How a fridge rocked the house on Diwali

How a fridge rocked the house on Diwali

By R Swaminathan

The frigid response to a call for a new fridge for the house almost set afire a ten thousandwalla this Diwali day. The lady of the house saw water oozing out of the cooling monster in our living room, and said something must be immediately done to get a new one.

What strikes a stingy husband in such a situation is the possibility of repairing the machine. The refrigerator was studied closely by me for the source of the spring. The tray below the crisper tray holding milk satchets was the villain of the piece. It was crushing the outlet too much and water was dripping in front of the fridge.

A quick examination of the tray revealed that it had been overloaded with all sorts of things _ cheap to expensive articles. The stored items below the overloaded milk tray included almonds, cashew nuts, cardamom jar, dates packets, laddus (giant size) acquired in recent marriage functions (from the groom's side), gram dhal, rava (half empty) and maida packet of 2010. God knows why all these things are hoarded in a fridge. A ready explanation is to protect them from pests and for a longer shelf life.

The fridge was overloaded with dough in two containers, prepared more than a week ago, and cooked items (when a spouse goes out for an impromptu dinner, the items are readily pushed into the fridge for the morrow.) The homemaker's job becomes easy next day. These foodstuffs sometimes emit a foul smell.

It is needless to describe the condition of the vegetable tray; it accommodates anything from broken coconuts and copras to fruits like mangoes and apples, simply because rest of the place is already fully occupied. No one wants the apples to roll out in the living room like gooseberry from a broken sack and so dumps them in the tray.

That the fridge is the most abused, overused and misused electrical appliance in the middle class homes these days will not be contested by any one. It is never switched off even if the people of the house look for getaways and spells of holidays to enjoy elsewhere. The electricity department really takes care of the defrosting operations whenever there is a forced or unexpected power failure/breakdown or shutdown. That again causes the ice in the chamber and below that to melt and spill all over the place.

The next place to look for is the door. The person who discovered the scope for creating shelves for an assortment of bottles, cans, lemons/eggs, chunam, betelnut powder, etc., needs to be hanged without a trial. Bottles come in sexy shapes and sizes and keep multiplying in the fridge after every shopping spree.

So I decided on "Operation Dehoarding " to please the madam. Removed as many things as possible and educated the user to keep the place free for the water to flow smoothly into the defrost tray provided at the back. Of course, it took a lot of argument to convince the person that the time is not ripe for a new fridge for the house even in an exchange mela or through combo offers. Things cooled off easily in a few minutes, and the special TV programme was another factor that brought about peace in the house.