In his lifetime Gandhiji owned many things, for his whole life was not always frugal — in fact, his suits and hats tended to show him as a dandy in his early years rather than the renunciate he was to become later — and what with having to use a watch, or reading glasses, or some sort of utensils, a fair amount of clutter accumulated in his lifetime. He tried to lessen some of it, giving it away as appropriate, even though people who begged him for some memorabilia knew they were taking away from him a slice of history. Sixty-plus decades later, if someone now wants to cash in what is clearly the best blue-chip investment they made, I can’t help wondering why so many people are getting their knickers in a twist.
It’s hard to understand why the only legatees of Gandhinalia should be members of his family, or the Indian government, neither of whom seem to have done a great job of preserving the Gandhi legacy in any meaningful manner. And a visit to any Gandhi memorial in the country is a matter of shame, rather than pride. If they now lay claim to all Gandhi memorabilia, I can imagine several hundred people among us who will be held accountable for scraps of paper with his autograph, or photographs and books signed by him. Must all these be returned post haste to some babu in a Gandhi ministry? Is there a collecting office where these can be rushed while amnesty is still on offer?
The reason I feel strongly is because I’ve been a collector of sorts — or used to be, till I got married, or more accurately till my mother-in-law started to visit us in Delhi. That was many years ago, and though she now appears frail, her appearance then was daunting rather than comforting. Because I didn’t know her well then, I had not taken to hiding things that I owned, or enjoyed.
There was my collection of records which, now that nobody owned record players any more, had become redundant, but that was no reason to give them away. I hoarded menus from restaurants around the world, and on any given day could turn up more memoirs of meals signed by Michelin chefs than most gourmands could remember names of ingredients. I had cartons full of matchboxes, hotel ashtrays, a complete and rare set of JS magazines without skipping an issue, a collection of the seventies hippie beads and peace signs that we wore as epaulettes and pendants, some posters that you might not be able to show to mom but made you the most envied kid on the block (though it was the embarrassment of throwing them out and having the kachrawallah know you had them in the first place, that prevented me from getting rid of them), my school notes (with poor gradings), my college notes (with love poetry written in the margins), wristwatches I’d worn through different phases of my life, boots, leather jackets — you know the stuff.
My mother-in-law came with a built-in mechanism that allowed her to track down things I’d hidden in lofts, tucked away in drawers, hidden behind the furniture, or stored away in cupboards. And though she had absolutely no right, she called the kabariwallah and sold it all on the day she also left town, so I was left with no one to shout at. But now that there is precedent that a commercial sale of anything is essentially prurient on part of the party executing the sale, I’m going to ask my mother-in-law for each of those things back — oh yes, I’ve kept an inventory — and if she fails to comply, why she’ll just have to pay up the estimated value of my nostalgia, interest included. Thanks Bapu.
