My mom has been coming in my dreams the last few nights. Whenever this happens, it leaves me with mixed feelings that carry over into the day. I love seeing my mom again, but sometimes - like last night in my dreams - I’m pregnant and know that she won’t actually be around if I ever did have children. Memory lane can be tricky, but this time the meandering path took me to our family trip to Mussoorie back in 2016. We had met Ruskin Bond in person, got signed books and then spent the entire week finding different cafes to read in. The same trip inspired me to write a little piece about my mom, and a Ruskin Bond short story. I’m sharing this little piece of teenage Vedi’s heart - unedited, unrefined but full of magic.
‘The toy seller had... a most mysterious and fascinating bag, one in which no one but the toy seller was allowed to look’, Somi and Rusty, friends in small places, Ruskin Bond.
There’s nothing truly fabulous about this specific sentence by Mr. Bond, as compared to other fabulous things he has written. Except that it struck a chord within me. I immediately paused my reading, took out my green Camlin 3B pencil and scribbled a pair of brackets to enclose this statement. It’s a habit despised by most (including myself, only 3 years ago) but explaining why I grew into this habit would take two whole pages.
My family and I had lived in many (rented) houses, but we had our own house when my sister arrived in this world and that’s the house we grew up in – all four of us – for 12 solid years. I remember all the reformations the house had gone through over the years, but the one thing that never changed was our mother’s cupboard.
My parents shared everything, except their cupboard. It encompassed of an entire wall in their bedroom and was equally divided into three vertical compartments – one for papa and two for mumma. This 2:1 ratio automatically gave mumma some sort of advantage and a foreboding air. The only person allowed to open the cupboard and rummage through it was mumma. She was the only one with keys to access it (not even papa) and I only ever sneaked a peek – that too with one door shut and one partially open.
The keys that hung from the cupboard’s keyhole weren’t just meant for opening locks. The number of keys on one humongous key ring was so remarkable that if we lived in England in the Middle Ages, my mother could’ve been named ‘Master (or Mistress) of Keys and Cupboards of the Castle’. The real purpose that the innumerable keys held was to warn everyone – even Mrs Kapoor on the third floor (we lived on the sixth) – that the cupboard was being opened. As a result, I didn’t dare sneak into her room and open the cupboard while she was napping or in another room out of fear that the jangling keys would give me away. So the door remained closed, I remained out of it and mumma the only one with access to it.
When I grew old enough to watch the Chronicles of Narnia, I compared my mother’s cupboard to the one in ‘Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ – a doorway to something magical. Turns out, it was exactly that. Anyone from an Indian middle class family would assume that the gold was to blame. All Indian women have gold that they keep hidden or locked away, but not in our case. All the valuable things were at the bank, but that did not mean the cupboard was devoid of treasures – the very opposite to be very true. That cupboard was a treasure trove, as I learned once I grew up and was deemed old enough to hold my tongue and temptations.
It held the following list of items:
1) Chocolates – Toblerones, Kisses, Ferrero Rochers, Mars, Snickers, Lindt, Milky Way, Kinder joy, Milka bars, and so on and so forth.
2) Gifts- received on birthdays and repacked to give others
3) Spare stationary, utensils and buttons
4) New clothes
5) Boxes of cookies that actually stored needles and threads
6) Fancy wrapping paper and used folded wrapping paper
7) Fancy paper bags
8) Old broken jewellery
9) Photo albums and spare passport-size photographs
10) Safety pins
So you see, while there were the most ordinary things in there (or the most extraordinary, depending on how you see it), the cupboard was mysterious only because ‘no one but the toy seller was allowed to look’.
A 19-year-old me thought I was one of the finest writers in her circle, and I still think this story has merit. This even got published in a local magazine in 2016! 8 years later, I’m writing frequently again and I know I would’ve asked her for feedback. She would’ve been a subscriber here for sure!
Join me for a journaling workshop tomorrow!
This is a beginner-friendly online workshop co-hosted by me and Rujuta, a counseling psychologist. We will use free association journaling prompts where the beginning of the statements are crafted by us, and the rest of the sentence needs to be finished by you.
🗓 July 21, 2024
🕓 4.30 pm IST
💸 Pay as you please, minimum of INR 100.
Coffee, Connect & Create - August
An engaging meet-up for like-minded artists from different fields to chat over coffee while creating with each other’s company over video call!
🗓 August 25, 2024
🕓 4 pm IST
💸 There will be a small fee
More details will be shared closer to the event on my Instagram.
Another event is in its planning stages, specifically for writers! It will also be an online event in collaboration with Sanj from Rest My Opinion. The date we have pencilled into our super-organized Google Calendars is August 24, 2024!
Vedi’s Postcard Club!
Apparently, paid subscriptions on Substack aren’t fully accessible to India yet, but I’ve been thinking of starting my own Postcard Club so I did it! I have a Patreon now, and a membership tier makes you a part of my Postcard Club.
This Postcard Club allows me to combine my love for art, sending postcards, and writing personalised messages. It allows you to receive affordable original art, develop a low-effort hobby for collecting postcards and hopefully encourage you to send out your own!
Every month, you will receive a postcard dedicated to you with artwork I make specially for the club's members. For subscribers of this Postcard Club, there will also be some bonus content including newsletters, giveaways and goodies! The monthly subscription is USD 3 = approximately INR 250.
I hope to see you at one of the events, and hopefully send you a postcard!
Don’t lose yourself in magical cupboard-land,
Vedi
Love this piece! Can totally imagine it as a dreamy animation with lots of colours and Whimsical details. ❤️