How vasuli can be harmful
Updated On: 06 October, 2023 09:18 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
Our obsession with frugality, which tends to chip into our sense of self-worth, has its roots in financial trauma that pervades our consciousness and sparks feelings of guilt and shame
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These days I’ve found that I savour more enthusiastically a two-course meal rather than a buffet. I’d rather pay for an excellent bottle of wine than drink something substandard. Representation Pic
I was recently in Dubai for a week. Partly for work and partly for familial reasons—my brothers have been living there for around two decades and my sister had travelled from Mumbai to spend time with us. It was a D’Mello sibling reunion. On our first evening, as I placed my little one in the bathtub, one of my brothers enthusiastically handed me a packet of bath salts from the Dead Sea. I wondered how long it had been sitting around, waiting to be used. This is not untypical of mine and other immigrant families—hoarding and holding on to luxurious-seeming things, postponing their use to an elusive future, delaying the moment of gratification. You either buy or are gifted an expensive perfume and if you dare to open it at all, you use it so sparingly, it outlasts its own expiry.
I’ve been thinking a lot about immigrant behaviour and its resonances cross-culturally. Within the South Asian diasporic context, I have mused about what constitutes an immigrant aesthetic. Why do most South Asian homes in foreign countries look similar? What explains the preference for plastic tablecloths and plastic flowers? Longevity, of course. Draping the table in protective plastic keeps its surface intact, preventing the threat of stains. I always disliked this custom because it kept you from appreciating the beauty of that surface—whether glass or wood. Plastic flowers do not fear mortality. Their USP is their ability to withstand death. Instead of dying, they acquire layers and layers of dust and continue to sit in the same spot for centuries, un-admired, their presence contributing to the domestic backdrop.
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