One day, I was going somewhere with my dad on a motorcycle and we got stuck in a traffic jam. I looked at the houses on the road and thought to myself how all of the things about these houses tell a story.
Like the front gate, maybe they chose it because they had a certain budget. Or they wanted something that looked like that. Or this was the first gate they saw at the store, and they fell in love with it.
And not just this, but what happened before that led to the moment of buying a gate? Maybe they were building their dream home from scratch. Maybe it was part of a renovation project. Or it was their second or third house, and they didn’t want to give it much thought, so they asked the builder to select a gate that matched.
The other thing was who was involved in buying this gate? Did the couple make the decision themselves? Did they involve the kids, too? Did they ask their friends for the recommendations?
I came back home and looked at what we have in our home. We have this almirah (a free-standing metal cupboard) that my parents bought when they got married. And it has gone through all the many houses we have changed over the years. It has scratches that tell how it was transported to each different place. It got lifted by a crane, by people on a tiny staircase, and even got dropped a couple of times.
I then looked at our dark red (almost burgundy) fridge and remembered the moment that led us to buy it. We used to live in a different house then, and I was about 11-12 years old. The fridge we had at the time was a single-door one. It survived almost 8-9 years, and the door used to come out completely from the fridge’s hinge. We were advised not to put anything in the door handle, and opening the door was a serious task. It was on its last breath.
My mom used to talk about it every day at dinner. My dad used to avoid the conversation cause buying a fridge was expensive. One day, mom and dad went out somewhere, and my two siblings and I were at home. When they came back, they told us to empty the old fridge cause we’re getting a new one. I remember mom telling us how it has two doors, a separate compartment just for the freezer, and how it has a bigger space and is taller than the old one. When the fridge finally arrived, it was the coolest moment for me. Because I had never seen a fridge like this in my neighbourhood, at any of my friends’ houses, or anywhere else. I was the coolest kid on the block that day as I talked about it everywhere I went.
And today I simply use that fridge and don’t give much thought to it. How weird is that?
When I was going through this thought process, I realized something else, too. It is interesting how the things we buy are not always the ones we wanted to buy when we went to buy them.
For example, I looked at one of our tables and remembered how we bought it. When I was 14-ish, my mom told my dad about buying a table that we could put our TV on. (At the time, we had those chunky TVs.
Then Dad went to the store the next day and saw a couple of options. After coming back home that day, he told us that he really liked this one table he saw at the furniture store. But he couldn’t buy it because it was over our budget. He added that maybe we could save up for it, but Mom denied. He then said about seeing this other table that was in our budget and looked sturdy. Then we bought that table.
Now we don’t put the TV on it. It is now our storage table.
I could go on and on about every single thing we have in our home. But ever since that day my dad and got stuck in the traffic, I can’t look at a house, or my fridge without realizing there is a long story behind it.
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