The Bag Lady

‘bag lady’
n. Slang
A homeless woman, especially one in a big city, who carries her possessions with her, as in a shopping bag.

That’s me. In every way. When my retail therapy hormones are on a roll, I do carry my world in a shopping bag. But most of the time, I don’t define this definition metaphorically. I live it, literally. I carry my world in my bag. And my bag is big.

I realised on a recent 2-day outstation trip, how I still haven’t figured how to travel light. I think I am fundamentally incapable of such a feat, simply because I live day-to-day in the constant bile-producing anxious company of my two imaginary friends: What If and Just In Case.

What If is the oracle; I believe he prevents bad things from happening just by hypothesising them. Just In Case is the echo effect, the problem-solver, the fixer. For instance, What If I am stranded in the middle of the road with a flat tyre, and no mechanic or sandwich in sight? Just In Case throws a mini-towel, a banana, a smaller wallet to keep the small change for mechanicwallas into my bag. What If my car gets towed and I have no money and need to rescue car from clutches of mean, corrupt, mole-sporting-groin-scratching policemen? Just In Case throws into the bag, driver’s licence, voter id card, pan card, JNU library card, tissues, addressbook, passport size photo, Feviquick, stapler, and another small wallet to keep these items handy for quick-sourcing (the groin-scratching bit just demands a stun gun though, and I am seriously contemplating an investment in one). Sometimes What If works with positive affirmations: What If all JNU teachers decide to bunk the day’s class, the weather gets all sexy, I get a surprise phone call from an out of town friend who brings me flowers and takes me out for a happy hours bitch-fest session? Just In Case gets into action, working with flowcharts to determine the size of bag (not too unfashionably unwieldy big, nor too small for a notebook in case class does happen), mint, perfume and range of five shades of lipstick (weather determines mood determines choice of shade/ matt/ glossy etc), spare bag for carrying flowers home, ancient gift for said friend (purchased when she still lived in same town), and Bluetooth headset for matching parking coordinates when we do land up at meeting point.

So, at any given point you will find in my bag, among other essentials, a mummified fruit, a three-fold umbrella, a hand sanitiser, two flavours of lip balm, three kinds of hair accessories, a pencil box with erasers and sharpeners and pencils and five kinds of pens, three sizes of wallets, safety pins (not less than the stipulated three I need for sari-wearing), a book and a pen drive. Don’t waste your breath on telling me just how anal I can be. Or that I have an obsessive compulsive disorder. I have been informed already. Also that allegedly, I can be identified solely by the size of my bags (‘of infinite proportions’) that are large enough to ‘pitch a tent for two’. Gross exaggeration, I protest, but only half-heartedly. I’ve spent too much time worrying about the right-heavy tilt my shoulders seem to be taking, if not about how I look like a coolie alongside my fashionista friends with armpit bags, to know how true everybody is.

I tried repentence. I tried rehab; I embarked on a monk-like abstinence to shed my material needs from my bag. All I got was a full bladder, a dirty public loo, and an empty soap dispenser. And a nagging Just In Case voiceover saying ‘I told ya to pack soap strips!’.
I tried carrying no bags. All I got was awkward, like a person with a missing limb, especially when I’d repeatedly run my thumb over imaginary bag strap that usually cuts into my shoulder that is already groaning with its perpetual burden.

Okay that does it, I decided. It’s high time someone wrote a stellar ode to the romance of bag connoisseurship.

And since I am shit scared about going into this original territory where no sensible woman has gone before, I’ll begin by stealing an analogy from a famous writer. So in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (definitive milestone in my reading career, awh, cool sigh), the hero revels in his appeal as an aggregate of averages. What shapes his pile of averages into something resembling a unique person, is his record collection. When a life crisis happens, he rearranges his record collection. Sometimes it’s just alphabetically. Sometimes it’s chronological. Sometimes it’s in the order he bought them in - a strange kind of autobiography.

“I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there; and when I've finished, I'm flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am. I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening ot "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.
But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me - or, at the very least, a doctor of Flemongology - to know how to find any of them. If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don't really want to go into. Well, you don't know any of that, so you're knackered, really, aren't you? You'd have to ask me to dig it out for you, and for some reason I find this enormously comforting.”


Replace record collection with bag collection. Voila! There’s me. Thing is, apart from bags (and maybe earrings), I don’t collect anything. Dolls, WWF cards, stamps, comicbooks, cricket memorabilia, audio CDs, clothes tags, Happy Meal toys, video cassettes, holograms, Pepsi crowns, coins, books, matchboxes, shoes, newspaper clippings….Uh, nah. Never done those. Significant childhood opportunity of education in hoarding and trading missed entirely, I know. Nothing to angst about, gloat about, have catfights about, run around bare-teethed about, or send fervent prayers to the gods for that one missing piece to make the collection complete. No transcendental joys in my childhood; only a placid simmering of ennui.

And so, among the many adult complaints and anxieties I like to swathe myself in, there's one that's top of the lot. It's The Missing Faculty of Passion. Note usage of the singular. It's my biggest woe. I do things reasonably well, but I like to leave them in a perpetual third-gear existence. I don’t do superlatives. I dance, I write, I love, I cook, I drive, I read, I drink, I shop, I housekeep, I listen to music, I sputter three languages, I get feminist about vague things, but I have no life-defining Passion, no perennially dangling carrot that makes me want to be a better woman (or even a blinkered horse, for that matter). No singular idea to arrange my life around. No material evidence of a collection called Me.

Except bags. Maybe.
I go through my bag collection at least twice every year, mostly when I’m trying to clear shelf space - always in vain. My mother used to go through it too with me, mostly to ask me pointless questions like ‘what’s so great about this rag? Throw!’ Now how to explain the concept of moment-collection and souvenir-ism? Like that one mad moody day I remember so vividly in its everything-sucks detail (the sterile exasperation, the fatigue, the ennui, the petulant narcissism of railing against a world that just. doesn’t. understand) that was salvaged by a fuchsia batik bag at People Tree? The bag was a saviour, and it’s rude (if not completely unethical and heartless) to throw heroes away.

Then there are the ‘surprise!’ bags. The Abstinence Reward (when your friend buys you a bag because you managed to tie yourself up in visible knots in a shop and refrain from buying the same whimsical bag even as it seductively screamed ‘I’m so YOU!’ Tipsy Yam has done it to me once and I will lurve that bag to death). Unexpectedly good gifts (from people you thought didn’t know you at all, until they chose a bag for you). Ingenious ideas (a miniature golden bag that hangs from wrist like a pearl bracelet? Bag Nobel, I award).

There’s a bag for almost every adult birthday I’ve had. I go through the series and feel all solid, like all my chinks and leaks are just a self-indulgent delusion. I like this feeling, of being put block-by-block together as a fictional character. Pretty much like the patchwork duffel bags that abound in my bag universe; like the notes I write on Facebook. Like a plotline even, a happy PoMo pastiche. ‘Delhi Metro, jhinchaak, frilly skirts, Tibetan silk, white fishies in blue waters, kitschy Tamil mythological commix.’

In a perfect, fictional world, I could wear all my bags and walk out as All of Me. But in realtime, on an everyday morning, I pick one of the many Me-s from my bag collection, and wear it on my sleeve for the day. Guess which one I'm playing today?