English author Aldous Huxley once said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” Of things gone, events past, of large swathes of life lived with the exuberance of flowers filling fields. There were ups and downs to be sure, valleys and summits, aspirations, fulfilments and disappointments, and joys and tears along the way, but it was a journey worth the while. An Odysseus with an Ithaca. Loved ones surrounded us, we grew up in their care and the whole ambience of growing up is there in my eyes.
A kaleidoscope of colours, a magic, weaving the web of times gone—hazy like reflections in water and then bright like images under the sun. I remember the mango tree with its massive branches under endless skies and slender blades of sharp grass teeming with caterpillars, ladybirds and other nameless creatures crawling by in somnolent grace.
Sinuous creepers slept on boundary walls with nonchalance and the magenta of the bougainvillea grown wild coloured the sky and let in the sun. Memories too like life are not linear. Suddenly it is the kitchen redolent with flavours, whetting young appetites as they rush through breakfast and to school before the iron gates closed in on us.
Then again the slant of the sun across classroom walls, the playground humming with activity and then the cruel metallic sound of the big brass bell calling us back to duty. The faces of our parents, friends, teachers, passing strangers who have been kind, the books we read together, laughed and cried over, come as on a parade. The people we loved, the people we lost, the people we keep mourning, the children we have borne who sometimes make us wonder whether at all they are the children we have borne, the laughter that echoed mine, the tears that mingled with mine.
All these make up the memory file—some pages shine brighter than others but each is a memory. Today as I recline in my chair and reflect I feel it is sadly the extinction of an irreplaceable world. If only Time could move backward, how many people would we not get back, how many moments would we not erase, how many moments would we not snatch as from a baggage carousel. In the evening of our lives before nightfall, in the twilight region of memory, we embrace life all over again with its medley of good and bad, the joyful and sorrowful. All life converts to one long memory.