In Defense of A Hoarder

By Jaya Chandrashekar

Siru thurumbum pal kutha udhavum! (Even a tiny stick can be useful to pick our teeth)

The above is a Tamil proverb which basically means that nothing is a waste, you can find a use for everything. But that philosophy has no place in today’s world. Marie Kondo is our spiritual guru who guides us to run a streamlined home. We embrace Fenshui and believe that cluttering your house, clutters your mind and leads to confusion and unhappiness. Everywhere I turn, I find people ruthlessly disposing off all manner of things. Goonj is as popular as Myntra, their respective packages nuzzling shoulder to shoulder in the hallway, one to come in and one to go out. People say with a great deal of pride about how they got rid of dozens of unworn dresses and sarees, gave away their 50 piece dinner set, cleared all the semi-precious jewellery and that it felt so good to see the empty shelves. I nod and agree when people talk about it, alternating between disbelief, panic and envy.

If it sounds like sour grapes, may be it is. I feel a misfit in this environment. I find it difficult to decide what I may need in future and what I can comfortably get rid of. To give an idea about how bad I am - I have 3 categories of clothes in my cupboard(s). Current lot, ones to wear when I lose weight, and ones that I bought when I weighed even more than now. One never knows!! I only recently got rid of letters and cards received all through childhood and teen years, a huge suitcase-full. Considering that we had lived like nomads, relocating to different parts of India every couple of years, this habit was rather alarming to others. Whenever my mother visited, I would inevitably have her opening cupboards and asking, ‘Do you even know what are in those boxes?’ My father in law, who lived with us would periodically say, ‘Why don’t you pay someone to take these things away?’ cackling at his own joke. It does not help that my husband is the world’s worst hoarder. Just when I’m toying with the idea of disposing off something, he would say, ‘yeah, you will give this away and then buy the same thing later paying three times the price’, squashing my tentative steps towards uncluttering!

I'm a hoarder but of a peculiar kind. To some extent, I can get rid of things that are well defined in their utility such as furniture, clothes, linen, books, kitchen stuff etc. It’s the undefined odds and ends that puts me in a dilemma. I have a huge cupboard filled with all manner of seemingly useless things. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I store them in such a way that I know which useless thing is where. Dia, my grand-daughter, loved the cupboard as a baby and would spend hours inside its open doors just gazing and fingering the items with much excitement.

But every once in a while something from that cupboard bails me out of a problem, making me feel justified and happy.

My pooja room is a verandah converted into a room. One side only has grills and curtains. The direction in which I’m supposed to keep the idols is in front of the curtain, which bellows and knocks down the idols and other puja stuff. Long standing problem which I periodically address without success. Today I googled and found a hack to stop curtains from flying- insert a metal chain inside the hem of the curtain. I knew exactly where I could find the chain. There was a box with metal dog leashes of old, not even sure how old. Took me just half an hour to execute it. Problem solved! Pleased as punch but I bet it sounds crazy and there are no takers for that approach.

By Jaya Chandrashekar