Memorabilia

Last week, I took out four plastic bags of memorabilia from my cupboard, intending to clean out the chaff and condense them into one single bag.

One of the bags was full of diaries, written in my teens and early twenties (before the internet era.) One was bursting with letters and postcards and greeting cards (from my high school days.) and had a file with articles I'd cut out from Target magazine. The third bag contained my project reports - grad, and post-grad. The fourth ...had my certificates and report cards, starting from preschool.

I spent many happy and entertaining hours going through them. At the end of it, I was left with the same four bags. I didn't throw out even a little sheet of paper.

I perform this exercise once every five years, with the same result. Another time, perhaps, when I'm less sentimental. Or when I'm patient enough to digitize the entire thing.

Reminded me of a short story by RK Laxman (yes, Laxman, not Narayan) called "The Letter". A man takes out his folder of old letters to sort them out and throw away the useless ones. He ends up reading all of them, is overwhelmed by memories, and puts them all back into the folder.