Memories

One of the hundreds of pics I clicked at Sawan School, Delhi. There are 2 parrots on that tree. The tree and the parrots are memories that linger funnily with pain. [pic from 2014]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggests in Love in the Time of Cholera that we manage to endure the burden of the past because the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. Maybe, nothing substantially good ever happened to me because my endeavours to magnify happy memories fall by the wayside refusing to go far enough. It’s not that I don’t want happy memories.  Who doesn’t?

But I have imagined happy memories. I’m more like Sara Teasdale. Stephen kissed her in the spring and Robin in the fall. Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest and Robin’s in play. But Colin’s eyes haunted her night and day though Colin only looked at her and never kissed at all.

Unheard melodies are sweeter, I can hear Keats moaning. In the dust-ridden lanes of the past, I look for the unheard melodies, I feel the sensuousness of the kiss that never planted itself on my lips, my heart palpitates for the love that was never expressed.

Memories are funny. Painful too oftentimes. The pain is funny too, isn’t it, when you experience it once again as it rises like a hungry ghost that cannot eat or drink?  How much tears should be shed before the episode transmutes into funny pain? Not your tears, I mean; the other person’s.