The Ashtray Lesson

Sometimes, it’s quite hard to remember what you did or said or heard a couple of days, or maybe hours ago. But things from your childhood are way easier to recall. In your mind, you can go back in time and still retain that first person view into your innocence. Not all people have the privilege of getting a wonderful childhood and a loving family as I did. Not everything from your childhood is a happy memory. Yet they are, more often than not, willing and able to remember their childhood. I wonder why that is.

I gave it some thought and reached a definitive, albeit contentious conclusion: that adults yearn for simplicity in their lives more than anything. Adam chose to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.  Now I am no Christian, but there’s something to take away from this story. That that very moment, Adam surrendered ignorance and innocence on behalf of all of mankind. Humans by nature are bound to search for knowledge. It’s the resulting complications that make us ache for a dose of innocence and a window into the times when we kicked soccer balls and made sandcastles.

One particular incident is etched into my mind.

I was four years old and sitting on the divan in the drawing room of our house. It’s not hard to recreate the setting. South-facing window to my left, a sofa and a coffee table in front of me, and a door into the room next to it, the television on top of a wooden showcase, and an embedded wall shelf behind me.

On it sat an old brass ashtray.

As a child, I often wondered why my Dad insisted on keeping that ugly, bent, soot-covered piece of trash in a room where one is supposed to welcome guests. It was as if he were fanatically attached to it. It did not serve its intended purpose as an ornamental device. Of course, I was too young to demand, or even deserve an answer.

So it was this one weekend that I was sitting on the divan, poring over a copy of the Oxford School Atlas (I am a born nerd) when my Dad came into the room with one of his young office colleagues. Apparently, he’d been invited to lunch with us that weekend. In our house, all gratitude was - and still is - expressed by my Mum’s out-of-this-world awesome cooking skills.

That day we had this amazing chicken curry with rice, and very soon, to nobody’s surprise, out came the glorious praises for Mum’s cooking.

So lunch was over and my Dad accompanied my Mum to the kitchen to help her with the dishes, and it was up to me to entertain the guest.

“How old are you?”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Made any friends yet?”

I answered those questions as articulately as possible, or much as a four-year-old’s intellect would allow, all while our guest was staring at the TV and smoking a cigarette. Maybe it was his kind of avuncular affection.

Don’t get me wrong. He had had the manners to ask my Dad before smoking. But it was not proper to smoke in front of a kid. And what could Dad do? In my house, you’re not supposed to deny the guest. So I did what I could. I sat holding my breath for as long as I could, and excusing myself for a glass of water or something similar whenever it became unbearable. And our guest was enjoying his afternoon way too much to notice.

Then suddenly, he got up and leaned over me to the wall behind the divan. Startled, I looked behind and saw him jerking the ashes from the cigarette into the ashtray. It left dark oxidation stains on the rim.

After he left – for which I was glad – my Dad came into the room to clear the coffee table and noticed a cigarette butt sticking out of the ashtray.

He was livid.

Before he could shout any more than he already had, my mom rushed in, took a look at the ashtray and put it all together. She immediately dragged him into the bedroom, and over a period of about half an hour, talked him down.

Later I found my Dad sitting on a reclining chair with a disgusted expression his face. He didn’t look like he wanted to talk.

I went to Mum. She was arranging some clothes in the almirah.

“The ashtray is for depositing ash, right? Then why is Dad so angry?”

Mum gave me a look, sighed, and started speaking.

“It’s because the ashtray is important to you Dad. It belonged to your grandfather. It’s been in the family for three generations, including you.”

“But what’s the point? It is still an ashtray. It’s not even a good show piece.”

“Some objects have a different kind of value to some people.” The expression for that, I later learned, was “sentimental value”. “Your grandfather was a self-made man. He worked very hard to raise up your father and his siblings. Your father keeps it there to remind him of his father’s sacrifice, so that he doesn’t lose inspiration for working as hard as he does himself.”

“I get that,” I said, channeling an extremely mature adult. “But why is Dad so angry? It’s nobody’s fault that that Uncle (guest) did not know about it.”

“Oh, but it is your Dad’s fault,” said Mum, with a smug, satisfied, I-told-you-so expression on her face. “You see, he did not pay attention to what I’ve been saying for months.”

“Which is…?”

“…that you should take care of what’s important to you. You should keep it guarded. Being paranoid about such important things is not a bad practice. You always keep that atlas of yours lying around. What would happen if a rat came in and shredded it?” (She made a gesture as if tearing something apart.)

“Sorry… I going to keep it properly on the desk…”

“You should, because what gives you the most joy can hurt you the most too.”

“So…,” I inferred, the cogs turning audibly in my head, “that means I should stop using my drawing book. And playing with my soccer ball. Because if the ball bursts or that rat eats my drawing book, I will be very sad.”

“So you’ll stop drawing and playing?”

“But if it will make me sad…”

“You’ll only be sad if you don’t take care of them. And those things, they make you happy too, don’t they? If you keep yourself away from things you love for fear of being sad when you lose them, you will become a coward.”

“Mum, what’s a cowud?”

“Your father bought you a dictionary, didn’t he? Go look it up. It’s C-O-W-A-…”

Your life’s first practical lesson stays with you, no matter what.