books and he
hugs me back ; I remember so very distinctively that our most passionate hug
was when we threw away a bag
full of video cassettes .Yup ! the
video cassettes of movies we have always been planning to see together some day . The darned technology did not want to wait until we got
our leisure. Only one decade more and both kids would be in college ,we done with
changing jobs and places and then all we needed to do was buy chips ,curl up in bed and watch those
movies which we had selected so carefully.
On the hind sight we were
not throwing away our dream of togetherness , we were chucking only the store keeping job associated with it plus the possibility of chips being
replaced by metformin
cannot be hushed away.
A time came to
chuck a plethora of old mouses , a UPS
of our very first PC ,many wires and
USBs. We had contemplated very deeply
about giving the monitor and key board
away to someone who needed it but the search for the ‘right candidate’ has always been very difficult , ( you do not
agree? go ask Congress party).
We still
have our very co owned molded ,non wheeled suitcases which had travelled with us on our honeymoon and now leading a retired life housing old mosquito nets and bed sheets for two
decades . Once the honeymoon was over ,as an
integral part of our
household those suitcases for a long
time symbolized romance in our marriage
.Being on the loft, forgotten , catching dust yet still usable
and reachable .While we were paying school fees, EMIs and entertaining
ourselves with kids’ annual functions ,the romance was waylaid for attention dumped inside those suitcases. We are keeping
these suitcases till our last breath for
the sake of nostalgia ,this is one of
the rarest points of agreement we have
reached .
I found it
easy to give away usable stuff like kids’ blankets, old bicycles, school bags
,toys, CDs etc ,happy that some other kids would use it .But one has to be a real brave heart to throw
useless stuff . I have no definite answer to what to do with kid’s scrape books
,their school projects and few letters ,
containing sonorous sugary feelings, exchanged
between hubby and myself which
now both of us are apprehensive to revisit or even show to each other for the fear of them
sounding like election manifesto.
Mom consistently
added to this dilemma by every year knitting sweaters for her darling son- in -law
who never could find a job in a hill station . His oil career took him to
various sea shores and deserts and, with every job change I resignedly
buy copious quantities of moth balls to preserve her love knit in wool.
You think
from heart and allow to get yourself emotional ,take it from a veteran yours truly that you will end up carrying
even the plastic tubs and mugs and brushes
from your washroom but if you let Bhagwad Gita’s
philosophy of “ only soul transcends the body and material” rub off on you ,you would just float in the superior surreal state of trance and would tell yourself
that you can take only as much with you
in your suitcases and rest is the soft copy
in memory .
