A drawer dilemma
Two months ago, my 98-year-old mother passed away. She was occupying the only bedroom on the ground floor. That was fine except that as I age and become less steady on my feet, going up and down about 25 times a day is steadily increasing the probability of a fall. So last month I decided to renovate my mother’s old bedroom in order to move downstairs. But alas! Life is never so simple. After every detail has been examined and agreed upon between my wife and me, a major policy problem has arisen in my life. It is whether I should ask the carpenter to build drawers in my new cupboard or not. My wife says yes. I say no. My son, usually a very good-natured fellow, says don’t bother me with this trivia.
So, the drawer problem has become as intractable as the Kashmir problem. It’s a classic case of on the one hand, and one the other. All arguments for and against are equally valid. What, you may ask, do you have against drawers? A lot, actually, thank you very much. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, a huge nuisance. Let me list below the number of ways in which they can be massively irritating.
To begin with, there’s the number. How many drawers should the cupboard have? The range is from one to six. Then the question: how big? What depth? What length? We have all sorts of drawers. Some are deep but not long. Some are long but not deep. Many are small, just three inches by five. There’s even a set that is two feet long and 10 inches deep. It’s completely useless but made of rosewood. For some reason my father got it made about 70 years ago. My mother told me it was only because he found some leftover rosewood in her father’s house. He hated to waste it. Whatever the reason, there it stands — heavy like me and, in my wife’s view, just as useless. Worse, like me, it’s not even ornamental.
Drawers in almirahs or chests of drawers pose another difficulty. They are very easy to pop things into but devilishly hard to get those things out. You also forget what they contain. The last time we did a cleanup about five years ago, we found cigarettes and lighters in almost a dozen drawers in different chests and cupboards in different rooms. My sons, I must say, were fair in that respect: no drawer left behind. They knew we hardly ever bothered to check these drawers. These awful things present another insurmountable problem when the handle breaks which happens from time to time. You can’t open them after that without seriously injuring your fingers.
In one set of drawers, we decided to put in-built handles. Those couldn’t break. But after some time, it became very hard to get a sufficiently hard grip on those indentations in the wood to pull the drawer out. Then there is also the problem of the drawers which get stuck either because the wood has expanded or because a piece of paper or something else is blocking it. We have three such drawers that have been impossible to open for almost five years. I shudder to think what my sons might have put in them.
In one chest of drawers a carpenter kindly installed rollers on rails. That was very helpful until we realised that in two of the six drawers, he had not fixed the rails properly. They were at a slight upward angle. Result: these two drawers always roll outwards a few inches. If you are not careful you can hurt yourself in sensitive places. So no thanks, no drawers for me.
