Paper Hoarding Dustbin Expert

In the planet of the dustbins, there are some that are first among equals. Primus Inter Pares. These celebrities, these super-achievers of the trash-keeping race can be found in quaint corners of our bedrooms and living rooms. Their Royal Hollownesses are never disgraced with the filth of the kitchen or the stench of the loo. Spent tea leaves and severed carrot heads for individuals so regal?? No Sirs! Not in this world.

They are attired more often than not in shimmering aluminum or if the owners are of the Fab-India cult, they’d be handmade with delicious care and a surprisingly uniform set of irregularities to insist on the handmadedness. Sometimes they might come with wooden frames and linings made of soft silk. The ignorant onlooker could be forgiven for mistaking such a work of fine art for the owner’s coronet.

With royalty comes joblessness. (Prince Charles?!! ) So these friends of ours collect tiny titbits of polite garbage like connoisseurs of only the finest wine, and take a month before being ready for the obligatory trip to empty their tummies.

Unbeknownst to them, these ultra cool superbins are keen observers of household history. They have days of family life and secrets lying within their emptiness.

The one in my bedroom contains more than a dozen Choco Pie and Cadbury wrappers and a month full of used Johnson’s buds and floss. (I like to remind all dustbins of their place in the larger scheme of things.)

There is absolutely no paper; I never ever throw away any paper, no ATM receipt, bill, scrap, random sheet of data. I am a compulsive collector of the ragii papyrus. And I have been at it for years. Every bag I own has one compartment reserved for all the paper that accompanied my life for the years that the bag escorted me.

It began rather harmlessly. In college, everyone generally agreed that I couldn’t be more absent minded. It was a common fear amongst my friends that someday I’d start chewing water during a meal. Very soon my friends convinced me of my disability. Treacherous people they! And a strange paranoia enveloped my innocent soul.

What if someday, I lose something so important that it could fundamentally change the course of my life and destine me for eventual and spectacular failure??

And being not a man of small measures, I decided on that very day this existential question appeared in my troubled mind, before stopping to probe what could be so important, (i think the exact translation from Hindi would be) without seeing Aao or Tao, that I would collect every scrap of paper I ever came across in my life.

So my dustbins never have any paper. There you have it; they can tell you a lot about the person too.

What story does your bin tell?