The Button box

 The Button Box

There was an old button box at home when I was a boy, a tin that once held chocolates but had long since been repurposed for a more practical, if less glamorous, role. It was about eight inches by six, a bit dented at the corners, and the design on the lid was faded with age – I can’t recall if it once showed a festive scene or perhaps a swirl of flowers. In those days, tins like these had lives long after their original contents were devoured. They became repositories for bits and bobs, a silent witness to a household’s steady rhythm.

Inside this tin lay hundreds of buttons, a true kaleidoscope of shapes and hues. Black and brown seemed to dominate – the practical shades of men’s jackets and trousers – but there were flashes of brighter colours too, a deep maroon here, a sea green there, and the occasional ivory-white disc that must have once fastened the stiff cuff of a starched shirt. There were cloth buttons, round and tightly bound, the kind that might have adorned a smart winter coat; smooth, polished wooden buttons, perhaps cut from some hardy tree long ago; cool metal ones, with a faint patina of rust around the edges; and the more common plastic varieties, lighter, shinier, and far more willing to roll off the bed if you weren’t careful.

On hot, lazy summer afternoons in Allahabad, when the household settled into the stillness of an afternoon siesta, I would tip the contents of this box onto the large antique four-poster bed, its high, carved headboard standing sentinel as I played. I’d sit cross-legged, feeling the faint tickle of the bedspread under my legs, and lose myself in the tumbling, clinking flood of buttons. I arranged them in long, winding trains, then in neat, disciplined rows like armies on parade. Sometimes they became imaginary cities with little round homes and wide, open streets, the larger buttons serving as town squares. At other times, they took the shape of spirals and whorls, carefully laid out patterns that had no purpose beyond my quiet amusement.

I have often wondered where all those buttons came from. I can recall my aunt, seated by the window with her sewing basket, snipping buttons from old, worn-out clothes before consigning them to the rag bin. Perhaps that’s how this collection began – the careful salvaging of still-useful parts from garments past their prime, a small act of thrift in a more frugal era. Clothes back then had a different life cycle – they frayed, tore, and gradually wore out, and their buttons often outlived their threads, popping off unexpectedly and rolling into corners like tiny, round fugitives.

Do people still keep button boxes, I wonder? Today, shirts and coats come with spare buttons neatly sewn onto a hidden seam or tossed into a tiny plastic bag, which inevitably disappears just when needed. It’s a practical approach, but it lacks the romance, the slow accumulation of odd shapes and mismatched colours, each with a hint of mystery about the garment it once held together.

There is something reassuring about the idea of a button box, a small, clinking archive of the past, and perhaps that is why it lingers so clearly in my memory. It was a treasure chest of sorts, a child’s hoard of forgotten pieces, each one a tiny fragment of a life once lived and loved.