Old and New

So we shifted houses last week. Nothing great, we just came down to the 5th floor from the 7th in the same building. We've changed places 3-4 times, we've changed cities and even Countries. But shifting from the 7th to 5th floor has been the most challenging thing ever.

You tend to take it lightly. 'Cuz in the end, its just 2 floors down. So you leave everything till the last moment. Then suddenly the new occupants arrive out of the blue, with all their stuff and you need to move out asap; a week before you actually intended to move. Its CHAOS.

Between all this chaos while packing and moving, you come across these tit-bits that are of no use but you have this clingy feeling towards it. I hate this clingy-ness and this feeling of 'oh-what-if-I-need-this someday-and-don't-find-it"? And for some reason, i was not clingy to anything. After all if you don't get rid of the old stuff, there will be no place for the new. There was just one problem.

MY father. The king of Cling.

He was like Kreacher from Harry Potter. Everything that i would throw out he would somehow smuggle it back into the house stating some or the other use. From old wires ("What if I need it for the music system?"), to shirts ("This is pure Australian cotton, i can use it for yoga !!"), from books and magazines... 8kgs of them ("What do you think i'm going to do after I retire? Read these of course!"), to pen caps ("You always keep losing pen caps, keep them together and then you can replace these with the lost ones"), from crusty battered bags ("Ah! I'll keep the phone and electricity bills in these" ) to broken radios ("It's not broken. Wait I'll fix it.").

All this stuff did go, but not when he was around. (Don't tell him though).

The more he kept stuff, the more stuff I threw out. We opened our box bed, which we didn't touch, ever since we came to Mumbai 7 years ago. Boy oh boy kid we pack some junk! A Broken kid's accordion, a remote controlled car, my old video game, more and more and more books! Mountains of sarees, huge carpets and thick, knobbly, wooly blankets. After throwing out most of the stuff, I looked around and spotted the huge mound of blankets.

"These, have to go!", i said pointing at the blankets. "They take up space and you don't need them in Mumbai anyway."

Mom grabbed a bundle of soft pink blankets. "I'm not throwing these ones, they're very expensive and they're in a good condition."

Sensing the finality in her tone, I went for a set of revolting brown and orange blankets.

"And these? Throw these"

"These were given to us as a wedding gift, but I guess we can throw them away now" Mom said a little hesitantly.

The last two blankets will very thick, white, had some painted designs on them and were very heavy. So i dragged them out and said, "These are going. I've said it. Bas, Enough."

"You can't throw these", Mom said.

"In God's name, WHY?"

Pointing to dad she said,"Ask him".

"Because," Dad said in a wistful voice, "My mother made them for me with her own hands. She stuffed it with cotton and stitched it herself. And painting was so expensive back then but she still got it painted for us."

Mom was smirking at me. She knew all along. Cheeky.

Trying to act unabashed and to fill in the awkward silence, I start rummaging through whats left in the bed. I find a heavily chewed book (No, we did not own a dog when I was a kid, but we did have Rati, you'd never know the difference.)

It was called, "A book about Me!", a Dr. Suess book. After some time i find myself smiling away while reading that book. It was a fill-in-yourself kind of a book. I must have been 5 years old when i filled it. Some of the things I wrote we're quite funny. For instance,

* I wanted a pet dinosaur

*I was "11 centimeters" tall. (I wasn't 11 cms tall, I just wrote I was!)

*I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up (Now, that's news!)

*In the "draw a picture of yourself" part, i drew myself with blonde hair.

* In the ''how many teeth do you have? part" i wrote 12.

*Rati had colored all over the book, distinctly outside the margins... clearly indicating she had no future in the fine arts.

It's the memories that makes you all clingy and weird. We can associate everything and anything with some kind of a memory. And we find reasons for keeping stuff with us so that we are constantly reminded of what it was like. I have a knack of doing that. Who doesn't like to re-live old times? For instance, I have kept all the letters that people have ever written to me. I love reading them again and again. Looking at it on the flipside, if you just keep hanging on to these old memories you're not making room for the new and possibly better ones. The question is where do we stop? Where do we draw the line? The answer- you'll know. In time, i guess, we learn to move on. Life is all about moving forward isn't it?

So the book stayed so did my signed Old DPS uniform, my first DPS Blazer, my Wilson Primary School t-shirt and yes, so did the blanket. We brought everything down with a LOT of effort, re-assembled the bed and started putting things back. And then ... *CRACK* the bottom part of the box bed gave way and broke.
"Oh no! Of all the times it could break, it chooses to break now!" Mom exclaimed, fretting about the all the stuff that has no place to go.

"You remember we bought this bed when you joined DPS?" Dad said.

All I could say was, "Yay!! New bed!!".

Something had to go ;)