Sixty Shades Of…..Shopping!

It’s silly (sorry, I meant saley) season again. Everyone and I mean everyone, the Gods included, put their heart and souls into waiting for the time of the departed souls (called Pitrupaksha) to end so that they can launch into the festive season with zeal. After all, three major festivals, all falling within a month of each other, means laughing all the way to the bank for some and crying all the way there for others. Yes, Navratri, Dussehra and the most important event on the festival calendar, Diwali are just round the corner, beckoning and tantalizing. So, it is time to toss out the rag-a-bones and waltz with the new!  And what with Bollywood holding sway over too many, Karva Chauth has escaped its geographical confines and become the festival of newly- weds everywhere. Although we don’t have a fall season, it is a pretty good time to see your bank balance fall with alarming rapidity!

The markets of course, are decked out early. Clothes of all kinds, pretty earthen ware, lanterns, fairy lights, scented candles, soaps and perfumes, knick-knacks, jewelry, sweets and mounds of dry fruit are on offer at every nook and corner. Clever builders try to make a fast buck by offering discounts on down payments to your dream home. Cleverer car salesmen follow in their wake ready to drive you to said dream home in a spanking new set of wheels of your choice. Banks scheme to offer the ‘Buy now, pay (or regret, as the case may be) later’ umbrella of schemes, too good to pass up.

With e- commerce surging ahead thanks to the recently waning pandemic, you tend to be swamped by the swelling tides of offers on all sites online. If Flipkart makes your heart go flip-flop, then the sharp snapping of the Snapdeal offers wake you up thoroughly if you were dreaming of falling asleep on the job. Myntra has its own mind-games, Nykaa nudges you in the right direction and the Amazon (site not the river, silly) swells and threatens to carry away your solvency on its tide! It’s not just the Joneses, but also the Sharmas, Varmas, Banerjees, Singhs, Baruas, Modis, Kulkarnis, Raos, Nairs and Iyers whom you run to keep up with! The only person who probably really laughs all the way to her office is Ms. Seetharaman, our long- suffering finance minister. She spots the gold, not at the end of the rainbow, but at the end of October, put there of course, by you and me!

Our ancestors were too smart to do anything without rhyme or reason. Back when we were a chiefly agrarian culture, this season meant the season of plenty, thanks to the monsoon which would have recently stopped showering its bounty. The harvest of the kharif crop was at hand. The barns and granaries were full, as were most people’s pockets. And they were ready to spend (not indiscriminately, I said they were too smart). Besides, things tended to come apart in the wet weather and needed replacement. So, to market, to market they went. The habit has remained. Although it is much bigger but not necessarily better.

We are all guilty of opening overflowing cupboards, thanks to our stashing stuff away all year long and wondering how to fit in a couple of festival newbies in them. Perhaps we could teach pack rats a thing or two! But, this ritual yearly inspection (if you happen not to get round to cleaning) helps in taking stock of what we lack and then we get down to the job of buying the missing items with gusto. Gifts, corporate or personal, make for a large chunk of what we shop for. It is guilt- free splurging when we are buying for someone else, you see!

On the personal front, I keep planning to turn over a new leaf when it comes to festival shopping, each year. With much fanfare, I make a list in the ‘notes’ section of my smart phone. This I decide, is the beginning of a new, Zen me, who lives a minimalist life. It will not be like that memorable year, when I ended up with four identical kurtas because they happened to be stashed away in the back of beyond, forlorn and forgotten! To further get my shades of shopping right, I decide that I will need to visit three markets at least. The flea market for knick-knacks, the mall for the pricier stuff and my phone for the thousand and one things which disappear from over wrought memory and which become (un)necessary online purchases. But, by the time my lists and plans are made, I realize with a start that I am as usual left with precisely ninety-six hours to get my act together.

Battling my way through all this is easier said than done. The flea market is best approached on foot, leaving the comforts of the car far, far behind! With the air of a gladiator, I plunge into the arena that is the flea market. Crowds jostle, people mill, gawkers gawk, dogs bark, vendors yell and my head swims with heady excitement and that strange smell of expectation. I stagger away with ‘knick-knacky’ essentials, and look for a rickshaw which will haul all the loot and my sorry self, back home so that I can hunt, gather and forage some more!

The mall demands a blood sacrifice before letting me into its hallowed precincts. I have to battle horrendous traffic and scrape my precious car before I can find a spot in the parking lot bursting at the seams. My car is wedged in a narrow space between a pillar and the wall and for some time, it looks like a losing battle before I extricate myself from it and stomp inside, the offspring who is giggling irreverently, in tow. The scenario here is worse because the crowds are now confined indoors, gawking at the beautifully decorated ceilings far above and nearly causing a stampede on the escalators. My well-laid plans of purposefully marching into a few select shops, going about my business with laser like focus and marching out again fly out of the window in the first five minutes. What with the glitz and the glamour and the enticing ‘sale’ signs everywhere, I forget my actual rather venerable age and act like the kid in the candy store, until the very mature offspring rebukes me sharply and tells me to put a sock on my silliness. I subside abashed. Truly, the child is the father or in my case, the scolding mother of woman.

Three and a half hours, a much- needed rejuvenating meal at the food court and several irate phone calls by the spouse later, I have shoved the thought of the much lighter bank account to the back of my mind and am trying to wedge myself into the car which is overflowing with the results of my excursion. A mental pat on the back is sorely needed, I decide, ignoring the black looks the offspring is offering. The decorations, cutlery, clothes and a majority of the gifts have been sorted or so I think. My happy trance lasts for all of the half an hour required to drive home.

Mumbai homes are cozy places with very limited spaces and I am unceremoniously jerked from my happy trance once I see the living room square footage swallowed by the fruits of my hard work. Getting down on my hands and knees, I begin the stashing exercise. As I clear away old and not-so-old stuff, I feel like the evil magician from Aladdin, exchanging old lamps (in my case literally) for new. The person who smiles beatifically in the background is the maid, as she walks away with quite a few prize- finds which I thrust at her as I follow by ‘stash and run’ policy with unerring regularity. Zen me has survived in the wilds of shopping for exactly two days.

As if I need more salt rubbed into my throbbing wounds, I discover several dry, desert islands in my sea of shopping. The tops are here, but what about the bottoms?  The beautiful Maggam work blouse does not exactly match the saree and although I have picked up six beautiful mugs from Home Center, what about the strainer I really needed? The new Amish Tripathi novel which is to be released is also sorely desired. And thus, Zen me turns into Regular me, rushing to Amazon Express armed with American Express. A cursory glance through the previous orders shows that quite a few things which I had ‘picked up cheap’ will be arriving over the next twenty- four hours.  Until now, they have been conveniently relegated to the back of my memory. But this is no time to brood. An hour of meditation (read picking and clicking on sundries) later, I feel truly cleansed. I make another of my golden resolutions: who needs the traipsing in the sweltering October heat if one can pick and click at leisure on the net from the blessed comfort of home? and hence physical shopping will henceforth be banned.

The moment of truth arrives exactly a day later when first the disgruntled spouse, and then the offspring begin arriving with large packages tucked under their arms every time they return home, both wearing identical black scowls. No amount of reassurances on my part that the yearly shopping has ‘been put to bed’ succeeds in cajoling them out of their pre-festivity blues. And as the cherry on top, I soon begin receiving frantic calls from the building supervisor regarding the number of packages which have found their way into the lobby, all bearing my name, causing an obstacle course for the elderly, amusing none and could I please take them away? I trudge downstairs to comply. I happen to meet a nosy aunty on the way back. “Oh, Diwali preparations! Been shopping?”, a loaded question if ever there was.

At last, all the shopping is put away, all the gifts sorted and everything matched and color coordinated. Clad in brand-new apparel, with a spring in my step, I set out for the ‘festive get-together’ hosted in the building. I meet a neighbor who regards me from top-to toe. “I am so glad to see you recycling everything and wearing your old clothes. Not wasting money on truck-loads of stuff! You have put out recycled diyas too!”, she says.

Luckily, she steps out of the lift before I bang my head firmly into the wall after throttling her. My face is changing color into sixty different shades of ….shopping!