The things we hold on to
Last month, while looking for something on a high shelf, a carton fell on my foot. Fortunately it wasn’t very heavy. When I looked inside I found half a dozen photo albums. We had forgotten about them entirely. Much excitement ensued as we flipped through the photographs, a few of which were from the late 1940s. Some of the people in those photos are dressed in European clothes, hats and sticks including. Others are in Indian clothes, sherwanis, churidars and all. The ladies are all in saris. Some of those photos were taken in large halls that had animal heads on the wall. I am pretty certain that the photos weren’t taken at our house. My father was a civil servant and never lived in such a big house and there was no question of animal heads on walls.
These photos don’t have anyone from our family in them. They are all sorts of random people. I have no idea why my parents had stuck them into these albums. They probably knew them. But since neither of them is alive any longer there’s absolutely no chance of us ever finding out who these people are. Now we are wondering whether to keep these photos or discard them. What are the chances that we will look at them again? To what purpose? Old photos are not like old books that can be donated to libraries. They are very difficult to get rid of and even more difficult to hold on to.
When I mentioned the dilemma to a friend he said he had found a big steel trunk with fancy dress clothes in it. His was a minor branch of a big zamindar family in Bengal where the rich had adopted British customs more fully than elsewhere in India. The annual fancy dress dinner at the local community hall, known as the Club, was a symbol of social standing. My friend was very embarrassed that his ancestors had attended these gatherings dressed in such weird clothes, you know, like fakirs, pirates, rastafarians etc. Now he couldn’t decide what to do with them. To chuck or keep, that’s the question he declaimed like that Shakespearean character, Hamlet, I think, who said ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’
It turns out that people collect and leave behind the oddest of things. My father had a huge collection of pipes. My mother left behind bags of boiled sweets that she wasn’t supposed to eat. My uncle was a voracious reader of Tamil classical literature which only he could understand. The great economist K N Raj used to collect strange matrimonial advertisements.
I googled this tendency. It turns out that people have collected Coke cans, banana stickers, water bottle labels, Barbie dolls, traffic cones, erasers, back scratchers (which I too collect) and so on. The list is as unending as it is inexplicable. People seem to collect such a diverse range of things that you can’t help wondering if they are normal. Well, it seems not entirely.
However, I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I’m no slouch at collecting and hoarding. I hoard T-shirts and shorts because online sellers offer such marvellous deals. I also have a nice collection of shoes, sandals and chappals even though most don’t fit, bought in an online bargain.
Hoarding apparently is different from collecting. Those who hoard are driven by different impulses. There are many explanations from psychology for this urge to collect. The one I prefer is brain defect. An entry in Wikipedia says “There are also cases where other brain damage distributed throughout the right and left hemispheres was believed to cause hoarding behavior.” Now I know why I collect.
