It would be more appropriate to call it a green cabinet. Loosely mounted on a stand and with two sets of open-able doors, richly decorated with exquisite floral design in orange red colour, floral borders in yellow, red, blue, rose gold and gold, all over a lighter shade of parrot green background all around with some of the lines painted with a micro brush using perhaps one hair from a squirrel’s hair as they do it here, with a similar top and insides of the doors as well. The artistically painted stand, beautiful and proportionate, in complimentary design and colour, simply lifted the aesthetic appeal of this cabinet to a more refined level, I had felt when I first saw it.

I had seen it by accident as I was made to wait grudgingly by my wife in one corner with a sack of old mixer grinders and other similar kitchen paraphernalia for repairs which my wife thought fit to bring to the cinema theatre, Cinepolis, in one of the best and tastefully designed malls, WTP, in Jaipur. My wife had disappeared telling me to wait for a “while”!.........and I had known all the while what her “ a while” would be and embarrassingly felt, that to other visitors, I might be reduced to an awkward looking man with a ramshackle bag standing near a swanky store. Totally out of place, I thought and started looking here and there when my eyes fell on this masterpiece.

It was not a bit out of place! Placed prominently with other such exquisite artifacts as cupboards, shelves, cabinets, cases, wooden trunks, frames, tables, side units, library units and what not, all distinctly different as apparent antiques and painstakingly painted with different eye catching colours and patterns, it was difficult not to notice it. I fell for it and checked for the dimensions if it would fit on one side of our guest room recently painted in light pastel green!

The dimensions were perfect and I lost no time in paying an advance with instructions to add a glass top to preserve the painted top and to add two shelves and then to send it home as a surprise to my wife! See the “grudging” giving way to “care and love” as induced by the beauty of a green cabinet when actually we all know that colour “green” is so closely associated with ‘envy’!

My surprise hit the right chords as my wife telephoned me excitedly when it arrived, about the sweet surprise and also how well it fitted in its spot, just under the modern art oil painting of a photography green room with a smattering of radium green colour, as if it was just meant for this room. They say marriages are made in heaven to be blessed on earth. I say, cabinets are made by artisans in workshops to complement happiness in homes!

My wife then coyly asked me if she could use the space for her papers till I thought of another use. I was simply floored on two counts. One, I had never thought about its function having bought it purely for its bewitching beauty, like we most men do and two, I was ecstatic to note my wife was asking my permission like a newly-wed bride, even after so many decades of marriage! I felt like an amused king giving the permission to the queen, on a rare occasion for what was equally her, fully knowing I will never be able to reclaim it any time again and had no grudges whatsoever!....so much for the green revolution!

That evening as I returned home, I inspected the new member in our lives and was filled with content. I placed my little juke box and a gifted marble pen stand with a watch, engraved and painted in red and green! I gently ran my fingers over the paintings which felt protruded giving 3 dimensional effect, just like in embossing. I opened the doors and looked in and closed my eyes as I smelt the polish. The juke box had started playing Shamshad Begum’s famous number “Bachpan ke din bhula na dena……”

My mind went to the various cupboards I had experienced in my childhood. Among many I remember one at my grandmother’s place, an experience which might have been shared by all my cousins, and we were twenty seven in all. It was made of teak, heavy and large, polished in dark brown, with Belgium mirrors and crystal handles with secret drawers, and all of us wondered if the forefathers had left some secret legacy in it! However it was always left open and was never locked. I wonder how it could hold every ones belongings including ours when we went there for our summer holidays, with us placing few items like marbles and shirt or so to claim our place as if on Antartica or the moon! But those were different days. Cupboards were large like people’s hearts then and wants and personal belongings few. Such cupboards, not surprisingly lasted several lifetimes…….and perhaps not made any more…….

I also remember one another glass and wooden cupboard I shared with my brother where we kept our school books with clearly demarcated areas, two drawers each, including spaces for sticking photos, timetables, drawings and what not, leaving two drawers which my mother used to store her annual home-made pickles and Indian jam bottles and that too were many as she made so many variations then, murabba, chhunda, katki keri, methambo, methia keri, gunda keri with mustard base, gunda mirchi, gunda keri garmar, etc…..……and how she ensured our drawers were kept in spic and span condition…..like the rest of the house!

Can you imagine that just a whiff of polish smell of this new cabinet took me on a memory trip, still green and fresh in my mind, to my childhood days and I wondered how many more magical surprises this cupboard would offer every time I opened it. This four dimensional unit housed so many multi dimensional feelings, stories, memories, conjectures, fantasies, philosophy, romance, that even you may now agree why I prefer to call it a cupboard and not a cabinet!

It required very little cajoling by this cupboard through the juke box now playing in Shamshad Begum’s voice, “Sainya Dil me ana re, aake phir na jana re….”, that we decided to sleep in the guest room itself that night!.............and several nights later, experiencing that grass was greener on this side itself, as we slept on a new bedspread and matching pillows with intricate block print designs using camels in parrot green!

The camels, we felt, took us on another fairy tale trip of the Arabian nights as Shamshad Begum tried telling us to our half shut eyes…. “Yeh afsana nahi zalim, mere dil ki haqeeqat hai, mujhe tumse mohabbat hai, mujhe tumse mohabbat hai”