Obsession Part II

How I met your mother Season 4, Episode 4. Ted is about to get married to Stella and he’s shuttling all the time between New York and New Jersey to make time with friends, work on one hand and soon-to-be-family on the other. Stella assumes that Ted would move to New Jersey after they are married and this comes as a shock to Ted. He finds life out of New York pretty hard to imagine. Even so, he decides to move and almost packs. But at the last moment all the memories attached to the apartment come rushing to him and he decides to stay put. That’s how strong one can get attached to things.

Someone told me once that it is unhealthy to get attached to things, people so soon. I end up hurting myself in the process. It’s true, I get attached to leave alone, people, but silly objects to extreme proportions. My grandparents had what we would call a ‘varda’. It would lie in the corner of our old kitchen and Amma would store milk, etc in it. It had a neat net on its door, and they used this big nail to lock the door. I don’t remember what colour it used to be before my dad got it painted white when the house was renovated, but it used to be some ruddy old colour. IT had this amazing rustic look to it and I always treated it as a legacy from my grandma’s household days when they used to move every two years with Aaba’s job. I always assumed that the varda would always remain an integral part of our kitchen – and my kitchen later on. But they gave it away to someone and I was quite appalled. The same happened with the small cupboard where Aaba used to keep his Harde and Mulethi for me. He also used to have those Seven Seas tablets in there, which I’ve burst open many times. They gave that cupboard away too. I couldn’t say a thing.

While in engineering, a friend and I were crazy about Perk. He like it because it was endorsed by Preity Zinta, and I, because, it was a thing we could do. So we used to buy one double Perk every night and eat it, one half each. I ended up saving every wrapper, just for the sake of it, like I would save every other thing – bus tickets, movie tickets, train tickets, etc. I kept them till the end of college, of course when it was time to pack and wind up everything at Bangalore, I had to let go of them. But it’s not like they weren’t put to good use. On his birthday, I gave him Preity ZInta posters and inside them, I stuffed as many wrappers as I could manage. It just made for a memorable moment.

My books, my pen, my guitar, that old shirt that’s always been in my wardrobe, a note someone wrote for me, a letter i got like 10 years ago, a card saved from my 13th birthday – everything makes me eccentric and I am not very proud of it.

But this is what makes me ‘me’. Had I not been like this, I probably would never have made such amazing friends, or cherished fond memories of people and things alike. Of course I do end up making a fool of myself, more often than not. But I guess it comes with the package. So be it.