A few years ago, the Japanese idea of minimalism created a stir. Out with the clutter, the broken tchotchkes, the debris at the bottom of a forgotten drawer. In with the clean lines, clear spaces, and smooth surfaces.
The very idea sent me running in the opposite direction, defiantly clutching my bundles of garbage, bits and pieces spilling out in a haphazard trail. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly no hoarder. Clothes that don’t fit, yesterday’s paper, advertisements for IIT coaching and last year’s iPhone… All redundant, and out they go.
But souvenirs... Ah. That’s where the gates come crashing. I am a certified souvenir seeker.
Mud miniatures of a cat and dog, from a trip to Chennai with my mother. An intricate doorknob in shades of blue and yellow from Jaipur that matches with nothing. Matryoshka dolls from the-country-which-shall-not-be-named. A little plaster-of-Paris fish, all the way from the Greek island of Paros, assorted bottle caps from Cambodia, a stained coaster from Toit. Slowly but surely the boundary between souvenir and scrap starts to blur.
I’ve been thinking about what causes this magpie-like mentality. Upon some reflection, I have concluded that a souvenir is a reminder — a reminder of a story or memory that deserves to be preserved.
In an age where a photograph is trussed, brushed, cleaned into a shiny happy postcard or even generated out of nothing, the little porcelain owl, with a broken ear, speaks loud and clear. Of the time we met a young, autistic boy in the rain-soaked night markets of Hualien, Taiwan. He sat in a poorly lit corner of the market, in his makeshift stall, painting and selling little figurines on a broken table. He introduced us to his mangy puppy, tail thumping, sitting happily by his side. Then, of a particularly windy day two years later, when an errant, flighty curtain swept the poor owl right off our TV table, separating it from its left ear, never to be reunited.
Sometimes a souvenir is a proclamation of all the things we have in common — across borders both real and imagined. The same fears, the same beliefs. When we started travelling a few years ago, I started collecting masks, to hang up in the house. Indonesia or Philippines, Masai Mara or Sri Lanka — the origin of masks, what they are used for and the stories behind them, could be traced back to very similar roots.
Or it’s a story with a lesson learnt, a mistake to not repeat. Tucked under my towels is a solitary earring. I attempted to change my jewellery in a moving car once, and well, that was that. Maybe even an inspiration — the yellow summer dress in size XS that I bought a decade ago, with the (failed) ambition to fit into some day.
A musty diary from a shop in Unawatuna rests on my desk. Its pages bored and unused, in their pristine form — save for a tiny flower with bruised petals, rescued from a park in Gulmarg pressed into them.
There is an assortment of yellowing pieces of paper stuck on my fridge, a farewell note from an ex-boss, mailed all the way from Utrecht; a thoughtful letter from a best friend, after a car crash; and a Zomato bill with an untidy scrawl, saved from mid-2021 at the height of the COVID second wave — it reads “Please give me 5-star rating”.
Maybe this is why I love staying in little bed-and-breakfasts and rental homes, rather than a hotel. They have character, they have life. Through their little trinkets you connect with a complete stranger and open a small window into their lives.
Trinkets make a place yours; you leave a little story from your life out on display in your house, your car, your workspace.
All my souvenirs, scattered across the house, seemingly at random, are special. They are catalogued and cross-indexed meticulously in my head. Tokens of love throughout the years, reflections of all the people who have come and gone, vignettes of days gone by and harbingers of everything to come.
Perhaps I am not a souvenir seeker after all, but a story seeker?
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