The things we bring back

What do we do to push start our memories of places visited? What souvenirs do we bring home to help transport ourselves back to those happy occasions as we flit past them a dozen times a day?

Some of us surreptitiously fill a little packet with sand from the river bank or the seashore or the desert and bring it home to add to a line of tiny bottles that stand on a tallboy with golden brown, silvery white, and other shades of earth!

Or we start rock collections, carting back pebbles from under an ancient Roman bridge in Spain or Istanbul or from the beach when we paddled in the waters of the Aegean or the Mediterranean. Once we’re home, the pebbles go into our bonsai pots or are neatly fitted into a mosaic on our centre table and for some time we can identify which ones were picked up from where until they all blend into one another and we cannot tell the difference.

Or maybe some of us are ceramic or mask collectors and we have to get that expensive plaque or the contrasting mask to complete the display on our walls, or we have bells from every temple city we have visited and now it is time to string them all up to catch the breeze ... We’re certainly not going to forget where each one came from — each tinkle, each peal, will be distinctive and tell us a different story!

For many of us, however, it is the fridge magnet that says it all. It screams out the place from where it came and converts what was once a mere piece of cold storage equipment into a colourful travel statement. Sometimes those decorative magnets are stuck on by the travellers themselves, sometimes they are presented by friends and relatives when they return from distant shores, and now they stand there almost like an invitation urging us to test those places ourselves.

My collection of fridge magnets started when our son went on his first trip abroad. Just one magnet was what I had asked for, mindful of his restricted amount of foreign exchange, but he brought back several. His next trip saw another couple — and suddenly the flood gates opened.

Adventures

I’m convinced there was something hidden in those colourful bits of ceramic and rubber and plastic — perhaps, the travel bug? — because soon I was off on my own adventures and the most important things I carried back were more fridge magnets. I find it impossible to pick just one in any souvenir shop I have visited, whether in our own Crawford Market or in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul or along the side streets of Macau.

Everywhere, I struggle not to walk away with entire collections, so enticing are they — and no matter how tightly I rein myself in, I still return laden. I tell myself I have brought them for my friends as well, but when the time comes to give them away, I balk at the thought, distribute trinkets and purses and fans, while the magnets stay with me.

Naturally, my fridge cannot hold them all, so they go onto the metal door and window frames, thereby creating problems for everyone. Reasonable instructions like ‘Watch your step’, ‘Be careful when you dust the windows’, soon turn to ridiculous ones: ‘Walk sideways through that doorway’, ‘Don’t breathe hard as you pass, the magnetism is wearing off ...’

Is it any wonder, then, that we find ourselves more at home when we are out of our home, really tension free only when we’re acquiring those same souvenirs that have us tiptoeing around once we’re back!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.