How vasuli can be harmful

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

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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I’ve never been able to empathise with the fixation for such flowers, I know it is rooted in price points. You buy them once and they last forever. You buy regular seasonal blooms; they die in three days. I personally find immense beauty in witnessing their withering. When I lived in Delhi, I delighted in spending about Rs 20 to Rs 40 a week on flowers, then bringing them home, arranging them in vases around the house, letting their scent infuse the air and caring for them daily until they had lived out their shelf life. This ritual allowed me to access the change in seasons. I’ve also noticed that many immigrant homes prefer to keep only a money plant as a living being. All other foliage consists of un-degradable plastic.

My partner and I have made a game out of identifying shops run by South Asians in Italy. The instant give-away is the persistence of white light; another stylistic preference I struggle with. Is it something inter-generational; this unspoken tryst South Asians have with the white tube light? Has it something to do with our earliest memories of electricity? It’s not necessarily cheaper than warm light, so I fail to understand its continued use. Is it comforting because we associate it with some notion of home? Does my dislike of white light validate my identity as a ‘third-culture immigrant’ who has distanced themselves from familial tastes and cravings? Why do I feel physically ill when I spend too much time in this antiseptic illumination?

Watching videos on TikTok, I have begun to understand how many of these tendencies are shared by migrants across cultures. ‘Show me you’re an immigrant without telling me you’re an immigrant’, is how the video generally begins. You see snapshots of corners from people’s homes, and they look like homes I have known in Goa, in Mumbai, in Delhi, in small-town India, and elsewhere in the world. Showcases filled with strange paraphernalia, collected over decades and rarely ever looked at or cleaned. The ‘good’ tableware and cutlery safely stored away for that rare occasion when the Queen of England might visit. Cheap soaps and shampoos on bathroom shelves. The higher quality stuff stored away for special occasions. Five pairs of cheapish shoes we keep reusing so we don’t have to invest in one excellent pair that could actually empower our feet.

Even though I am a sucker for the word ‘vasuli’, I have become critical of my own relationship with it. I am increasingly aware of how financial trauma continues to infect our lives, so that even when we are no longer in a precarious state money-wise, we continue to skimp, because we have known scarcity, either personally or ancestrally. It takes generations to undo this kind of unspoken trauma because it pervades our consciousness and enables feelings of guilt and shame. It’s intriguing to think about what we are comfortable spending money on and what makes us hold our purse strings tight. Many of us will take bank loans to host a lavish wedding but wiggle out of paying our domestic workers fair wages. 

There is a fine line between wanting to do bacchat and being miserly. Our obsession with vasuli starts to chip into our sense of self-worth. 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. I’m finding joy in being precious about my body’s relationship with pleasure. At LuLu in Dubai, I found brass filter coffee sets. I love having them in my kitchen in Italy. I relish their weight, finish and feel. My sister got our kid a stainless-steel set, with plate, bowls and a tumbler. Our daily encounter with their materiality enhances our general well-being. 

You could say I’m turning into a snob. I would say I am proudly pursuing every opportunity to encounter beauty and finesse in my everyday life. No more postponing for later, no more delayed gratification. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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