Author: Aanvi Banthia, Class VII C
Priya was known in her neighborhood as ‘The Girl who kept Everything’. Her room was a museum of forgotten bits of paper—tickets from movies she barely remembered, broken pencils, faded ribbons, even candy wrappers and bills of every item pressed flat between the pages of old notebooks.
To anyone else, they were scraps. To Priya, they were very precious. Each object carried a memory, a whisper of a moment she feared would vanish if she let go. The cracked porcelain cup reminded her of her grandmother’s laughter. The torn shoelace held the echo of a race she once won. The broken pen which she called the luck pen had once helped her pass exams with flying colours.
Her obsession grew quietly, but her parents did not utter a single word against it. She stopped lending books, afraid they wouldn’t return. She refused to throw away even the smallest receipt, convinced it might one day prove something important. Friends teased her, but Priya only smiled, clutching her treasures tighter.
One evening, a storm rattled the windows. Winds blowing as fast they could. Water seeped through the roof, threatening her collection. Priya panicked, rushing to save each item, stacking boxes high, shielding them with her own body. In that frantic moment, she realized the truth: she wasn’t protecting the things. The things were protecting her—from forgetting, from loneliness, from the fear that she herself might be discarded.
When the storm passed, Priya sat among her soaked belongings. She touched each one gently, whispering promises to keep them safe. Her obsession wasn’t madness—it was her way of holding on to the fragments of life that others let slip away.
From then on she decided to lend books to those who wanted them and ask them politely to return them back.
And so, Priya remained ‘the keeper of things’, guarding her world of memories, reminding her of memories which she never wanted to forget.
