The endless recycle

I’m writing this at 3.55am, having woken up about 45 minutes earlier thanks to jet lag. Just two days ago we flew home to Bangalore from Los Angeles — this time for good.

The journey, and indeed the last couple of weeks before we left, weren’t nearly as emotional as I expected, and it was because of stuff. The amount of it we had accumulated in just six years was dispiriting, even frightening.

And this after we molded our lives on the idea of not loading up too much from the material world. Even after a careful culling session that resulted in about 100 cubic feet of things making their way home on a ship across the ocean (we overtook our shipment six weeks later as we flew past Singapore), we seemed to have an entire house full.

Then the steady flow began, the stream of products heading out of our doors using various paths. There was the expected Craigslist of course, where we were able to sell our furniture. I posted to Freecycle, an e-mail group of people in the area to whom you could offer unwanted items,many of whom would respond in less than five minutes. I was able to give away stuff ranging from empty CD jewel cases to cardboard boxes and disassembled furniture.

Then there was Goodwill, the chain of stores that accepts donations of household goods and sells them at low prices. We dropped off so much at the nearest one, that on my second visit, the guy behind the counter blanched and asked how much I planned to carry in this time. When we needed large items taken away, such as our mattress and box spring, all we had to do was schedule a pick-up on the Salvation Army website.­­­

Method of madness

The most interesting avenue of post-consumer recycling though was the strange man from Durango, Mexico. He drove a dismal pick-up truck that was loaded many feet high with flattened cardboard boxes. His son Armando sat in the passenger seat, surrounded by an incredible array of things, which included several old toys that the little boy would pluck from the mess around him to play with.

The man (who just happened to be driving past our house) took all our old cardboard, paper, charcoal, rags and buckets. Even households without children have toys somewhere in a corner, so I was able to dig out a few things out to keep Armando occupied while his friendly but slightly eerie father loaded the truck, stopping now and then to talk to me about American foreign policy. (He was not a fan.)

I would have classified that truck as ‘full’ with even half the load, but the man managed to load everything on there. After I had a brief mock karate fight with Armando, and heard his father expound on how the US government would just kill you and your family if they didn’t like what you said, they got in and spluttered off down the road.

Back in India and faced with an empty flat again — this time one that’s to be a permanent home — I hope we never forget the lessons of the itinerant life and live as if we have to pack it all up again in the next six years.

It’s not the big stuff, it’s those little things — the knick-knacks, the unknown keys, the strange plastic bits, the torches and openers you never use... they seem to settle into all the gaps and just clog the flow in a way you don’t notice until you round them all up into a large bag and give them all away.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in India.