From sheets to pillow cases to dusters

From sheets to pillow cases to dusters
Uma Asher,TNN

Over the years, it has slowly dawned on me that I have learned many things from my parents in years past, without even noticing. They live in an apartment in the overcrowded clutter that is suburban Mumbai. Every day, they buy a handful of flowers and bel leaves for the household altar. The flower woman delivers them to our door, wrapped in a leaf and tied with a piece of string. My mother saves the string, and when it has grown to a fist-sized ball, she returns it to the flower-seller, who re-uses it.

My father would take cloth bags to the market every day, but somehow plastic bags crept into the house occasionally. My mother would collect them, and periodically hand them over to the vegetable vendor, so he could reuse them.

In the days of glass milk bottles, my mother saved the aluminum foil caps. A few caps made a new career as scrubbers for cast-iron cookware like a roti tawa; others were given to our domestic help, who sold them as metal scrap in the slum where she lived. That way she earned a spot of extra money, and the aluminium presumably got recycled somewhere. When the tough nylon fabric from folding deck chairs frayed at the edges, it was taken out and sewn into heavy-duty bags to buy our monthly supplies of grain.

Those bags lasted well over a decade. When I was a child, the fabric of my unfashionable but sturdy cotton school uniforms was ideal for making shopping bags. Our old clothes that were in wearable condition were bartered for steel pots and pans from an itinerant vendor.

My mother rescued old zippers and buttons, and stored them in an old candy box to sew on other clothes. Torn clothes were cut up and saved as wipes for kitchen spills, muddy shoes, and so on. Old cotton bedsheets got cut up, and the ends, less frayed than the centre, were sewn up into pillow cases or dishcloths. If a container broke, the lid was saved, and used when another container was missing a lid.

To this day, gifts are unwrapped very carefully, and the paper stored flat under a mattress for reuse. Resealable plastic bags are rinsed, dried, and reused when possible.

Even though my parents live in a flat, they don’t regard their hoard of old stuff as clutter; it’s well-organised so things are there when they need them. When they need string, a plastic bag, a clean jar or bottle, a lid or nail of any size, a rag to wipe a spill, they know exactly where to find it.

Only when I lived in the US did it even occur to me that stores could sell such items. I have come to recognise and be grateful for how my parents’ little habits continue to shape the way in which I use things. They never use the expression “reduce, reuse, recycle”. When they add some little item to their stash, they simply say, “This will be useful.”