We are at a stage when it is imperative that we simplify our lives, de-clutter and rid ourselves of the unnecessary stuff we hoard so that when the grim reaper comes calling, we don’t leave a mess behind for someone else to sort out.

Years ago I followed the advice columns that said: If you haven’t used something for three years, pass it on to someone else or throw it out. Very often, of course, I wound up giving away things only to find I desperately needed a short while later. (That is some kind of “law”, isn’t it? You throw away an apron, a sieve, or a peeler that you haven’t used even once in your life – and three days later, you need just that particular plastic apron, that double sieve, that vertical peeler…and nothing else from your cupboards will do!)

But no, I won’t let that obscure law influence me now: and I open the first wardrobe and taking a cue from the Japanese art of de-cluttering, I attack it without mercy and start to pile up clothes to be discarded ... and then suddenly I catch sight of a familiar kurta a loose, collarless long shirt). Faded, shapeless, probably unattractive by your standards — but I am captivated and I linger over it because it saw me through those happy months of anticipation when I was pregnant and I know for sure that when my son first learnt to recognise colours and shapes, he could find them all in those purple and pink and green swirls. When he took his first steps, too, he took them towards me in that outfit, so how can I get rid of it now when it could perhaps still work its magic and get him homeward bound again?

So I put it away and move to the next shelf — and some more stumbling blocks. How do I toss away the moth-eaten two-sided shawl that Mother bought in Kashmir in the 1960s, and used until one of us girls “borrowed” it for a party, left it behind — and then spent weeks trying to locate it again? As for that denim skirt that still holds fast at the seams, all I have to do is expand the elastic at the waist and I can tell it has another few years of life in it. It was the first thing I stitched on my mother’s sewing machine — and I had to “repair” both machine and skirt three times before it was ready!

It’s no use, I tell myself. Clothes just bring back too many memories. I would probably do a better job elsewhere in the house — and I head for the kitchen where sentiment surely cannot extend to soulless utensils.

But I am wrong. The memories are even more powerful there because they are backed by three generations of men and women from both sides of the family.

So that wooden mortar and pestle that made the chutney just right in my mother-in-law’s house shares pride of place with my mother’s metal bowls in which the meringue was whisked to perfection and the plum pudding steamed — and visions of childhood feasts and festivals float before our eyes. (It doesn’t matter that I gave up grinding my own chutney and really never took to baking meringues — what if the urge strikes out of the blue one day?)

And thus, after an entire day trying to de-clutter, I find that almost nothing has been discarded. To do so would be to cast off the past and let happy times slip through the fragile net of memory.

So resolutions are forgotten and almost everything stays where it is — a private memory bank that needs no password and no code for me to enter: only the time to sit and reminisce.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.