Don’t trash my treasures

The mementos and trinkets of our travels say a lot about who we are and, of course, where we’ve been.

Tablescape in the Kurosawa household.

How truly bizarre. By which my husband means bazaar. He’s a happy chap in 2020 because I’ve been nowhere near an exotic shopping destination and thus have not arrived home laden with battered brass pots, wooden whatnots and bolts of hand-loomed textiles.

He well knows my penchant for rescuing unloved items from roadside stalls and markets and heartily disapproves of such recklessness. I tell him it’s a harmless addiction as he surveys, say, an antique doll from Gujarat and then remarks that it’s armless, actually, and missing half its head.

The mementos and trinkets of our travels say a lot about who we are and, of course, where we’ve been. Our home is like a mini-museum dedicated to journeys past, even if some would label it a junk heap.

This year, I’ve restored a semblance of order and grouped various items by country of origin. I’ve also relegated a few unwise purchases to the back of an armoire. I can’t actually throw out such oddities because they’ve been rescued from cobwebbed sheds and dumpsters and it would be bad karma for me to seal their final fate.

Then there are the beautiful books of faraway lands and cultures, which increasingly I give away or donate to our local volunteer fire brigade for their monthly fundraiser events. Those I can’t part with, including tomes on the holy trinity of female artists (Berthe Morisot, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe), are in bedside piles so teetering that their extraction would cause a mini-avalanche.

My assorted “ornaments” are more accessible, each with a story, provenance and sometimes a recollected smell. Candle lanterns from Istanbul, when lit with tea-lights, throw mysterious latticed reflections and I imagine being in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus by night, breathing the rose fragrance of Turkish delight. A tall silver Aladdin-like jug with a hinged lid from Morocco would surely release a genie if its round belly were rubbed. To divest myself of such treasures would mean the letting go of memory.

And then there are the paper effigies of household items from Hanoi’s old quarter, burnt as funeral offerings to ensure the deceased has a prosperous transition to the next life. Irresistible, I say. The cut-out shapes of a pedicab, a laptop and a telephone fall out from the pantry’s “miscellaneous shelf” as my chap dives in to find a mandoline slicer from Denpasar market, circa 2015. It’s basically two lengths of splintery packing crate, strung with wires and held together by nails. He has carrots in need of dicing. Death by a thousand cuts. Call the souvenir emergency hotline, he mutters.