AGAIN THIS PANDA-MONIUM
It’s said that the thing that most often drives a wedge between a loving couple is money. In my 36 years of marriage, that wedge is comprised, however, of a ragbag of objects.
My husband wishes to keep all the artifacts he has received over the course of his long career. Some are heavy glass and metal plaques for the talks he gave at institutions that felt obliged to thank him. Others are published books, notebooks, folders, shoulder bags, cloth bags, caps, pens, flash drives, t-shirts in the wrong size, you name it. I also have two red turbans if anyone wants them for a Halloween party (if you promise not to return them). The problem I face is that nothing may be thrown, at least not in his presence.
For me the exact reverse holds true. Every object that enters my home needs to prove its worth. The admission rate at my home trounces that of Harvard or Stanford. Now you can understand why I get nervous when my partner announces that he’s off on a business trip to yet another faraway land because I know we’ll be getting into quicksand the second he lands at home. The same scene plays out over and over again with the detritus he brings back that I — and he — never really asked for.
On his return from China last March, my husband flung open his suitcase and whipped out gift objects to him (that he, in turn, gifted to me) from Panda country. He pulled out a cup that a colleague in Chengdu had given to him — a conical white ceramic cup with the outline of a panda on the inside.
“I can use that,” I said. I found a place for it in the kitchen where I keep all my ceramic cups. Then I sat down in my office to work.
A few minutes later, my husband walked into my office with what seemed like a bamboo stick in antique gold. It came in an elegant box that looked like a box for pens. “Nice,” I said, scribbling on a paper with the pen. I could use it, after all. But it weighed almost a pound. I dropped it in a pen holder in the living room, the fifth pen holder in my home in which most pens don’t work when I want them to.
A while later he seemed to have pulled out a red puppy. “Cute,” I said. I tossed it on the bed in my daughter’s room where it lay next to a stuffed giraffe and Tigger. I would let the tiger and the giraffe fight it out with puppy.
No sooner had I settled down to work than my husband strode into my office with one more object in hand. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that it was a white cloth. “Don’t disturb me now.” I said. “I’ll look at it later.” But I caught the satiny end of a stole that could have been a loin cloth used by a king from the Qin dynasty. Fine, I told myself, I’d wear it around my neck in winter.
A little later he was back again with a wooden stick on which someone had molded a panda face. It had got squished in the suitcase. He felt sorry. I didn’t. I was getting a crick in my neck watching my house get trashed by pandas. I could care less if a fake panda were mutilated in the cheek. My husband tried to fix the squished panda face. He left it by my computer. Annoyed, I moved it away to a place on top of my book shelf where it would remain until one of us — panda or I — bit the dust. I suspected panda would go first.
My soulmate barged into my room for the nth time. Now he held two colorful hanging objects, one in each hand. “What use are those?” I barked. “They’re too big to be worn as earrings. What does one do with three inch hangings in red, yellow, blue and green anyway?” At least the pandas had taste, I thought to myself. They dressed in white and black. My husband left the room, hangings in hand, muttering under his breath about how I was an ingrate.
For a final time, he was by my shoulder again as I typed. Now two pandas stared at me from inside a 10-inch wooden frame. “Stop!” I said. “Who ASKED for these?” And he whined that I was thankless and I said I didn’t ask for meaningless panda souvenirs and he said I was tasteless and I said he was tacky and both of us volleyed insults at each other that would have made pandas in the wild spear one another with bamboo stems.
Hours later when we were talking again like civil humans, I noticed that the two pandas in the wooden frame had now barged into our living area. I walked up to them and examined the work inside the frame. “Ah, this is embroidery,” I said. “I didn’t realize that at all. Delicate work.” My husband was smiling just a little. I looked pointedly at him. “Although I don’t exactly care for the frame.”
My husband’s China trip was many moons ago and the world is a very different place now. Now the two pandas have managed to tramp into our bedroom. They survey the world from the shelf in our headboard reminding me every night, before we go to bed, that even an object cleaving a marriage needs to be saved sometimes, perhaps as a reminder of the fragility of a marriage and of life itself.
~~~Kalpana Mohan is a writer in Saratoga, California. Her first book, Daddykins: A Memoir of My Father and I, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. Aleph Book Company published her second book, An English Made In India: How a Foreign Language Became Local, in 2019.
