A gold-rimmed photo frame with a picture of my parents adorns the shelf around the television. We use this shelf to keep clutter that looks good – it is called a ‘show case’. It has show-pieces gifted to us by guests from a time when gifting show pieces was a thing. We don’t gift show pieces anymore. We like to call them merchandise.
The newspaper lies on the teapoy which has a flower vase with white plastic flowers in it. Next to the flower vase is an empty cup of tea. It is not placed on a coaster. We have several coasters, but we never use them. They are only used when guests come.
The sofa has three cushions on it, all placed at an equal distance from each other. Whenever one of them gets displaced even a bit, my mother says, “Oh my God, the house is such a mess”. Hence, on public holidays and Sundays, it is strictly advised to not touch the cushions. Lest the guests arrive and witness the abominable view of the house being in such a great mess.
The two ends of the room host the most important things. To the left end is the dining table and at the right end is the altar. The dining table has five chairs around it. The house has only two people currently living in it. The extra three chairs are for guests. A portrait of ‘The Last Supper’ hangs above the dining table to indicate that this is where we have our supper.
Representative image. Photo: Flickr.
The other end of the room houses the altar, which is the most special part of the house. A lot of thought and planning went behind building it. It has Gothic architecture, golden pillars et al. It has four statues of Jesus, three of Mother Mary, two statues of saints, and an angel-shaped holy water container. It has a shelf where we keep the Bible, which is kept on top of yet another shelf, to show the importance of the holy book – apparently the importance is directly proportional to the number of shelves dedicated to it. The altar has three lights. One is kept on at all times, the other two are switched on when the guests arrive.
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The living room also has two book shelves which were built solely out of pity because the second child of the family incessantly insisted on its existence. The book shelves are so small, the guests don’t even notice it. Hence, they hold no importance here. Moving on.
Once you get a hold of this entire room, you can now make your way to the bedrooms which is, in fact, the real home. There are bags stored on top of cupboards, blankets stored under beds, clothes hanging behind doors, day-old laundry hanging from the window. A mosquito-killing electric bat rests in an accessible spot for emergency perusal, a half-used medicine strip lies on the cabinet, stray charger wires can be found in drawers. Where they came from, nobody knows.
Middle class people don’t have guest rooms. The living room is the guest room. Everything you see there was strategically placed to impress you. And if you’re seated in the living room, with a teapoy in front of you which has snacks placed on expensive china, and teacups placed on coasters, you must know that you’re a guest. It would be best if you leave in a few hours. And if you’re invited into the bedroom not so you can ‘see’ the bedroom, but because ‘why not?’, it means, congratulations, you’ve been upgraded. We consider you fellow-humans, and you are allowed to see that we do deal with some mess in our lives, and we aren’t ashamed to show it to you.
You have a mess, I have a mess. Some decorate it with coasters, some leave behind ring stains. At the end of the day, it is all the same. It is a mess. It exists. And it is allowed to exist. Coasters or not.
Sonia Joseph is a professional procrastinator who writes sometimes.
Featured image credit: Calico cat/Flickr