You cannot choose what you remember.
When I am writing, I try. I picture my brain and see if I can zoom in on a memory to find something interesting to tell. But it only contains the songs and visuals I have scrolled through the previous night (‘just looking like a wow’) and the argument I have had with a friend. After a minute and half have passed, I can hear a phantom cry from my phone, asking to be picked up like a baby.
If I resist, eventually memories will start showing up. Moments like the day when my brothers broke my mom’s black and golden vase while fighting with each other. For their sake, I hoped it could be fixed with glue (it couldn’t). Or the time I was talking to a girl in class who said her parents gifted her the latest Harry Potter book for ranking 3rd. I was ranked 1st. What were her parents celebrating that mine weren’t? These memories are like an art film. They have no morals, no happy endings. They are suspended in time, vivid, reminding me of something important I am sure.
Some nights, I will be unable to sleep as my mind cycles through conversations with a teammate where I should have been less angry, less righteous, more kind. When I am sick, all I can taste in my mouth is ‘Kori rotti’ because it makes me feel like I am my mother’s child again, looked after. When I go to Bombay now, it smells worse than I remember - a mixture of heat, keechad (mud) and perpetual construction. Bombay has a romance that exists in my memory even though it may have never existed in reality. So I roll my window up and play ‘Iktara’ while watching the rain from my cab.
My memories, they sit inside songs. “I’m this” by Peter Cat Recording co is about freedom, the first time I lived alone without flatmates, without parents. It is the song of the one bedroom apartment with a mangalore tiled roof that felt as high as the rent. A house where I cried in the bathroom even though I was alone. “Wish you were here” by Pink Floyd reminds me of my first trip abroad when I was 20. And a 30 dollar grey and pink scarf from GAP that the friend who introduced me to the song, gifted me on the trip.
“Start with your childhood. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.” Anne Lammott suggests in her first writing lesson in the book, Bird by Bird.
My childhood and its memories rarely came up till I was 26. I don’t know if I was still dealing with it or I was too busy living to sit and reminisce. But in the last 4 years, I have been opening a new cupboard of memories ever so often and wading through it to find something decent to wear. My memories when they show up are unassuming. But they feel alien, made up sometimes. Stories from a world I don’t know anymore. Almost immediately, I am ashamed. Hoping they looked different. So in my re-telling, I make myself sound wittier and less sad. Eventually, I hope I will learn to tell the truth.
We don’t make memories, memories are made. We have no control over what gets imprinted. What comes to us when we think of our lives, our family, our friends, 10 years later. We will remember our mother’s black and golden vase, 30 dollar scarves from GAP and the smell of Bombay from 2008.
Today, I was walking in Cubbon Park with Ollie and Addu. I watched them walk ahead of me towards a tree, pink with flowers and I hoped that I would remember this. But there’s no guarantee.
always and forever in awe with your writing