Room within my footprint

My mother doesn’t throw away a thing.

There is a calendar mounted in one corner of our storeroom, quietly hidden away behind a Godrej almirah. It dates back to 2020. Hidden away because the last time I had visited, I told her to remove it, but she probably couldn’t help herself. She has a kitchen shelf that houses hundreds of empty bottles that look 'good enough not to be thrown’. There are designated closet spaces for broken toys, cracked showpieces, alarm clocks that don’t work, globes without stands and the list goes on. Any object that has space to hold other objects, be it a vase, empty beds, display saucers etc., is dotted with old pillows, folded laundry, abandoned chalk pieces, paper clippings, curtain hooks, and whatnot.

My family gobbles pitchers of mitha doi (sweetened curd, a charm of the East you should definitely try) every few weeks, and these empty matkas are never thrown away because ‘we can do something with it’. I have found hair clips from when I was ten years old carefully tucked away in rusted, old boxes, catching wood dust because that drawer has probably never been opened in twenty years. I won’t lie, it is rather nice to occasionally come across some of these little treats from the past. It’s like getting a whiff of that one familiar smell that has been unknowingly lodged into my memory, on a random Thursday morning, in a random alley on my way to play catch with my friends for one last time.

But scents don’t take up space now, do they?

I think you'll back me up when I say that a core part of our Indianness comes from the shared experience of growing up in an absolute clutter. Maybe not as much as my parents' house, but I think you get the gist. I just have a feeling that even Nita Ambani has a drawer full of old polythene bags she reuses. A drawer that Anant might have otherwise liked to use, the poor deprived soul, had it not been for momma's endemism. Inherent environmentalists we are, sacrificing personal functionality for cultural practices since eternity. Most of us didn’t grow up in aesthetic houses, at least not in today’s standard of beige minimalism. Our houses looked like they've been thoroughly lived in, every corner a health hazard to a practicing Gen-Z.

Most of us probably have memories of dinning around a table with seventeen different containers of achars and biscuits and namkeens right there in the center, making eye contact and conversation a herculean task. I come home at a gap of six to seven months and swear to Plutus (googled it to fit my plot), I have found somethings in the exact same position that I have left them in. Mostly useless things, like outdated wedding invitations and old electricity bills, because of how reluctant my mother is to throw things away! You see, things last in one of two ways. You either take care of it or you leave it untouched. My house is a marvelous exhibition of both.

It is both a source of immense joy and immense pain to live in a space like this. A familiar world you can’t do without but one that can get a bit much at times. On one hand, I have access to sedimentary layers of life. On the other hand, I stub my toe or catch my sleeve on a totally unnecessary piece of furniture in an entirely unsuitable corner because ‘no space should go unused’ is the concept that runs in this house. I stand in stark contrast with my family’s interiors. Not unlike, how I feel alienated with most of life as we know it. I have specific conditions of physical living that need to be fulfilled for my sanity, especially now that I am at an oddly grown-up stage in the midst of self-conflicting twenties.

I am an extremely uptight organizer, and I cannot tolerate the weight of junk. At the same time, I cannot entirely erase my parent’s ancient pillars in order to carve my niche. After all, under their roof I am part of their world, not the other way around. I want to live in an optimal, spacious and functional house whereas they want to live in Sheldon's storage compartment. Asking them to adapt to my ways of living isn’t only tone deaf, it’s nearly South Delhi tone deaf. For, I realize that the habitual familiarity my parents hold in living amidst the chaos of possession is because that’s what feels like home to them. It doesn't matter if I am at odds with it. That's the life they created for themselves. However, I cannot go on feeling out of place in a house where I grew up in, no matter how little empty space actually remains in it. It is unfair that I should feel unrooted to a core source of my being, as if I have no place to ‘come back to’.

In our twenties, we don’t really have our own space in this world. Not just yet. We haven’t built our own homes (perhaps inherited for some) or lives in a manner that we’re fully content with. We’re living in other people’s world to an extent. We’re either living in hostel rooms, rented flats, parents’ houses, or PGs - not entirely on our own terms. We’re living so very temporarily; on a larger level, like life itself, don’t you think? We are stumbling around in this disorderly world that we haven’t yet made our own. So, does that mean ‘for the time being’ we should scrape by till we find our space on earth? Maybe. For many people, it works. However, I have outgrown the tolerance of scraping by, and I am sure I am not alone. We’ve been doing it for so long now, haven’t we? That’s when the genius in me understood the importance of having a room. The importance of this soil I stand on, within the boundary of my footprint.

An ownership that’s been integrated with each of our existence.

In our country where privacy has been a myth, I consider myself extremely lucky to have my own room. I believe not many of our peers can boast of this basic luxury, if not from an economic standpoint, rather a cultural one. The practices of locking one’s door, knocking, personal space and establishing boundaries is still surprisingly uncommon, especially towards the ‘children’ of households- a title we cannot escape just yet. Hence, most of us are basically doing life in a state of utter physical as well as mental clutter. We need to have the tiniest piece of space that we can live in entirely according to our own terms. As much as I agree with the concept that this space can be created inside our minds, I do want to emphasize that a private physical space is always a welcome aid to live like twenties aren’t an interruption to the life they can have, like an intermission till the main part of the movie plays.

Like my parents’ Sheldon’s storage compartment of a house, which I cannot clean off its stubborn junk, I have come to accept that I cannot escape most, if not all of the world’s quirks that I am vexed by-this staggering clutter of existence. So, it is much simpler and effective to create a corner for myself, similar to setting up an organized little room within a cramped household. I cannot avoid or ‘rise above’ all the ways of the world I am transiently passing by. Not in a totalitarian way at least. But within my peace of mind, I can lock myself away from flight delays, administrative hiccups, elephantine potholes or even reels claiming Deepika Padukone’s pregnancy is fake like I shut my bedroom door to shrewd relatives. Personal space is worth clawing towards at twenties itself for your own sake, your peace, your growth. And, for many many many of you, it can even be for something as basic as an uninterrupted session of your favorite porn, but who is judging really! Not your walls. Never your boundaries.