Selected for the top 20 national finalists for the Nanhi Chhaan Essay Competition.
There is a large Cabinet in the attic, which is 5 feet tall but not very wide, of classic Ikea finishing and rusted handles covered with splotches of grime. On the top left corner is a freshly woven spider web with gossamer strings, and by the sides you can see the indentations of peeling paint. Inside the large Cabinet are scarves. There are scarves and hats. Hats and sunglasses. Sunglasses and old bags. Bags and shoddy shoes. A wide repertoire of items both old and new, fresh and forgotten, lost and discovered. It is, of course, the dumping ground of the Woman. The Woman is not a greedy person by nature. A shopaholic to some degree, but not greedy, not at all. No more than the average lady walking down the street. The need catches her by surprise sometimes, just twists around her neck like a thick, warm, and comfortable hand knitted scarf. This insatiable, overwhelming urge to pick things up. “It’s this lovely shade”, she mutters to herself, or, “I like the shape of the lenses”. When she lies awake at night, when everything is quiet inside her head, slivers of thought worm their way upwards to the surface of her consciousness.
The Woman remembers those back to school trips or grocery shopping with her mother, God bless her soul, who asked herself but one question. “Is it a want, or a need?” The value unfortunately had not instilled itself properly, not taken root, nor flowered. So what if she had some extra stuff lying around? Everyone has that one overflowing corner of the house. Everyone has stuff they don’t ‘need’. In fact she grew quite indignant then, as the hours of the night slowly escaped her tightening clutches. What a stupid question to constantly be asking yourself. Are wants not manifestations of some inner need, some unasked, unreleased desire? Should she not indulge in the liberation of those suppressed emotions? This determination fueled her wobbly knees up the rickety staircase to the large Cabinet the very next morning.
The Cabinet creaked and groaned in protest, the old wood contracting under the weight of fingers swollen with rheumatism as she painstakingly emptied out the whole thing. Dust mites and thick lint coated every imaginable surface on a stuffy June morning. The abrasive aged leather of boots scratched uncomfortably against her sensitive skin, her nose tickling desperately as particles wormed their way through her olfactory canals. She sniffled and swore, complained and fussed, until finally, it was done. Objects of every imaginable shape and size lay around her, surrounding her in a claustrophobic cocoon.
It was then that the Woman began to don each scarf, and as many pairs of sunglasses she could rest on the perch of her nose. She shoved her gnarled toes into multiple layers of stockings and topped off the whole ensemble with three faux leather coats.
Feeling quite pleased with herself, if a little hot, she huffed her way down the stairs again.
The cacophony of colour and variety reflected off her onto the sidewalk, her energy almost infectious. She feigned a practised nonchalance as she strode down the street, stares pinning the back of her head (which was, naturally, covered in a tapering pile of hats). The Woman saw ‘it’ then, and for the very first time in her life, she took pause.
‘It’ was a bundle of old, patched blankets ripped at the corners. Wayward threads flapped miserably in the dirt in a little corner of the street. The bundle stirred slowly, and then she saw white wisps emerge from underneath. An old Man sat there, his hair ragged and unruly reaching till his shoulders. He had those two blankets, which functioned as his garb.
She looked around almost frantically, a new desperation fuelling her sluggish movements. One hat fell from the top of her head. Then, another followed suit. A scarf slipped from the tight noose around her neck, a coat shrugged off of one struggling shoulder. Her hands lay limp at her side, as the accessories hurried to get off her, self-disintegrating until they lay in a haphazard pile at the Man’s feet.Mortified, the Woman knew she had one and only one course of action left to her. She bolted then, the shame creeping up from the cracks in the sidewalk and grabbing at her with long, spindly fingers. She felt exposed to a slight chill in the air without her protective shell. Bare. Almost naked.
It had been many years since she felt truly… free.
Our planet is filled with approximately 8.2 billion people, everyday, who go about their lives. Each of them act as consumers. Our ultimate driving force is to consume. We consume knowledge, we make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes to consume more information. We consume material objects, for satisfaction. Each individual acts as a sort of vessel, empty, but constantly waiting to be filled up from top to bottom. However, like any finite vessel, we tend to go overboard. The water overflows until we’re drowning in the finiteness of our own selves. In that way, consumerism is an odd economic theory. It’s odd because although ‘excessive material consumption’ translates seamlessly to ‘greed’, the whole concept can be extremely confusing. The lines between an individual’s wants and an individual’s needs can blur against an urban or even privileged lifestyle. Social stratification and diversification become virtually invisible. What we are sold, what our eyes and ears perceive versus what they are being told to perceive shifts these sensations and warps them, until they are uncontrollable. The need to consume. The guilt after consuming. Each corner of everyone’s house becomes a landfill, simply piling up with all this ‘stuff’.
Suffocating in its extremity, overwhelming in its capacity and encompassing in its entirety. Until eventually, there is nothing left. No magical resets, nothing driven by necessity at all. Simply the bare need of survival.