The man arrived at ten in the morning with a helper, a trolley, and a face that had seen too many dining tables to feel anything about this one.
He walked around it once. Tapped a leg. Looked at the surface with the practiced detachment of someone assessing timber, not history. Then he named his price. It was not the price you pay to take something away. It was the price you pay someone to do you a favour.
I looked at the table. Twelve years of breakfast. The dent where my daughter, age two, introduced her head to a hard surface and delivered her first proper howl. The chair she stood on, aged four, reaching for something she absolutely should not have reached for. The evening she ate her first real meal there, small fork, enormous concentration. The man with the trolley saw none of this. He saw four legs and a surface. I paid him to take it away. The room looked larger and felt considerably emptier than its dimensions suggested.
This is the problem I cannot solve. Acquiring is effortless. Disposal is grief dressed up as logistics.
The Ticket from Vegas
I have, somewhere in a box that has moved with me across three cities, a paper ticket from a trip to Vegas in 2012. Every time I reach for it to throw it away, something stops my hand. The ticket is not a ticket. It is a sealed jar containing whatever I was feeling on the day I stuffed it into my pocket. I do not know what that feeling was. I am apparently not willing to find out.
This is the part nobody warns you about when they talk about letting go of things. It is not disorganisation. It is attachment, distributed across a thousand objects, each one a small protest against the fact that time moves in one direction only. The New Yorker ran a piece on the heroic misery of trying to offload things. Its sharpest line: people prefer cheap to free. Meaning a price tag, however small, signals that something has been assessed and found worthy. Free signals the opposite. You cannot even donate your way out of the problem.
The Boxes
I have been thinking about the boxes. Not the contents. The boxes things come packed in. There is one on a shelf right now. Bright red. A perfume box, foam insert intact, carrying a faint trace of what it once held. The perfume ran out some time ago. The box did not. Too well made to throw away. Next to it, the moisturiser container with the elegant pump, long empty. And the iPhone box from two upgrades ago, because the cardboard was so clean.
If you cannot bring yourself to throw away the container, you were never going to throw away the thing inside it.
The Invisible Kind
A twenty-eight-year-old in that same piece offered a thought that stung: we have moved our accumulation online, he said. Digital purchases give the illusion of minimalism. The clutter is still there. It is simply invisible. Clay Shirky said in 2008 that the problem was never information overload. It was filter failure.
Free storage means no friction at acquisition, and no friction means no moment at which you pause and decide. The screenshots accumulate. The downloads folder fills. The brain does not distinguish between a drawer of cables for devices you no longer own and a folder of PDFs you will never read.
The Warehouse Economy
The United States has more than 50,000 self-storage facilities: warehouses you rent by the month for things you cannot fit at home and cannot bring yourself to discard. More of them than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway combined. One in ten Americans rents a unit. The monthly rent, paid quietly over years, often exceeds the value of what sits inside.
India is building the same economy now, and faster. What we are storing, in the end, is not furniture. It is a mental state: unresolved pasts, uncertain futures, and abundance without clarity.
Learning to Let Go
Clutter is expensive. It costs the mind more than we admit: the low hum of unfinished decisions, the guilt of things unused, the weight of objects that demand nothing and take everything quietly. In a city like Mumbai, where every square foot has a price, it costs the home too. Space given to things you no longer need is space you are paying for twice.
I am trying to change this. Genuinely trying, not aspirationally trying. Filtering at source, before things arrive rather than after. Keeping the memory and releasing the object. The dining table is gone. What I was trying to keep was not the table. It was my daughter at two, howling. That is still here. It requires nothing except the occasional willingness to let it surface on its own.
I do not have this solved. What I have is the intention to work on it seriously, and the humbling recognition that intention is not the same as action. If you have found a way through this, I am genuinely interested. Tell me what worked. Tell me what you have not been able to let go of, and why.
The dining table is gone. The Vegas ticket is still here.
We are both works in progress.
You touched a raw nerve on this one, Kavi. It is timely and much required. But it is true. I am hopeless at letting go. I cling onto objects, memorabilia, fancied packaging, letters, old note pads with notes I was proud of a long time ago… In short, a quintessential hoarder. The better half picks many a bone with me on this trait. Till, with a heavy reluctance and a heavy heart I succumb to the pressures of spring cleaning. Inevitably, with growing years, and reducing memory that prevents me from accessing what I look for, the household is poised to downsize to only what’s currently essential. The nostalgia lives on virtually in the mind, without the prop of substance, where it now gets summoned as many happy returns. Just saying.
That’s a really a tough one . I am classic hoarder from books to stamps to all the empty boxes to travel tickets and souvenirs. Separating the object from the memory requires some effort. Sometimes we have to give permission to keep a symbol .. letting go of 2000 odd books to a library – comic books bought from saved pocket money was painful, it took time . Sometimes you wait if the body resist and then act on it, sometimes I think you are tired to resist . Still struggling around this .. have seen my friends who practise minimalism , give away a piece of cloth to buy a new one ( I still have those conference t shirts I sleep in from a sales conference 20 years ago )
There is a hook the wall bracketing the narrow passage to the bedroom. On the hook, once, were the lanyards of various conferences I attended, a few I spoke at. One has the address of the IMO London and another the IIT Madras. I would pass them by every day.
One day it was gone. It was in fact gone for many days and I hadn’t noticed. The gangster ruthlessness and the surgical precision of the act can only be appreciated in hindsight. I have someone at home who sees a larger picture. Reading this post, I also see the kindness that underlies the ruthless precision.