Bose, Buddy, Barter, Buy (Excerpts)

Savvy Soumya

With age comes maturity. With our age, our ruinous-ness matured. If we have gone together to buy curtains (me) and a lamp (him), both of us will end up buying both curtains and lamps…and many other things. Our mutual shopping is not based on needs. It isn’t based on science or commerce either.

It is an art. The art of mutual destruction. The inexplicable art of mutual destruction.

One such inexplicable episode is the furniture swap. Something our parents have grappled to understand. A lamp shade and a doormat in exchange of a foldable 6-seater dining table, a bench, two cane chairs, two cushions and a large double-seater futon. For context, I had been grovelling for the lampshade — a sort of a chandelier of bunched up thin bamboo baskets — for nearly a decade. I must have seen it at his house first in 2008.

He had bought it at the Surajkund fair a few years ago, so I went to the fair the very next year. I couldn’t find it there so I begged. I checked online. Nothing. I continued to beg (and threaten and grovel). At different points, I tried bribe, barter, and blackmail. Nothing. Nine years.

FINALLY.

“Ok fine take it,” he said. I sensed a ‘but’ coming and so I jumped in — “you wanted a dining table, take mine”. I was on the slippery slope of barter hill. The rest as you know is history. He threw in the doormat to make the exchange look less skewed, I think.

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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.