My house has perfect Feng Shoe

"First we build walls to bring space in. Then we go to live within that circumspection. We are so inspired by that limitedness (which we call a house) that we even don't mind paying the mortgage for the rest of our lives. In order to convert brick and mortar into "love and beauty" or in other words to transform a house into a "home", we bring things in...lots and lots of things till the place looks either like a museum or a junkyard (depending on the housekeeper's sensibilities). Circumscribed, limited and bound, we lead lives thinking this assembly of walls and stuff around is security, home and life. What a rat's life", so on and so forth, I rant

as I continue to move my chair towards cleanliness and thereby godliness. Will someone tell me how I managed to gather so many things around me? I feel like the sum total of things I (we) have accumulated over the years and I am including my children also in this feeling of "accumulatedness". I keep remembering this famous line from Silsila, "hum yahan kaise aa gaye?" "How did we arrive here?"

There is a small 3x3 foyer ahead of the main door and believe me....its four days since I attacked that space and I am still not done. 39 pairs of unusable shoes and slippers, 19 pairs of carefully folded and completely mismatched socks, 8 vials of shoe polish dried beyond Sahara, a tangle of shoe laces, two packets of rice powder (!), clippings of my column (rightly housed next to slippers), three tool boxes (bought afresh each time because we didn't know it was here in this shelf), two pairs of expensive skating shoes (again bought twice because GPS to them wasn't available), two gaudy flower vases which we possibly kept for sentiment reasons but well hidden and forgotten in that shelf and some God pictures (!!!). All this stuffed into two shelves and the space above the upper shelf. I am not done sorting it yet. How, how, how at all did we arrive at this very Feng Shoe place in life? And now I remember the milk woman's complaint about having to place the milk packets right over a pile of shoes (predictably gathered) on the doormat. The pile was there because there was no space in the shelf and also in the morning I didn't have to bend down to retrieve the packets. I could just open the door and pick the packets on the pile from arm level. So convenient, so back buddyish and just sho(e) lovely.

So now things to do-

a) I have to dispose all these shoes, which I have now moved into my car's boot. I have to either donate or avail that discount which a local shoe store gives for old shoes when you buy new ones there. "Fling shoe for that perfect Feng Shui". How does that sound for a byline ;) eh? Or should I say "Boot the boots from the car's boot"- is that too much to boot?

b) Buy a milk box and place it on the grill so that my coffee does not smell like Bata showroom.

c) Remember not to use that rice powder in my dosa.