Being Your Plastic Bag

The little guy never thought his fate would bring him to the garbage dump. He was tied inside a kitchen dustbin for a day and given away to the garbage collector the following morning. His expectations from life were never of abundance. He felt luxurious staying in the refrigerator for at least a week with all the milk, chocolates and juices, who were thankless and always wished to visit the Kelvinators showed on TV that housed a wedge of a watermelon and an uncut cake kept outside the box. He was excited about the idea of travel, irrespective of whether he was used to pack shoes in the suitcase, or just carried around to hold used underwear for four days. However, he thought that he deserved to go with a little more respect. He'd have enjoyed being thrown away at the hands of a school boy embarrassed that his parantha wrapped in aluminium foil was put inside a poly-bag instead of a Tupperware lunch-box. His idea of the best way to leave was being given away to an underprivileged kid shouting, “uncle, panni de do” outside the Hanuman temple on a Tuesday. That would’ve secured a place for him in heaven.

The poor one was unaware that little boys have a variety of lunch boxes to choose from and uncles don’t give away the “panni”. He could’ve been flown like a kite by the dusty semi-naked kids. He could’ve enjoyed trips to the Ashtmi Pujas, collecting kanjak food and bills of ten. He could've enjoyed his first monsoon riding on the head of a rickshaw puller. He learnt the hard way that life in a rich man’s house might look luxurious, but for a lowly sabzi wala polythene like him, there was no respect. There were countless like him at the local mandi, praying to visit a big house someday.

The richer looking and bigger plastic bags believed that they enjoyed a higher status. Belonging to nation-wide supermarket chains, they were used for important things like stocking old toys in the top most shelves that required a bit of furniture climbing to reach. Some of them started assuming importance as they were taken for shopping trips to the kind of supermarkets they came from. Unaware of the fact that the person who carried them tried hard to straighten their wrinkles out and not feel embarrassed in front of the cashier, they lived their mid-ranged delusional middle class lives, trying hard to believe that they were just as respected as reusable cloth bags. There’s only so much that their health and perseverance could allow though. The end was almost always in a corner of the kitchen, collecting disposable party glasses on a celebratory night, only to be thrown out the next morning.

The superior plastics, the branded bags who cared for things like style and boasted of their knowledge that little children were to be kept away from them, lived not in the lower, easily reachable shelves. They were properly kept in the wardrobe, folded to perfection, to be used at times that commanded importance; times when glittery gift wrapping paper would fail to show the importance of the gift. They knew that they would never be used for all the work that the cheap plastic bags were made to do. They knew that the cloth bags weren’t necessarily above them. They waited patiently and at ease for the opportune moment of their use.

There came a time when one of the branded bags was preened and handed over to someone who deserved that importance. Pressed beneath the gifts lying open, it lay wrinkled to an extent that no amount of pressure could straighten. The only life options available to him, thenceforth, were either of the middle class plastic bag or that led by the lowly polythene; and sadly, the option was not for him to choose. The end, as always, had to be the garbage dump.

Reflecting on their lives at the dump, waiting for death to come slowly, a few hundred years a step, they all had enough time to question the creator about the wasteful lives that they led. The purpose of their existence was never clear and they felt just like humans questioning the almighty for answers to life. But there was one difference between their creator and the almighty that they were aware of. At least their creator, man, could end their misery by saying no to the plastic bag.

Image Source: theenvironmentalblog.org