Losing it at home

You have probably glanced through and scoffed at dozens of surveys or messages that pop up from time to time on the internet or elsewhere, telling you how many hours or minutes or seconds the average human spends in various mundane tasks.

Like combing your hair, for instance — and at once the bald and beautiful smirk and add the hours they have saved to their kitty and think of something else they would like to do with them. Or you could be at the other end of the spectrum, saying in amazement, "What, only one year out of three score and ten is spent in searching for things that are misplaced? What kind of clockwork house is that?"

In an average family with a forgetful grandparent, a couple of careless youngsters, a harried housewife and a caustic commuter, it seems that at least a third of our waking hours are spent on various fruitless searches.

Grandfather is the one who starts it all. The entire household is geared to his routine, but he still manages to make the morning rush even more frenetic for everyone. Always anxious to be the first to get his hands on the newspaper, he neglects to make sure he is wearing the right spectacles and he needs his long distance glasses and his reading glasses, a magnifying glass for some of the smaller print, a red pen and a blue pen to highlight articles ... and he invariably sits down without one or the other.

The logical thing would be to keep it all beside grandfather's favourite chair so that the early morning scurrying and searching under pillows and beside stones in the rockery does not eat into the limited time at everyone's disposal, and being an uncommonly common-sense-controlled household, that is exactly what is done.

But grandfather has an answer to that. One day he'll be determined to go back to the newspapers of a week ago to check on the trail of evidence of a thrilling murder case; another day he'll want his diary to check whether his understanding of tax laws is the same as the columnist's he's reading; yet another day he'll want his book of specimens to check on an unusual shrub he's spied in a corner of the garden...

Everyone gets involved in the search, and that's how the rolling pin gets left behind the cushion on the sofa (no, there was no plan to brain the next person who hogged the most comfortable seat) and the sandwich wrapped in Ziploc finds its way to the window sill to be pecked apart by the crows or sparrows or an inquisitive squirrel that finds its way in while another sandwich is hastily made for ‘tiffin' time.

The careless youngsters, who join the search for whatever grandfather wants secretly hoping that they'll spend enough time in it to warrant a day off from college, leave a trail of their own — usually dirty clothes and books and bags.

Not to be outdone, the father figure misplaces his cell phone and has everyone calling his number just in case the ring tone emerges from that pile of dirty clothes waiting to go into the washing machine and not from the clothes already churning in murky water.

The more we own, the more we misplace or lose. That's why, perhaps, the term ‘losing it' is used so much in the clutter of an everyday home — it's either the specs or the pen or the cell phone or our escaping sanity that we're frantically searching for!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.