Wallet worries

Wallet worries I am good at losing things. Repeated warnings by my benefactors to remain more alert, agile, and aware of my fault have borne no fruits. I continue shamelessly with my streak of losing stuff. With gay abundance, I lose house keys, phones, spectacles, pens, umbrellas, and wallets. Consequently, the recent loss of wallet did not agitate me much. This loss however was not so benign. The wallet contained my whole digital life. Everything was lost, my identity cards, driving license, credit cards, debit cards, club cards, the whole lot. The pain and anguish of dealing with paperwork, and tedious calls to banks, police, and sundry agencies exceeded the pain of losing my wallet. I am not sure when I got my first wallet. It was not during school or college days, as I had no money to keep in the wallet. My mother gave me a monthly collage allowance of Rupees 5 with a word of advice to spend it cautiously. I never carried those 5 crisp one rupee notes to the college. I kept them hidden in a small tin of cigarettes that I had found in the street corner. My elder brother had an evil eye on that tin but he could never found it. It was hidden on a ledge in our toilet. I received my first salary of Rupees 150 for a part-time clerk job in a bank. Such serious money necessitated the thought of acquiring a wallet. I invested a princely sum of Rupees 3 in a green, raxine wallet that came with a colored photo of actor Raj Kapoor on the inside flap. I was quite enamored by the actor’s photograph what with a secret dream of becoming an actor buried in my youth. Most of my salary of Rupees 150 went to my mother but a small sum remained in my wallet. Since there were no credit cards, and driver’s license back then, my wallet remained painfully thin like myself. I started keeping postage stamps and bus tickets to make it look thicker. I used to envy people who took out thick, and flashy wallets from their pockets. By this time, I had also acquired a girlfriend who wrote me tear-jerking love letters. I tried stuffing them into my wallet but they were too many so I had to find another secret hiding place to store them. The first authentic but imitation leather wallet I brought was from a stall on the footpath in a suburb of Grant road in Mumbai. This one was polished brown with almost half a dozen hideaways for notes and coins. This time, it came with a picture of Rajesh Khanna who had become a superstar by then. I promptly discarded his photo and replaced it with a photo of my girlfriend. Over a period of 5 decades since then, I flirted with the number of wallets, pouches, and clips, and even tried keeping used envelopes to store cash and cards. Finally, I ended up with a clip for cash and a small pouch for all the cards, both of which I lost on a recent sultry morning while I was looking for a bottle of water in the market. The loss of anything gives new insight into life after the loss. Consequently, I have resolved to not keep a wallet. I have used this chance to cancel many of the bankcards save one, closed many bank accounts, and shrunk my digital ID to just a PAN card. I have decided to keep some loose cash in my shirt pocket. Nothing really matters since for the next two years I am not traveling beyond a 5 kilometers radius of my home. For now, my wallet worries are over.