Cinderella’s wish
We wish our old-fashioned home away. Alas, there’s no magic wand at hand

By Meha Mathur
When poor Cinderella expressed her embarrassment at going to the ball in tattered clothes, the fairy queen felt sad for her and transformed her clothes into the most graceful evening dress one could have seen. She then transformed the garden pumpkin into a chariot, the dogs into horses and rats into attendants.

In Indian mythology, when Sudama paid a visit to his childhood friend Krishna, the latter realised the dire condition his friend was in, and transformed his miserable hut into a mighty palace. When Sudama returned, he found his family basking in new-found wealth.

Well, Indians today desire similar job with their homes. Only, they want it in reverse order, because minimum is the order of the day. Oh, those old tiles, the bulky Godrej almirahs, the double beds, the Victorian sofas and the six-seater dining table. How out of style, these! If only they could vanish somehow, and make way for bean bags, bunker beds, sleek sofas and dining tables with glass tops. But since there’s no fairy queen to wave her wand this time, and no Krishna to realise our wishes and grant them on his own, the task becomes tedious.

It’s not that money is a problem. We are ready to shell out any amount for leading life in this moment. Whatever we want, we have to have it now. The problems exist elsewhere. There might be old parents to contend with. Parents who purchased that ‘old-fashioned’ furniture with their first pay, got it along with wedding trousseau, or assembled it over a period of time as and when they could afford it. Hence their attachment with the items, and the unwillingness to part with it. Almost every three-generation family would be going through these tussles now - whether to retain the sewing machine which was so essential for the upkeep of a family’s wardrobe earlier, but which is utterly redundant now; whether to dump the steel cupboard that the lady of the house got in dowry then, but which looks shabby in front of the Bhutan Board in-built cupboards, whether to retain the two-burner cooking range, when there’s Microwave and hob at home. And who eats in steel plates and steel glasses anymore? Don’t the oldies understand that overcrowding of furniture invites pests and cobwebs? The entire value systems come into clash, with accusations as mean as ‘miserliness’ and ‘unhygienic living’.

Once the disputes are resolved in-house, the next trouble is whom to give the old furniture to? There are enough takers around - the household helps, the electrician, the plumber... Only, who will give the desired price? The home becomes bargain ground, with the maids quoting less, the young generation, eager to get the stuff out of way, agreeing instantly, and the old generation arguing desperately to get a few hundred bucks more for the belongings that they assembled with their sweat and toil.

The home has now been stripped of its belongings, which are now somehow accommodated in the maid’s one-room home. (For her, space and minimalism is not an issue, for her the possession is.) Now becomes the most dreadful task of ripping the walls of old window frames and doors, changing the pipes, bathroom fittings, doing PoP work, changing the tiles and the whitewash. What this entails is several rounds of showrooms, tolerating an army of workers, braving the minute dust particles for two months (lower estimate) and making the family and neighbours suffer deafening sounds. Finally, comes the new furniture and tapestry. The dream home is complete.

It seems that street after street, locality after locality, city after city, Indian homes are renovating themselves. There’s almost a frenzy. The cost of construction?

Not just a hole into the family’s pocket but the enormous piles of discarded brick and mortar, the dust deposited in trachea and the damaged self-esteem of a generation whose possessions have been dumped away.