The adventure of the three sofa sets

I just got back from Chennai, where I went to pick up Ken after his month of lazing around on the couch with POGO and chips. He's 4 kilos fatter and has developed teenager attitude. But that is a not-so-important, temporary problem compared to the chaos I feel plunged into whenever I visit my parents' home. Apart from all the emotional baggage, it's physically overcrowded! Not with people. With furniture!

Take for instance, our sofa sets.
The first sofa set had become so old that Papa convinced everyone that it was best sold and a new one bought. Concerned about our potentially sofa-less state between the sale of the old set and the purchase of the new, he wanted to buy before he sold. He picked up a large carved sofa set which he claimed would go well with the large carved almirah that his father had picked up for 50 bucks at an auction in 1950 or so.

Having set up the new sofa and the antiquated almirah in the hall, he proceeded to buy a matching carved TV cabinet which occupied one wall end to end - and reduced the space in the drawing room by about 25%. Oh, and a matching center table as well as 2 carved stools (I have difficulty using that word in this context, but can find no other).

Anyway, at this point Daddy discovered that there were few takers for the old set, so he decided to get it re-upholstered and try again. Now he found that the offer price was lower than the expensive tiger print faux leather upholstery that he used. (He has such a thing for animal prints. Ugh!) To get back, he decided to do “the wise thing” and keep the old, newly-upholstered sofa as well. So now we had two sofa sets.

Shortly after this, my sister left for the US, and all her furniture (including her cane sofa set) was added to my parents collection. Despite her specific instructions to sell, they kept those for sentimental reasons. What with fashion, sentiment and price considerations, about 50% of our drawing room space is occupied by sofa sets. The other 30% is taken up by the TV Cabinet, the center table, the stools (!?) and the almirah. This is just the drawing room!

Despite long practice, I find it hard to navigate the maze of sofa sets that Dad has strategically placed all over the hall leaving a few inches of space. One has to negotiate one's skillfully to get from one end of the hall to the other. Moving around, especially holding something, is a difficult experience. One wrong step and I may be impaled on the hard wooden edge of some frightfully carved piece of furniture.

Oh, and you can't access the beautifully carved shelf space of of the cabinets because you can't open any of the drawers or the doors without physically moving all the rest of the furniture. So the stuff we initially put in there have remained - like buried treasure types. And we can't put new stuff in, so all the stuff that ought to be put away in drawers or cupboards are placed on top of all this furniture any which way. NOT a pretty sight!

The rest of the house is furnished around much the same principle. More.. more...more... of everything. They have also three sets of kitchen utensils (theirs, as well as my sister's and mine - which we cast away when we moved out of the city).

They have about 4 double beds as well as 3 dismantled ones, that occupy 2 bedrooms. And these include the cot bed I used as a toddler. There are around 7 supersized Godrej bureaus, four of which are simply used for all the old fashioned, faded and undersized clothes that my sister and I dumped when after college.

My folks live their life dangerously - and therefore angrily - among the overload of furniture in this space. My mother, now 65, finds it impossible to dust and maintain all this furniture. Or sweep under or around them. Not being wealthy zamindars in filmy villages, we also find it hard to get any respectable maid who will do so.

And don't even get me started on all the electronics that they have and never use. I ask "Why aren't you washing in the washing machine?" to be confronted with "Oh there's just one bucket of clothes!" "Why don't you play your CDs on the new HUGE music system?" "We don't know how!" "Why don't you watch all those DVDs of films that you wanted to see?" "We forgot how to use the DVD player!" There follows a demo and then on my next visit, both look sheepish like kids in a classroom and claim to have lost the detailed instructions and forgotten the lesson!

I know that it's their home and their life and they have a perfect right to live their life in any which way. Acquiring new furniture. Or fighting constantly over who cleans what. I mean, everyone has their own ideas of fun. But increasingly, I find it harder and harder to visit and even tougher to stay for longer than a couple of days. It would all be like Jerome K Jerome's classic "Uncle Podger hangs a Picture" if only tempers weren't so frayed. But they are and poor Ken's obnoxious parting advice to his grandparents was "You're married. You must love each other. And when I come next vacation, I'll clean!"