Mera Kuch Saamaan

I never thought I’d say this, but for once I'm glad dad’s not the kind of man to write love letters and give mom mushy, just-because cards from Hallmark.

As it is, the movers took a good eight hours to pack my humans’ possessions. If dad had written mom lengthy epistles over the years, she would’ve felt obliged to save every bit of paper he had given her, adding to the weight, volume, and more importantly, expense of their international shipment.

Such a farsighted person my mom married! Really, I wonder how other women cope with spouses who wear their heart on their sleeve.

“Make sure you supervise the packers carefully,” instructed grandma over the phone. “Tell them to wrap all fragile items in cloth so nothing breaks on the way.”

“Ma’am, I’ve been doing this for 41 years,” grunted the heavy-set man as mom watched him loosely wrap her kitchen items in white paper and stack them in a cardboard box. “You got insurance, right?” he asked, chewing on a toothpick.

As the three burly movers moved furniture around, long lost items were discovered under the sofas and behind consoles. Tufts of dog hair danced in circles on the floor, happy to be released from their dark corners. Hair clips, pens, marbles and coins fell out of the sectional, and a macaroni necklace caked in dust emerged from behind the television stand.

“Do you wrap the items in plastic?” asked mom, as she surveyed her precious belongings held together with brown paper and duct tape.

“Not for international moves,” explained one of the men. “Because of mildew.”

“But what if water seeps through?” asked mom, worried about her wedding saris that haven’t seen the light of day in a long time.

“The metal container’s waterproof, ma’am,” he said. “However, if your shipment falls into the ocean …” he trailed off, lifting his shoulders and rolling his eyes heavenward. “You got insurance, right?”

Later that night, dad walked into the house and carefully picked his way through the shapeless objects casting giant shadows on the bare walls.

“We’ve got too much stuff,” he frowned, surveying the cartons on the floor.

“Do we really need all this?” he wondered, conveniently overlooking the fact that 20 of the 25 boxes contained his college textbooks, back issues of National Geographic that he refuses to throw away and other random purchases he makes on amazon.com.

Whatever material objects the humans amassed in the last 12 years were loaded into a trailer the next morning, and mom watched the truck leave with a heavy heart.

“What am I doing?” she thought, not for the first time, as she turned back to an empty house, each room now large enough to conduct Bharatanatyam classes if she were a trained classical dancer.

See that empty corner over there? That’s where her reading chair used to be, the one she curled up in a few nights ago when the house was dark and the dishwasher hummed in the background.

That closet door was where her son had hung his basketball posters, right across from his bed; a bed that mom had hauled from the mall and spent an entire evening assembling.

Over there stood the carrot-colored sectional (she could never make up her mind if it was a red or an orange), and above it hung black and white prints of her children - mementoes all the more special because of the person behind the lens.

How many times had mom stubbed her toe on that wooden console that graced the corridor? Right here is where she had tripped over a Lego block when she was pregnant for the second time.

“When will we see our stuff again?” ask the children plaintively. Raised differently from their parents, they are unused to spending time without a television or a video console.

“You can play with your toys as soon as we find a home,” says mom reassuringly.

In the meantime, the bare walls echo her footsteps as she wanders through the house like Rekha in the last scene of Umrao Jaan - tears welling in her eyes and a thousand memories rising unbidden to her heart.