Once upon a time...

Time was when all the waste my family of ten generated could be contained in a broom and dustpan that one of the servants we employed would take out daily and empty into the community dustbin. The waste itself comprised mainly of vegetable matter, tightly wound balls of hair and grains of sand and dust that accumulates so easily in India. Rarely the dustpan would take out an empty rasna carton or frooti tetrapack. The presence of these blatantly commercial items usually implied that the children of the house had been indulged by a visiting relative or a family friend. For the most part we made everything in-house including ice creams, puddings, juices and jams. In that huge, rambling ancestral home there was no place for a dustbin or at least I have no recollection of one. Likewise, i don't recall vegetables being purchased in bulk and stocked in the refrigerator either. My aunt and mother took turns going to the vegetable market to bring home the vegetables in a green knit basket. I remember that green basket so well that I can almost feel it between my fingers now. The basket was placed under a brown bench alongside an aruvamanai and another basket that held onions and potatoes. As my mind roams through the rooms in that house I can recollect every item we owned back then and where they used to be placed. This is partly because we owned so little but also because we never threw anything away. When we outgrew clothes we sold them by weight to someone in exchange for pots and pans. When the pots and pans wore out we took them to someone to have it fixed. In fact some of these utensils outlived their purchasers by several decades and when they were eventually sold it felt like a girl of the family was being given away in marriage.

When my grandmother died and it was time to sell the house and move on, all the objects of our life together were apportioned among the families that lived in that house. When I go home today, I still find some of these objects from my childhood in my mother's kitchen but now they share berth with tupperware containers and ziplock bags and a profusion of other modern storage innovations. These bright and shiny items change and are often replaced but the green bag, my grandmother's dosakal, the ancient wall clock etc., are cherished possessions of the house.

A quick zap to my life in America and what have we? As a nuclear family of three we generate so much trash every day that it frequently threatens to take over the house. Huge plastic sacks stuffed with coke cans, milk, diapers, water cans, plastic bags, bills, flyers and so on. Every year it seems to me that our plastic footprint just keeps going up despite our increasing awareness and the over-priced, cloth-based grocery bags. With time being scarce the shelf life of goods becomes an important parameter and in comes the shrink wrapped carrots and tomatoes and the bread, that must be made of cotton wool, given its propensity to stay mold-free for weeks. I see that the pace of my life has brought about these aberrations but even if I wanted to live a little slowly and deliberately I would have to jump through hoops to live the lifestyle of my childhood. Where would I find a milk man who would walk around town with a cow and a tall silver container to measure out milk? I would trade my organic cartons of homogenized milk were such an option available, even if it meant I had to spend precious minutes every morning yelling at him for slipping in water into the milk. Even after the milkman was replaced by Aaavin covers it wasn't too bad. We had the convenience of pastuerized milk delivered to our doorstep (or street corner) and a safe way of disposing the covers (as we call it in India). We piled the cover up for months and then sold them by weight to a wholesale store that bought such things for money. The children of the house fought endlessly over whose turn it was to sell the covers and pocket the proceeds. Today, I throw into the dumpster, three cardboard cartons of milk every week or twelve every month. Not to mention the countless plastic spoons and forks and all manner of non-degradeable things.

A man I know once told me that he gets one of those huge dumpster pods every few months to dispose off the waste from his house. Have you seen one of those things - those mammoth boxes that a low income family in India would consider ample living quarters? What's alarming is that at the time that I heard this information I remember thinking to myself that it was a good idea. It's amazing what you can get used to. It’s certainly a long distance to travel for someone who slept on the exact same brown pillow for the first seventeen years of her life.

I make fun of my parents when they reminisce about their childhood. They talk wistfully about how things were so different back then and how people were good and kind and milk and honey flowed the streets. Although I recognize that i'm doing the same thing here in this post I also acknowledge that some things have changed for the good. My only gripe is about those instances where we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Sustainable practices seem to have become the buzzword now with the educated classes but for most of my life in India it was the only reality. It made economic sense but it was also a way of life. Were my grandmother Pushpammal alive today I suspect she would disapprove of my commuter mug and pedometer, signs that the concept of time has gone out of wack in my life. And who can blame her?