Spring cleaning was the only western culture habit my husband was excited about. When the kids were growing up, he would use positive reinforcement to join him in this annual task. He would make up two boxes and label them as “yay “and “nay” and they would fill it up with their own stuff. We would bring the “yay” box into the living room and discuss about the things we wanted to keep. But no matter how many years we did it, our storeroom was always filled with stuff. After our kids moved away, we slowly were forced out of habit. This year too we were reluctant until we decided to sell our house and move to a smaller space in the housing colony. Our daughter insists on us living near her.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in June; we decided to start after brunch. There isn’t much to do anyways once you are retired. The morning and evening strolls are the only scheduled activity in our lives. Like before we made two boxes and opened the storeroom. We started small with unimportant stuff like coffee mugs and home decor. We didn’t realize how much we had collected over the years until it was time to choose which ones we keep. Funnily it’s the same with acquaintances in our lives; we get to decide when it’s time to move on. Once we gained momentum, we moved onto clothes and shoes. Shortly after that, we decided it was too much for that day and planned to continue the next day. My husband hurried down to make tea. Just as I was tidying the remaining of the stuff lying around, something caught my eye. It was a book given to me by someone from my past and by given I mean returned. That is the answer to the obvious question why the book was in the storeroom instead of the five hundred capacity bookshelf in the living room.
When I was younger, there was someone I had been in forever in love with. I had poured my heart out to him and considered him the love of my life for a long time. But fate had other plans for us. The book in question was the book “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini. What the book was was unimportant, what was made of the book by me was important to me. When I read the book for the first time, I was not fulfilled. On my second read, I underlined the lines which reminded me of him. The irony is that the book is not even a typical love story but in my own delusional way I found love in unusual places. So when I underlined the lines, it was the highest form of love I could show my love for him. It was like a love note in the words of Khaled Hosseini. The words were not mine but the feeling were hundred percent mine. I dusted off the book, pulled a chair and sat down to flip through the pages. I smiled when I read the underlined lines – “Words were secret doorways” and “Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly”. It felt like reading the book the second time; I knew how it would end but I still chose to. Sometimes I wonder why we go back to the past over and over again. Maybe we miss the person associated with the past or maybe we miss the person we were at that point of time. Or maybe the past is a piece of us we can’t get rid of even if we want to, just like the prop roots in the Banyan tree. The roots start growing slowly when the tree matures and prevent it from falling down due to its massive size.
I gave the book to him on our fifth anniversary and the very next month he broke my heart and returned all my stuff, the book was one of them. In his life I wanted to be a hill station but instead I was just a cool evening for him. I opened the book to underline the lines– “The truth was a no. The lie was yes. I settled for something in between”. The day when he broke up with me, that was exactly how I felt. But I still kept going and underlined the lines – “It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place”. There was no point of taking the book in to our living room, I knew the ending anyways just like I knew the ending of the book. I read the last line and then tossed it into the “nay” box; I read his handwriting “please don’t” under the lines – “For you, a thousand times over”.