The imminent arrival of my m for m....mother-in law spurned me to do some cleaning in the guest bedroom. Essentially my daughter had taken over the room and its cupboards. We planned that she would shift back into her room and that the things in the closet in the other room would be moved in here. In the process of shifting things I dusted the closet (found a fistful of dust that contained 90% talcum powder and 10% sundry particulate matter) pencil ends no longer that a couple of inches, broken crayons, sharpeners with rusted blades, leaking paint bottles, lots and lots of paper (which 100 12th class students could have used to take their HSC exams 200 times as my mother used to say) art work material, card board, marble paper and wrapping paper of various sizes except of the right size that could be put to any use, fancy hair pins with missing clasps, hairbands, Barbies minus their teeny weeny clothes, a thousand pair of Barbie shoes. I cleaned the closet and produced 20 bags for garbage disposal.
Next came the shoe rack. Out went 2 pairs sport shoes, 3 pairs of sandals (that were good but were not worn for 2 years) 3 bottles of dried white shoe polish, 2 tins of black polish that looked cruddy and occupied a bit of space, 3 nos socks (which formed the other half of a pair) This filled up 2 Bangalore Emporium plastic bags.
Then we trooped to the fridge- out went a dozen or so waatis drying-the-edges- waran small dabbas of 2 year old chutney, inumerable pastes, left over bhaat, ice trays and packets of salami that survived the ice-age.
There is some pleasure in simply hauling out things and chucking them out.
