|
Published
in Gulf News, June 19, 2007
Cutting through
the clutter
Clutter.
Some people see it, others don't. And as life would have it, the
ones who do, end up marrying the ones who don't.
When
I was a bachelor in Oman, I needed to hack a path through my living
room every day because of how every inch of floor was covered with
books, bags, photographic equipment, CDs and papers. (Fortunately,
it was never dirty plates and half-eaten food.) My desks at work
have always been disaster zones, with passers-by often stopping
to watch, waiting for teetering piles of press releases to fall
and entomb me.
The
girl who eventually became my wife, lived in a house that was as
if nobody but the Robots stayed there. Everything was dusted every
day, there was nothing on the floors and the bed was always immaculately
made.
And,
of course, these two people ended up sharing the same space. Today
almost every argument is about tidying up. You might wonder though,
what problem could the messy one possibly have with the neat one?
Well, it's not unknown to have a newspaper put away, even as it's
being read. Often, as the neat one tidies, she goes into automaton
mode and puts away everything in her path, anywhere there's place
to put it. We have cheque books in kitchen drawers and CD-ROMs in
shoe cupboards.
Over
a few high-decibel negotiations, we found tidy middle-ground. She
can now tolerate a house that's less than zen-like, and I now actually
notice mess (though whether I do something about it depends on a
complicated arrangement of planets and prevailing winds).
My
brain just doesn't have a high "mess resolution". I can
look at a sink and not see that it's covered in tea leaves, simply
because to me, mess is only when the dishes are piled so high they're
an immediate threat to life and limb.
The
neat one's mess resolution is a bit like those satellites that see
golf balls on greens from hundreds of miles in the air. When it's
her turn in the kitchen, she doesn't just do the dishes and give
the surfaces a desultory wipe the way I do. She scours the entire
place with various brushes, sprays and cloths, relines the burners
and stove backing with aluminium foil, and leaves the counters so
you could have open-heart surgery on them and not catch so much
as a cold.
I used to have the fond notion that she enjoyed tidying and so I
told myself, I was doing her a favour by strewing. I discovered
(the hard way) that she hates cleaning up, but does it because she
hates clutter even more. Like many young women I know, she blames
her quirks on her mother, who is supposedly an obsessive hoarder.
Apparently the neat one's need for sterility comes from growing
up in the original House of Clutter (though I found it quite cosy
and comfortable).
The
last couple of weeks, she has been out of town on work in the week,
and back on the weekends. This gives me and our flat five days to
return to more primordial times, but our retro-evolution is slowed
a little knowing that if there's a mess, the she will walk in and
start tidying even before she's put her suitcase down.
But
once the environmental negotiations are done, we usually note, with
relief, that our differences are not actually that deep. After all,
instead of one neat, the other messy, we could have had one a meat-eater,
the other vegan; one an avid club-goer, the other a homebody; or,
our worst nightmare, the other a smoker.
Site
designed and maintained by Gautam Raja.
© Gautam Raja, unless stated otherwise.
|