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The stock-up syndrome
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The house is overflowing with junk accumulated over all those years. Geeta Padmanabhan on how hoarding can take up physical and emotional space
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As an astonished farewell group watched, the retiring officer boarded the train, Alibaba-like, with 40 suitcases blocking every passageway in the coach. The train moved and the guys travelling pounced on the staff. "Oh, those boxes," sighed a tired helper, "Saheb never throws anything away. We packed old letters, magazines, souvenirs, those big event badges, sandalwood garlands, pieces of wood and steel and used manila envelopes."
You've seen those people, right? Classic packrats, guys with the stock-up syndrome.
Are you a packrat? You are, if: you keep receipts dating back to 1995, ticket stubs for all movies you went to, refuse to throw out old albums, school answer sheets, calendars of the last decade and a concert T-shirt dating from your teens; you've saved every greeting card and mug you ever got and gifts for your last birthday in school; your car has more stuff than your kitchen, you store your kid's clothes so your grandchildren can wear them; you have newspapers in which Indira Gandhi looks young; and you never give away old clothes.
Amassing junk
Let's face it. We have remained `hunter-gatherers'. Some collect objects precious. Others put aside things `useful' (I always need it within a week of throwing away!). But we all hoard, amass junk. Open Accounts Officer Latha's freezer at your own peril. You could go under kilo packets of dals, maida, and sugar. There are tinfuls of grocery items around the apartment, 50 new cloth dusters, picture frames and old stools. The family of four may live in one-fourth of the apartment space but can feed 50 at any given time. If Chitra stacks pantry shelves with dinner sets and recipe books, hubby Sridhar has power tools that would do a catalogue proud. His cousin can't part with paint tins and varnish bottles long past their expiry dates. Saradha Kailasam is proud that she has every dress her 20-year-old daughter wore, every sheet of paper she scribbled on. "I have no space here, but I have an ancestral home in Kerala," she grins.
And yes, we all have sepia photographs of forefathers we no longer recognise.
"A maggot-ridden shawl has been with me for years," says society watcher Swati Siddharth, "and paperback romances are my lifeline. I have designs and cuttings that I am going to scan and e-hoard." She knows a gentleman who hoarded dried-up, non-refillable ballpoint pens and broken ice-cream cups given by a dear friend. "But he also clings to the need to have two litres of milk and curds in the house at all times revealing the deep insecurity from days when food was scarce, school fees came out of distributing newspapers and one set of clothes was all he owned."
Swati knows a lot of women `collectors', but she is convinced that "it is we women who have the strength, call it ruthlessness if you like — I would choose practicality — to throw, to be able to hold the memory and junk the junk. Is that emotional hoarding?" What does Siddharth hoard? "Gadgets. (Why can't he dust them too? And roll up those metres of cables?) And all those bits of papers that have telephone numbers and no names, visiting cards of the world... is stuffing of pockets every day a form of subtle hoarding? At least we are kind of evenly balanced here in the gender war!"
The problem, of course, is clutter. The house is overflowing with books stacked two deep on every shelf, and all the flat surfaces are piled with stuff. You might still be able to breathe, but only just! Try a clean up and hoarders typically get angry. They find emotional value in everything. They have trouble deciding what is worth keeping and what is not. But they come up with ready excuses — they haven't gotten around to cleaning up, old newspapers contain valuable information. Yet, they are also embarrassed about the mess. Someone whose house is teeming with cats perhaps has a more serious version of this disorder.
Don't fall into the packrat trap of stacking rubber bands, rusty clips and toffees, says Saraswathi Bhaskar, counselling consultant, terming it an obsessive compulsion. It's sentiment on the surface and anxiety underneath that they will miss stuff when it's gone. Often single-child families have a memory box — family heirlooms — to be passed on to their kid. "See that accumulation doesn't take over physical and emotional space," she warns. "What if the son/daughter thinks it's just trash? Hoarding becomes a problem if it is a hindrance and is allowed to strain relationships."
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