My bag is killing me. That’s what a recent New York Times feature said. It was about how supersize purses, bags and handbags imperil female backs and clog sidewalks. It started with an NY woman deciding to train for a marathon and meeting a physical therapist, who spotted the woman’s enormous Sigerson Morrison handbag and at once refused to work... for here NY Times policy raised its head to say that I must pay to read more, and I don’t like paying in dollars.

So I did the next best thing — I looked at my bag. It is a rather respectable-looking bag, if unbranded, nondescript and a little weary, made of good leather, but bulging at its sides and with things sticking out. Oversize and frumpy. Does a woman’s bag look like her? Is it her doppelganger? Perhaps. But it is also doing things to my back, neck and my right shoulder with its weight. My back aches and a drowsy numbness pains my senses as though a millstone I have hung.

My bag is a killer, too. So are most of my women friend’s bags. In the silly season, I have to do something; I have to shed weight and excess baggage, so I really looked deep into my bag and came up with a shocking truth. The weight that bogs me down, if I have to classify and document it under heads, will amount to nothing.

In an envelope, there were four plastic buttons that my father wore on his panjabi, but had been given to a friend who had stayed over and found her kurta buttonless in the morning. There was an old floppy in which I had copied an article by Susan Sontag, her speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at Frankfurt in 2003, where she noted that the American ambassador was deliberately absent to avoid being seen with someone who thought and said things about Bush and his Iraq invasion that weren’t part of US policy. Bent on self-improvement, I had never been able to throw it away.

In a small envelope, there were two lottery tickets, with a prize money of Rs 55 lakh, but the draw date was 11/11/2006. The last date of claiming the prize was over a few weeks ago and I hadn’t bothered to even check the results. And yet I was clinging on to hope.

The bag was overrun with small plastic folders. The things I had done to them. Under each transparent cover, I had stuffed in cards, tickets and old ATM receipts, about 56 of them. There were two old credit cards that were invalidated five and three years ago. There was an old SIM card, from a phone that stopped working three years ago. There was an old bank receipt, folded several times, which made it stand out, but I don’t know why. A blue plastic mini folder carried the monthly local train pass I used in Mumbai, but it’s been six months since I came away and I still feel I need it. There was a restaurant bill, reminder of a beautiful lunch on a beautiful afternoon in Mumbai.

There were about four combs, thrown in at different times because I couldn’t ever find the one that was already in. There was an invitation to a seminar on violence against women, with a lovely logo, which I had meant to cut out. There was a metal knob I had wrenched free from my wardrobe, which I have been carrying for months because I needed a matching one, but I never feel like getting into a Chandni Chowk store. There were discount coupons — two thick wads of them — from my mobile service provider, of which I have not used a single one and they expire on the 31st. There was a hair-band and rubber bands, all attempts to control my hair, which is short but problematic. I almost expected the White Rabbit to walk out of it, crying “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”

So a few scraps of paper and odds and ends added to the dead weight on my shoulder? (My women friends are equally puzzled by their findings.) Do we carry some other baggage, too, not quite tangible, but accounting for the missing kilos? Something called “emotional baggage”, the inability to break from the past, which, according to men and writers of wellness columns, accessorise women, especially women who are the “walking wounded”, full of unresolved hurt and anger from the past? But which many women find normal, anyway, and breaking from hurt and anger is also throwing away your memories, hope and love? The weight is ok, really. It’s probably more difficult to deal with lightness. Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being found that.

As I write this, I get a message on my cell that says: “Ho Ho Ho Once again it’s that time of the year when Santa comes to town.” Another year is on its way, and I wasn’t able to throw away half of the scraps of paper I found at the bottom of my bag. What will happen to my back? Merry Christmas!

chandrima@abpmail.com