Some time before the coronavirus kept us indoors, we began the onerous task of sorting out our files and papers.
Most of us dislike this work and some of us never get down to it. We feel that we can leave it to those who come after us to take everything out and burn it once we are gone, hopefully, without reading anything and getting an insight into our private memories and secrets.
Some of us, if we are practical and a little hard-hearted, have always tossed letters and invitations and greetings into the trash can once we have read them.
Could we just dump those boxes unopened into a bonfire? Could we blindly shred them and send them for recycling without going through them and figuring out why we had clung to them through three dozen years and two dozen houses?
But some of us, sentimental saps that we are, are loathe to get rid of paper evidence of goodwill and affection from our family and friends and others whose lives we have touched or who have touched our lives.
When we started out on this clearing-up exercise, it was very obvious to us in which category we were. We pulled out those files and boxes from the back of our cupboards and all kinds of paper memorabilia fell out onto us.
Letters, cards and telegrams
Suddenly, just as we had turned our backs on each other after a minor spat (as we tend to do at least a dozen of times a day), we found neatly boxed letters, cards and telegrams that greeted us on our wedding day, on the arrival of our son, and on other meaningful events in our lives — happy and sad.
We found letters and cards to each other, giving everyday details as well as landmark ones when our son first slept through the night, or took his first step, or aced his first test as an obedient little fellow in the early years of his schooling, or gave us grief when he decided that “being a nerd” was not to his taste and he barely scraped through his college exams…
Nothing brought us together like all those events at that time and now, suddenly, we were laughing over these papers together, minor — and major — arguments forgotten.
What’s more, since we had somehow become the repository of the memories of the previous generation as well, we unearthed letters, cards, articles and stories commemorating significant occasions in the lives of our parents and uncles and aunts, going back almost a century.
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Could we just dump those boxes unopened into a bonfire? Could we blindly shred them and send them for recycling without going through them and figuring out why we had clung to them through three dozen years and two dozen houses?
Of course not.
Instead, we went into companionable confinement within our four walls and attacked those individual and joint piles of memories.
“Sorting out” could no longer be the definition of what was being done. No, it became more of a magic carpet ride, a trip to the past in a time machine.
Sitting as we do on the fence between the paper past and the digital present, our next step was to share all this with the extended family: and thus, photographs are taken of an uncle’s poem in his own handwriting, a “parent’s” prayer long before she became a parent, a child’s drawing of an imaginary superhero … and emails and WhatsApps wing their way to those whose hearts sing with ours as they go back in time with us.
In the process of all this, the “onerous” task is no longer unpleasant — and we wake up with a spring in our step each day, eager to get through with the routine household tasks and once more step into our time machine to re-live the past: able to now accept the losses and remember fun times with those who are gone or see the humour in what at one time we considered huge setbacks in our lives.
—Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India
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