Skip to main content

Memories

 

Courtesy TheConversation.com

Though my country is obsessed with memories, I am not fond of them. It’s beyond my comprehension why my country loves to dig up the ghosts of Babur and Aurangzeb, people buried centuries ago. It looks like my country is getting tired of digging far into history because of late young girls seem to be the targets. Girls in their early 20s seem to be the most favourite. Middle-aged journalists and activists were the focus some time back. Well, tastes vary as time changes, I guess.

Back to memories which is my concern this morning because an old friend of mine called me “bastard” yesterday when I refused to respond to his seemingly endless messages. This friend – let’s call him Harry as in Tom, Dick, and Harry – has been trying to renew a lost friendship for a while now. We had said goodbye to each other in 2001 standing on shifting sands on a mountaintop. Future looked utterly bleak to me as I descended the mountain and walked away into absolute uncertainty. Because of him and a few others. Him, mainly.

Time is not a bad healer in spite of the scars it inevitably leaves. I learnt to forget him in the due course of time. I decided to forget many others. That’s not an easy job, if you’ve ever lived through hells. They’ll say you created your own hells. You’d rather give them the honour as the architects. The truth, we all know, lies in between: the hells were created by you as well as them. Perhaps, they are inevitable – the hells. Part of life. Part of growing up. For some, it’s growing down. I belong to that latter category. I never understood the ways of the world and so kept shielding me more and more from it. Did I have a choice?

I have wished a zillion times I knew how to live in the world of real people. Every attempt of mine was like the dwarf-clown’s antiques on a trapeze in a circus I watched as a boy. The clown’s antiques are fun for the spectators. Not for him, if you know him.

Finally I accepted my social handicaps and withdrew into my cocoon. And waited for the butterfly to emerge knowing that miracles are not as common as our godmen (where are they now in these bad times, I wonder) make it out to be. There’s a nice warmth in that cocoon, if you want to know. It feels nice there. I didn’t want memories to come poking at my nice cocoon.

But they come. Life never leaves you in peace. Life is strife. Inevitably. If there’s nothing to fight for, they’ll resurrect Babur from his grave and fight with his ghost. Harry resurrected ghosts within my nice cocoon. Ghosts of memories. Through WhatsApp messages which wanted my opinion on whether Hopkins is a Victorian poet or more modern in spirit. Who am I to speak about Hopkins and Hardy to you, Dr Harry?

You didn’t want my answers to those questions, I know. You’re probably trying to bury the ghosts that stir within your cocoon. You’d better do it without me; I’m no exorcist.

In the meanwhile, I don’t mind raising a toast to you within my cocoon and sing with Maroon 5: “Here’s to the ones that we got…”

Comments

  1. SuchitaFebruary 17, 2021 at 12:08 PM

    I love reading your posts and how seamlessly you combine two apparently disparate things. I let go of a friend too, even though we were the "best" ones because there were too many memories to make it okay.

    ReplyDelete
  2. rupam sarmaFebruary 18, 2021 at 10:10 AM

    Nice to read

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeFebruary 18, 2021 at 6:15 PM

    Ghosts do have a nasty habit of wafting in and out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 18, 2021 at 7:24 PM

      Indeed. Their very purpose of existence must be just that wafting.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more