As I walked into the kitchen to top up my drink at a friend’s, I stopped to take in her fridge covered with magnets from around the world. A leaning tower from Pisa leaned over the handle, beer mugs from Oktoberfest overflowed with rubber froth, swaying palm trees beckoned me to Bali. I thought of my dying refrigerator back home, with nothing but a sad little ‘Godrej’ emblem in fading letters. My travel stories were nothing but tall claims.
I barely make an effort to hunt for souvenirs when I travel. As philosophical as it sounds, ‘they come to me’. Strange things draw me, often food items, which I carry back home. An empty jar of wasabi cookies is my souvenir from Taiwan, even though it’s downgraded to being a keeper of Parle-G biscuits that I dunk into my cup of evening chai. Last year a grouchy old lady in Taiwan sold me an overpriced wooden cat that I love, and as it sits stupidly grinning on my mantelpiece it takes me back to the narrow, bustling lanes of Alishan and that dank shop.
On a three-month backpacking trip through Southeast Asia with a friend, we had had a terrible time in Vietnam, and I was quite okay with having no mementos from there. The Mandarin script is challenging to say the least, and lost in translation, we had been cheated on bus fares, we paid for private rooms and were shown into shared dormitories, and given general class train tickets for the price of first class.
A style statement
After a harrowing time traversing the length of Vietnam, we finally found redemption and cool climate in the northern mountains of Sapa. I decided to go for a trek with a local Hmong guide, and more than the rolling green valleys, I was fascinated by her traditional knee-length leg warmers. On a short water break, I was astonished when she took them off. They were actually triangular pieces of black velvet with a green cord attached to the tip, and she wound them around her leg effortlessly and strapped them up to show how they were worn. The whole procedure was as riveting for me as perhaps a foreigner watching an Indian draping a sari in no time, and I dragged Tsu to the local market with me the next day to help me buy a pair. The velvet triangles share space in my drawer with my impractical heels that I own but never wear. But unlike the heels, the warmers take me back to the lovely Hmong women with whom I jostled in the market and the mountains of Sapa, the saving grace of my Vietnam trip.
The books in my bookshelf are interspersed with a variety of objects that have no plausible explanation for being there. A stone ‘dodo egg’ from Mauritius wobbles crazily and falls all the time because I insisted on buying it without its stand. Amidst the clutter lies an empty bottle of Limoncello to take me back to a night of debauchery in Venice. It jostles for space with a Ladakhi hat that everyone at home says I look ridiculous in.
Sharing space
A pig-shaped piggy bank from the famous pottery square of Bhaktapur in Nepal sits there too (and which I managed to carry all the way from Kathmandu, breaking only one ear), together with a coral stolen from Lakshadweep on my first underwater diving trip, observably from before my responsible travel days.
A pair of wooden chopsticks resting in a bowl remind me of how determined I was to learn to eat with them, choosing greasy, roadside joints in Cambodia to practice, and where the loud kitchen sounds drowned the embarrassing clacking of my chopsticks. A traditionally woven Bhutanese box lies open, because opening it is tricky and I spent 24 hours once with my SIM card locked in it. A dinosaur from Bangkok stares at a copy of Maximum City , not because I associate Thailand with the origin of species but because I love dinosaurs in general, and I thought it was the best piece of oddity to get rid of the last of my annoyingly jingling baht coins with.
My most recent prized possession is a small Tree of Life in mosaic that hangs on my wall. It’s a miniature design of the huge dining table that I fell in love with at a showroom in Jordan; to buy it I would have had to sell my soul to the devil. I settled for the little wall hanging instead, which mocks me every time I look at it but also reminds me of the breathtaking artwork of Jordan.
Oddly below it on my bedside table, sits a salt and pepper shaker from Seychelles that I could have bought just about anywhere. I like the fact though that only I am privy to the connection, and no one would know its story, or that it has one, unless I tell it. A Chinese formal dress stitched by a local tailor in Hong Kong hangs in my wardrobe, which I wear on occasion. The day it catches a thorn and gets ripped or fades, my souvenir from that journey will be gone forever. But my memories won’t, and it would any day be better than having bought a ‘Ni Hao’ magnet. And most of all, I could proudly display a tombstone that says, Murakami style, “At least she never bought a fridge magnet.”
Born and brought up in the Himalayas, the writer is an adventurer who gets great joy in napping under the mountain sun, and in not bing a blogger.
