It's the Small Things | Clutter Turned Coordinates
“Vavoooo…Vavoooo…Vavoooo…mmm…”
“One, two, three…”
Slowly, my toddler closed his tiny eyes and drifted into the world of dreams. Carefully placing pillows on either side and ensuring no mosquitoes were playing hide-and-seek in the bedroom, I then tiptoed to the hall – only to slip and nearly fall.
Oops. That was the auto maman, as my little one calls the driver from his toy tuk-tuk. The tuk-tuk itself lay abandoned somewhere on the play mat. For a moment, I wondered how the auto maman had been severed from his vehicle. Did the rickshaw driver have an accident?
Curious, I paused and began observing the scattered toys more closely. They no longer seemed misplaced but deliberately arranged.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The tuk-tuk lay on its side, not upright. Meanwhile, the big elephant and the small elephant faced each other – perhaps a mother and child in conversation. Four pebbles he had once rescued from a flower pot were also neatly aligned in the arm of the excavator. A pawn and two knights sat inside the tuk-tuk – passengers, undoubtedly.
On most days, I would have picked each toy up and returned it to its box. But that night, for the first time, I couldn’t unsee what I saw. These were not toys on the floor. They were maps – routes charted by my child’s mind.
We often say a child’s mind is like a sponge. Yet, in our nightly routine of spreading the bed and decluttering his play area, my husband and I realised how many stories we had missed reading, how many worlds we had failed to notice. At the same time, I felt a quiet pride that we had resisted gifting toy guns, rifles and addictive digital toys – objects that quietly shape behaviour, reinforce stereotypes, and rehearse power.
Perhaps, the toys on the floor are not clutter but coordinates – small markers of how the mind wanders, experiments and invents. Long after the toys are boxed away and the floor is clean, these scattered maps will remain, etched quietly into memory, reminding us of a time when imagination needed no permission and order was the least interesting possibility.
Tonight, instead of tidying up, I stood still, reading the geography of imagination spread across the floor.
Swathi Gopi works in the finance domain and writes as a personal passion while navigating motherhood alongside her professional life.
We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.
And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.
Read the series here.
This article went live on February twenty-first, two thousand twenty six, at thirty-eight minutes past five in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
