Not long after my father’s death, my mother packed up all the basic necessities and moved to a different city to be with my sister and start anew. And I was left with boxes—eleven of them. They were everywhere, leaning against tables, crouching under sofas as if the furniture in my house had grown its own luggage and planned to walk out on me the minute I turned away.
I ignored them until one dreary afternoon, I was down with a nasty cold. I decided to put some water on the stove, stir in jaggery, pepper, dry ginger, and tulsi leaves, and while it simmered, assembled the many boxes from across the rooms to try and piece together a life. Unless you try to sort through a person’s lifelong belongings, you have no idea how we depend on material things to make sense of the world and our place in it.
Starting first with the box I was looking forward to opening the most was my way of not putting this whole project off any longer. Out came elephants, ducks, rabbits, and all sorts of animals, small, sturdy, and stout. These were export rejects with minor flaws that came from my father’s long stint at the export-import company in Ballard Estate (Mumbai). By the time I was halfway through this box, obsessing over the cyclical nature of life and belongings, the peppery aroma of the chukku kaapi slowly wafted in.
The brass cat is small yet heavy in my hands and needs polishing. When my father bought her home, I am sure he did not envision that his little daughter would grow up to become a crazy cat lady. From one of the many photo albums vying for my attention in the cardboard boxes, I find a photograph of my father busy at work. He’s on the phone, his expression perplexed. Was a shipment missing? Was something wrong back at home? I notice the chickenpox marks dotting his face. Could it be my mother on the phone telling him he had passed them to me? Or was it the other way around? These details will come through if I concentrate and spin the dial through static noises enough times till I reach the correct frequency. But it is difficult, this act of sitting and sorting. There is the constant swinging between the backstory of an object and its unwritten fate. And worst of all, that I am the judge.
I manoeuvre the photograph into an empty frame. Funnily, what I remember of my father’s office is also the boxes. I remember being perched on top of container boxes one time, when he took me to the office so that I could see Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla. The movie Ishq (1997) was being shot. I relive the secondhand embarrassment as I remember the film maker’s outburst at Juhi when her slipper broke, causing repeated retakes of the same scene. This story was then offered as a warning to every friend who aspired to be an actress. There were many.
A single item has the power to summon stories that lay in the very dregs of my mind. Is our attachment to material objects a reflection of deeper emotional needs or a symptom of a consumer-driven society? For me, this keepor- throw exercise was mostly based on emotional value and taught me the role of sustainability as a necessary filter while preserving memories and meaning. It also made me anxious about the future. What will happen to these flawed animals and these photographs whose stories now begin and end with me? Decades from now, when someone holds this brass cat, would it feel lighter? Will they find it tacky and ship it to a recycling unit?
The other animals get hired as bookends. I make it a point to keep the birds together. Every time I look at them, I remember my father‘s favourite story about being a newlywed. This is perhaps the last time anyone is going to narrate it. On their wedding night, my father asked my mother what he thought was a romantic question: If she could be reborn in another lifetime, who would she want to be? My mother, all of eighteen, replied, “I want to come back as a parrot, to be free and fly.” To a third person, does it sound like a cliche? Having known my mother only as ‘mother’, this story is the most original thing I have ever heard. This story, for me, is a prologue. I pluck their wedding album from one of the boxes. So young and so full of hope that it feels wrong that I know how their story ends. Who were these people before they got together, built a home, and brought all this stuff?
I play a song that I have been avoiding since my father’s death as I get to the third box. These are just drawers emptied out—tablets, breathing exercise balls, unused medical gloves and his dialysis diary, where he used to input his water intake. Everything plastic slides into a trash bag to be recycled. Next to the book, I find the pencil box that I got my father from when I visited Shantiniketan because I didn’t know what else to get a man whose life was a relay from hospital to home. I reinvented its identity and told my father it was an insulin box. When I opened it, I found an old needle and two lozenges that hadn’t expired. I pop one and bawl like it’s the first day of kindergarten, and I am not sure if my parents will come back to collect me.
The box can now live as destined and become my pencil box. What story do these objects really tell? Can you piece together how caring my father was? I still haven’t even mentioned his sense of humour, have I? The last thing in the third box is his old phone. It looks beyond repair, but I scrambled through my wires to find that my Kindle charger was a perfect fit. I think of all the lifeless old phones that lie in the darkness of drawers and cupboards because we haven’t learnt to let go. How, then, can sentimentality coexist harmoniously with sustainability?
The chukku kaapi had now been reduced to a third, a lot stronger than it should have been. I rinse one of Achan’s flasks. Like the Egyptians often buried their objects with them, if my father had to choose three things to take along into his afterlife, I am sure his flask would be one of them. By the time he died, he had an entire collection of flasks—for longer hospital stays, for quick visits, and separate ones for water and tea. I picked the smallest, which is also the last thing I ever gifted my father, two months before he passed away. By then, he was allowed to drink only 750ml of water a day. It reminded me of Russian poet & novelist Maria Stepanova’s words: ‘All these objects were inextricably bound together, everything had its meaning only in the whole, in the accumulation, within the frame of a continuing life.’
The fourth box has clothes. These shirts had spent their lifetime being lovingly ironed but now carry the marks of time’s folds. I put aside a couple of FabIndia kurtas that could be donated. It is then that I remember how, after my very young aunt’s funeral, her husband came up to me and told me that I could now inherit all her clothes and how that made me slide out of the bustling room to the nearest bathroom. There is no word for the strangeness you experience when you confront the clothes of the dearly departed. He was here breathing the same air, rocking on this recliner where I have now piled up his clothes. I held up a blue checked shirt and remembered how he would always carry a pen in his pocket. I wonder why men don’t do that these days. Maybe I’ll remove the pockets of all these weary shirts and stitch just the pockets together and get that framed. Would that be art, or would that be scrap?
Today, I am 33 years and 11 boxes old. Today, I realise why it’s so important to talk about sustainability when talking about belongings. Ever since these boxes have made it to my home, I compulsively imagine the afterlife of what I buy. How do we escape the haunting reality of our throwaway culture? What are our thoughts when we add something to our cart? When do we own it? Are we thinking of its lifespan? Or ours?
I sit on the floor and watch the room darken. A few minutes and many memories later, the light from the table flashes the room to life. The phone has been switched on. The last item in the gallery is a video that was meant to be a selfie, which I had never seen before. In the four-second footage, Achan has positioned his camera low, which is the familiar angle characteristic of dad photographs, before he bursts into laughter. The hahaha reverberates through my house, which is now a museum of his belongings. I look up at the recliner, the door, and the stairs just to double-check. Yes, I am all alone.
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