When I was a kid in a family of three, there were clear roles demarcated for my mother, my father and myself, with additional walk-on parts for the people who worked in our house. My mother would prepare the food with the cook, the other staff member would wash and press the clothes before taking down the suitcases and the bistras (the bedrolls) from the store cupboards and cleaning them. I would then be told to make myself scarce while my mother went into rising panic and my father packed, logically and efficiently. Somehow we would be in the car and at the station, well before the train left Howrah for Bombay. In the train, there would be a superficial unpacking, the food and sleeping clothes coming out, books, magazines and comics deployed for the one day sandwiched between the two nights that the train took to get us across the country. Early on the second morning, as the train wheeled though the tunnels in the Western Ghats, we would gather up our stuff and roll up the bistras .
Later, the packing became different and mostly for air travel. I had begun to pack my own suitcases and trunks while going to boarding school. Suddenly I was packing to go abroad to study and the ball game was different. I watched other people pack and unpack and realised that the act of packing suitcases was as personal an act as putting your handwriting on paper.
The two kinds of packers
In the categories, the first section would be for the chaotic packers. These are the people who slam open their suitcases and then assault them with their clothes and effects. In go the pants and shirts, losing their ironing as they hit the bottom of the bag. Caught up in the flurry of cloth are the more chunky objects: the shoes, the shaving equipment, the make-up bottles, the books and papers required for the trip, the chargers and the external hard drives. Somehow all of this is stuffed into the bag before the travellers wrestle the thing shut. The chaotic packers then straighten up and smack their hands in satisfaction. “When’s the taxi coming?” they say and sit down and switch on the TV so that they can be sure to be late for the flight.
Then there is the opposite category: the militarily meticulous packers. These people usually start with making a list or several lists. Everything they plan to take on a trip is put down in logical detail. Then the different kinds of material are arrayed according to category: socks here, bras there, liquids on one side, hard solids on another side, papers in neat stacks, and so on. Then the suitcases are opened and filled almost scientifically, as if the packers are reproducing a complicated mathematical equation. When you see the finished suitcases, you feel as though the things were born like this and there is no possibility of them being packed any other way. The meticulous packers then shut the suitcases, stand next to the door and wait for the transport that will get them to the airport well in advance.
There is obviously also a difference between packing for a long trip and a short one, and the chaotic packers usually get away with their chaos if their journey is of a short duration. The meticulous packers don’t have to be quite so meticulous for short trips, but usually they are because of their wiring.
Between the extremes
Somewhere between these two obvious extremes fall most of us. Over the last 25-odd years I have found myself packing for long intercontinental trips twice a year. I therefore find it very difficult to pack for a short trip, a bit like a cook who has worked so long for a wedding caterer that he can no longer manage to cook for just two or three people. For the longer trips I tend to be closer to the meticulous packers, while for the shorter trips I tend towards chaotic packing.
Even as I say this I find myself thinking of a friend who manages to be both extremes at the same time. This guy, let’s call him T, flies so much that he is single-handedly responsible for 5% of total global warming. T goes on long trips and short ones, sometimes so close to each other that they form a sort of morse code of long and short dashes. T makes lists, T lays everything out, and then, as if a demon has entered him, he starts to throw everything into the suitcase he has placed on his desk. The jumbled jungle of stuff is still bouncing on itself when T literally jumps on the suitcase and shuts it before it has time to react. Then he stands there, breathing hard as if he’s just won a hard game of football. I look at T and I remember my father also breathing sharply after he had shut a suitcase overstuffed by my mother.
It was a very different kind of breathing, just as those slow journeys were a very different kind of travel.
