Our pre-Diwali cleaning
We mark different points of the year with festivals and commemorations. Our calendar is packed with them and there seems to be a competition between those red-letter dates and ordinary days. On some, we go berserk, and on others, we mourn. On Diwali, we celebrate. Some of us settle for what this festival’s tradition truly was — sharing and bringing light to our homes and neighbourhoods. More often than not, we send rockets whizzing in the air and burst crackers to scare off any and all animals and birds, that have never done us harm. We change air quality in our towns and then, cough, wheeze and complain in the days that follow. But before all this happens, we clean. And if we can, we clean with a vengeance.
Like many others, at home, we too are in the middle of the ritual called pre-Diwali cleaning. This is, supposedly the annual deep cleaning. Apart from getting rid of accumulated rubbish — though not in our minds and lives — this process is supposed to welcome good luck and wealth. This may well be true, as good luck and wealth disdain dirt. How one wishes that this was also true of the entire country, where rubbish does not spare high hilltops and once-pristine beaches. However, let’s leave that tirade for another time and come back to the innards of domestic cleaning. Just about everything in the house is being turned upside down and inside out. Our backs are also being bent. Moans, groans and topical analgesics accompany the aches and pains that follow. Surprises spring from unseen corners and dust hidden for weeks, if not months, shames us and our supposed housekeeping.
This time, one let ambition get the better of good sense and we entered the store. This is a place where things that cannot be thrown, but should have been tossed out as quickly as possible, accumulate over months and years. It is like a grand convention of uneaten leftovers gathering in the fridge or elsewhere, and where the question is, ‘should the item under question be thrown out now, or preserved for some weeks and only then be thrown?’
Led by yours truly, into the store went the cleaners. There were piles to the left of us and piles to the right of us. We stood, then stared. Then, overwhelmed by the task before us, exited and locked the door. A council of war took place. It was now or never. Back we went. Why did we keep that tricycle used ages ago by our sons? Or that old swing? Things that will never be used and the dust on them has smothered all traces of ‘sentimental value’. That is not to say that the store does not have many things that, for now, will not be thrown or given away.
Mustering courage that had more to do with the mind than what little brawn one possesses, I first took on the old chest of drawers. The top one is what I call my heart-break drawer. In this are bits of the past that have both roots and tentacles. It holds all the little things that I do not have in my heart to remove or banish. There is a pair of unfinished bright red gloves that my mother had started knitting for one of our sons and could not finish; illness and then death got in the way of clicking needles. There is my father’s shaving kit and his much-treasured Solingen cut-throat razor that I never saw him use. There are drawings made by the now-grown children. The same chest has a drawer which I may well call the ‘good effort’ compartment. This is beholden to the English language and is the embodiment of one of its most vacuous phrases, ‘good effort’, even ‘good attempt’. The phrase does not explain much. It does not pin down if something is actually good or bad, or terrible or excellent. All it says is that we do not want to say anything.
The ‘good effort’ drawer has various things. It has bits of embroidery once done by family members who were learning the fine art of the cross-stitch and left them at the stage of ‘good attempt’. Worse, that drawer was also packed with the presumption of writings that I had done in school, college and later. These, even to me, would fall in the category of ‘poor attempt’. Without further ado, these were collected and mercilessly tossed in the garbage bin.
The elephant in the store was not in those drawers. That was in the reams of paper. Old letters, documents and publications. That’s when the cleaning came to a standstill. Battle-hardened by the first skirmish, I opened one box of papers. That box has been taken out of the store and it is close to me as I type out this column. Some of what the box holds has come from friends and acquaintances of my parents. So far, I have read through the four issues of Harijan that was brought out by Gandhiji; these date back to 1940 and are in almost-pristine condition. There are sheets of Dawn, the paper started by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and I’ve just finished reading its wobbly argument written in 1947, of why Delhi should be the capital of Pakistan.
— The writer is an author based in Shimla
