dhoop mein, parchhai mein

mujhe tum, yaad aate ho / meditations regarding memory

I am always thinking. This and that, from ten years ago till tomorrow. Memory runs through me, and runs me like a tiny chip fit in my robot body. Everything around us deals in the universal currency of memory, of remembrance. Every morning I wake up and I remember that I love somebody. I also remember I am a total failure by my standards and nothing is going to make me feel otherwise about it. Then I remember to drink coffee and get ready to go to my shitfuck job and all along my way over there I keep remembering how much I hate living.

Recently (months ago), I read an essay by Ian Frazier titled “If Memory Doesn’t Serve.” It was the perfect piece of reading for somebody like me whose brain is an entanglement of information. Names, songs, movies, facts, and factoids; random access memories.

Frazier writes delicious bite-sized phrases like “unknown law of synapses”, “thread of a conversation”, “the mental pleasure is keen”, “remembering soothes and resoothes”, “limpid rush of enlightenment” — phrases that make my brain rearrange its tapestry to make space for them. All of these can be playlist names.

It is currently windy, but there is no promise of rain. Not even a false alarm. The dam from my balcony looks deep blue, and it seems to get farther away from me each morning. There’s an ugly lizard in the house, and I am terrified, so I have locked myself inside a room. I called my boyfriend to inform him about the lizard. What can he do from Delhi? He can indulge in my fear and reassure me that if a lizard were to be in my vicinity at the same time as him, that poor reptile would suffer a fate unimaginable. I am soothed. Subsequently I am resoothed by the memory that he stood in the bathroom, of the place we were staying at on our vacation, while I peed; all because there was a baby lizard in the bathroom. I still remember it, a small, translucent creature, I could almost see everything it was made up of on the inside. Sometimes I think my boyfriend can see everything I am made of, maybe when I am comfortably numb in my siesta and he is up and about. The fact that he still greets me with love when I wake up is a solid enough proof that somewhere within my veins runs some liquid goodness, some organ inside of me creates something lovable. Resoothed, hence again. Reassurance, the key to a happy married life. And here I go, spoiling it all by admitting to it.

Admittance has always been a flaw within me. I cannot admit anything – be it good, or bad. I don’t want to admit when I get hurt, I don’t want to admit that I am so tired my bones rattle like chains holding me captive in this real, alive world. I don’t want to admit that I enjoy certain things in life despite it all. I don’t want to admit that I have fucked up over and over and it is all my fault and I am going to keep suffering until I admit. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. To attain a Nirvana record, you need to go through it all. Five stages of life, also known as unending grief.

It is about to be my birthday soon. That is like a second New Year wave, you are thinking about everything and it is Not Good. Since big changes, unsure changes, are happening in my life, I am scared out of my wits. I don’t show it though. I don’t admit to the fear. I just sit and rewatch 30 Rock, I stop listening to music, I wash a lot of clothes. Cut my hair. Fight with people. Call my mother more.

I remember my birthday when I was in fifth grade. A film camera has stood the test of time, the proof of that disastrous birthday is archived as a photo album. My gift on that birthday was a doll, the first in my life. Imagine saying that I got my first Barbie when I was ten. I had been asking for a doll since I was three. My father thought it would be a pleasant surprise, he would get to gloat. All I could think as a ten year old, who had already started writing, was man this is lame as hell. I still played with her, dressed her up, chewed on her plastic shoes because of the texture, cut her hair and put a bindi on her big forehead. I felt guilty for not liking that gift so I overcompensated. She was my first and last doll, and she is still in a steel trunk somewhere. I also remember I had tried to curl my hair using one of those plastic combs, and it got stuck in my thin, silky, straight hair. I had a huge bump on my forehead on that birthday, and I carried a faint scent of Moov, a pain relief ointment.

stratton combs

I remember the desert cooler in the bedroom, my neighbour wearing a bright orange suit-salwar. She died a couple of years ago, leaving behind a teenage son and a husband who had been miserable his whole life. She used to collect a lot of jewellery, she was very fond of clothes. I wonder what happened to it all. Her son took up smoking when he turned sixteen, he has a leg that is longer than the other so he walks with a weird limp, and he stopped going to school for a couple months. The father, on his way home, bought cigarettes from the same shop as his son. On my last trip back home, I spent a lot of time trying to unravel the mystery inside their home. What could they possibly be talking about, what do they do when they are in the same room? Where did her jewellery go, her fancy sarees and handbags that she showed to me one summer, when she was one of the first ones in our neighbourhood to get an AC and she invited me over, because she wanted to show off, but mainly because she did not have a daughter. She was the one who took me to a cosmetics shop and let me buy the Eva lip balm which stained a deep cherry, and tasted like strawberry wax. My school friend and I ate it all up in a couple of days, and because of the Delhi heat, it had melted so it stained not just my lip but also all around it. I looked ghoulish, but I was a child, so it was okay.

My father was very against it, this small plastic trinket that made me feel like an it girl. For some reason, this lip balm had caused one of our infamous family episodes and I ended up crying. There was a tension that hung in the air for a long time, longer than the stain on my lips – it would come off with a wipe. That’s all I had to do to calm my father down, wipe the girlishness off my lips, but he did not seem to understand that. Maybe he wasn’t really angry about it. It could have been something else. But that summer, everything was cherry red – lips, knuckles, knees, his anger.

Another lip gloss I remember is this green apple one. It was green, and had one of those Bratz dolls on the tube. It was my prized possession. When my then favourite maasi (mother’s sister) got married, and I went to visit her, it felt natural to me to give that lip gloss to her. I loved the lip gloss. I loved her.

I ate a green apple for the first time last year. It was delicious. I don’t know why there had been abstinence on that part. My father only bought red apples, and he bought a lot of them. But something about these Granny Smith Apples… if I was Tracy on 30 Rock, I would say that these granny smith apples are so good I want to take them behind a middle school and get them pregnant. If I were Charlie XCX I would have said that over the brat green layout. It would amuse nobody except me.

I ate a lot of green apples until now. Mango season is upon me, and I miss my naani. I remember my mother buying a green nightgown for naani, so that she could be at ease when she slept. It was met with shyness, but within a couple of days she had warmed up to the idea. I remember her wearing it, carrying a steel bucket full of mangoes left in water all evening, to the terrace. Walking behind her, I could only think of my mother growing old, and looking exactly like her. We would then sit on the terrace, no lights, and eat mangoes. Faint sounds of her children would reach us, and she would confide in me her worries and secrets from her girlhood, all of it making me glow more than the moon. I was her confidante, I was important.

The terrace. I remember the terrace. We would wash the concrete with water so that it would cool down, before laying our beds. Every night we would lie down together – cousins, uncles, aunts, and entertain each other until somebody ended up crying. I would always pray for it to rain. Once it did, and I told my mother to leave me and go, so she took the mattress and left. I woke up on a bedsheet on concrete, the rain hitting my cheek at a sweet, rhythmic interval, and I stayed there, until I heard some profanities directed at me. I want it to rain soon so that I can appease that inner wish, and sleep on the terrace. Chahe garmi, jaada ya barsaat… Come summer, winter, or rain.

The lizard has disappeared somewhere. I remember a lizard when I visited my naana at his flat in Jamshedpur. A big, darkened lizard on the wall by the papaya tree. It was doing nothing to us, I was not terrified because it was Outside. This other kid in the building compound, same age as me, hit it with a rock, and with a clean shot the tail fell on the ground, a losing struggle. I sat there and waited for it to stop so that I could touch it. I remember my maasi tying a thread around a lizard and smacking it against a wall. I remember my uncle’s wife running away in terror. That summer was good. My naani and I were eating mangoes, her kids were on good terms, and I was still considered a child and not a liability by my uncles and older cousins, so there were numerous bike rides to nowhere. It was all cherry red –my aunt’s georgette saree trailing behind her as she ran from the lizard, the bedsheet I woke up on, my nails, scraped knees after playing cricket, the sun when it would start setting and I would be finishing up a book on the terrace in the coolest nook possible.

shamm se pehle

I am trying to be good at memory, at admittance. I am preparing for all the grief in the world, I am preparing to wake up one day and see that whatever is inside of me has leaked out – some filthy mucous, all shades of red, and it has left a stain so permanent on everybody I love that they cannot help but turn into my father. That time, I won’t be able to just wipe it off. So I will prepare, until I turn 24.