Requiem for a Refrigerator

I have always wondered where do all old and used appliances go. Do they have a graveyard like the elephants in the wild? I am sure all of us can think of a few appliances that we liked but just faded from our memory.

Dad was quite an appliance enthusiast. I have memories of things like a big Philips radio and a tape recorder that had large spools that he bought from the Gulf. The radio was a stereo and could also function as an amplifier. It had those elongated valves that emitted an eerie flickering glow inside. At the back there were numerous black sockets. Most of the time it was not working and when it did, I listened to Gavaskar and Vishy cracking centuries. Dad used to ask us to listen to BBC to get our pronunciations right. 

He and I shared an interest in listening to news. (Mom says I got it from him. She has an explanation for this. She says that when she she was carrying me and had labour contractions, she told my dad that she needed to be taken to the hospital. And he asked her to hold on till the News Bulletin was over.)  He used to follow the election results closely and we had this table that we drew up that had columns that either he or I updated after every bulletin. I set alarms so that I could wake up early and impress him.

We had a white coloured ’Frigidaire’. The name fridge came from Frigidaire, just like Xerox stands for any kind of photocopy. Ever since I remember, it was under repair. But my brother told me about a time when it worked. It had a stock of Cadbury chocolates, ice-creams, juices and jellies. I imagined that if it came on, the chocolates and other stuff appeared magically. It travelled with us to every place we moved to and it became part of our furniture. There were times when a mechanic got it to work and then it was pure delight for all of us. We rushed back from school to check if the sweetened water that we kept with sticks in tumblers became ice. We chewed on the ice even in the freezing Bangalore winter. 

I found a good use for it when it didn’t work. I used it as my cupboard and kept my books and stationery in it. The shelves were perfect, I kept my Phantom and Tarzan comics in the slots for bottles on the door. The Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys went in the vegetable chiller. My school books took the rest of the space. If memory serves me right, I am sure I kept my maths, physics and chemistry books in the freezer given my hatred for them.