Kissa Kursi Ka (Excerpts)
Last month, I decided to fix a dear old chair, whose wheels had lost all their mobility owing to years of hair and dust entanglement. This has been my dedicated working chair ever since the pandemic, it has been the seat of my thinking, plotting and planning every creative pursuit, so the thought of letting it go was inconceivable. The fact that it did not move an inch was another matter.
In an attempt to salvage the wheels, I decided to take matters into my own hands (quite literally). On a fine sunny day, I put the chair upside down and got my tools ready to take on this new task — a trusted pair of scissors and paper cutter.
Spreading a newspaper on the floor, I began working at one of the wheels. As I put myself onto this minor technical endeavour, I couldn’t help but think of my father. Dad was the engineer, mechanic, gardener, and electrician of our house. All his life, he maintained a cabinet that housed his prized auzaar. His tools ki almari was famous as it had a variety of plas (pliers), paana (wrenches), pench-kas (screw drivers), hathoda (hammers), aari (saws), you name it.
He was not just a connoisseur of tools but someone who knew how to recover dying items and make good use of spare parts. From fixing an old mixer-grinder to grandfather clocks, Dad was an all-rounder. While I have not inherited his mechanical prowess, that day I sat down with one mission in mind — salvage the chair.
Slowly yet steadily, I continued to perform surgery on the wheel. The scissors helped me cut through thick locks of hair, while the paper cutter cut through the strands lodged deeper inside the joints of the wheel. Then, using tweezers, I kept pulling at the hair that slowly loosened their grip on the wheel, as it began to show signs of recovery.
By the end of nearly 40 minutes, I had one wheel released from the tight tangles of hair. Victory was in sight, but not how I’d imagined. Despite my best efforts, the wheels did not achieve the same mobility as before. Next morning, when I pulled the chair, it did so a tiny bit more freely than it had in a long time. My father would’ve been proud.
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Objects of Our Affection is a series exploring our connections to the furniture and objects that make our spaces home. Through stories of tables, chairs, and that odd-shaped thing only you love, we celebrate the inanimate pieces that hold memory and witness our lives.
If you'd like to contribute your own story to this series, we'd love to hear from you. Micro-essays, poems, reflections, and fragments welcome. Write to us at hellothadi@gmail.com. Word limit 400.
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