Working to keep stride with the visibly floating population, I often wonder about my possessions. Possessions in terms of the old world furniture, the crockery, the umpteen number of upholstery sets and the small knick-knacks. Moving houses has always been the permanent change in my life. From my childhood to my days as a student in the US and now as a working professional, I have lived with certain things that I know not the reason for.
The value of these physical objects is recognized by the grazing look it gets as we tread past. The dust piled in the crevices, in those unreachable cleaning spots, describes its antiquity. The days we ogle at its long forgotten beauty is when we proudly present its presence to a guest. The other hundreds of days, it’s an object for cleaning. The physical weight and space occupied and the emotional weight and space occupied take precedence based on the mood of the day. The broken objects that stick on in the small places available in the bottom racks are only there because of the emotional weight that we cannot shake off. We wonder how we can NOT keep these things that have been with us for …hmmm, let me see… don’t know how many years. What happens if we just discard (the word throw is emotionally hurting) them. Will someone with lesser opportunities in life find it and make it a useable object in their life?
The money invested in visual temptation result in accruing physical object stack. The bonding will be created unconsciously by the money spent on it. This makes it unmovable and after a couple of years, unfashionable. It is neither an object of envy or one for Christie’s. The small ceramic figurines and plaques with happy b’day on it, the number of candle stands, the small idols of god; all gifts from ..ah..guess friends from school or belongs to my brother or ..the or’s could include all family members. The gifts from oblivion are in the stack too. These can be used by the archeological department to pick dust from fissures and practice their carbon dating techniques. The ancient gramophone cum radio is pretty sturdy and is now a stand in some relatives home.
The bags with upholstery sets remain enclosed as a prized possession. They remain wrapped in clean covers. Have seen the expensive silk ones powder after years of safe keeping in the hidden darkness of those totes. Not to mention my skirt from my kindergarten days, shoes that I loved, socks that are pretty, the cute container (so small that it sits prettily in my desk), the boxes of some curios, the beautiful plastic bags. If we remove the adjectives from these objects, it will possible be the reason of anguish.
The heirlooms are part of our tradition. The royalty of ancient years owned them to display power and culture, the lesser mortals then heralded it for some obvious public acknowledgement of association to power and now we keep it for emotional reasons we don’t question. We are just preserving our culture where we never discard useful things or rather things we inherit. No matter how often we use them or how many of them we have, or even if it’s broken.
I am not an ungrateful kid or grandkid that I don’t understand the value of possessions. But then…
1 comment:
Agree. U cant do away with it nor do you want it to eat up so much space in the tiny house. Forget Christie's, am not sure if even the Shivajinagar mozzies would buy it :(
Remember having to do this sad deed of giving away everything old when we first moved to Moodbidri due to lack of space, so much so that we had to give away books that my Grandpa authored. It helped that we did not know the man and we did not and do not know anything abt jainism(this was wat the old man wrote about).
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