Skip to main content

Memories

Appu Garh, Jan 2001

 Memories can sustain us. They can also kill us slowly. 

Shillong and Delhi are memories for me now. I lived in both places for a decade and a half each. The first was hell for me and the second was my paradise on earth. 

I visited Delhi for the first time in the winter of 2000-2001 along with Maggie. We were on a holiday from Shillong which had become an agony for us both. The very next summer found us both seeking jobs in Delhi. We had given up our jobs in Shillong. We had given up Shillong. 

Looking back at any reality two decades later has certain dangers. The past is never a fixed entity in our memories. The past is as much in a state of flux as is the present. The past keeps changing to suit our present. We need that transmogrification for our own survival. How else would certain events of the past become bearable?

More than 20 years after I left Shillong, the place still remains as a festering wound somewhere in my psyche. That is how certain memories are. They haunt you like a vindictive ghost. They have the potential to tear you apart. That is why we need to reshape them. For our own psychological survival. 

As the narrator of Julian Barnes's novel, The Sense of an Ending, says, "Remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed." We live in time and time keeps moulding us relentlessly. You are not today what you were yesterday. And you look at yesterday's reality from your today's point of view. You reshape yesterday so that it fits in with your today. You need that consolation. You deserve it. Memory is not an absolute entity with any sanctity. Your memory exists for your own consolation primarily. 

One of the places that Maggie and I enjoyed like two little children back in the Delhi of 2000 was an amusement park called Appu Garh. The above picture is from those days. Appu Garh is only a memory now. Thousands of Delhiites and others will certainly remember Appu Garh which added colours to their memories in those days. 

Of course it wasn't Appu Garh that lured Maggie and me to Delhi in 2001. But Appu Garh remains as a sweet memory in my mind. As a teacher in Delhi, I took my students to Appu Garh many times until the place became sheer memory in 2008. 

No, I don't miss Appu Garh. I miss Delhi in some ways because the place holds some of my most beautiful memories, memories that still regurgitate in my happy dreams. Unlike Shillong which brings only nightmares decades after I said goodbye to it. Memories don't die either way. And the height of irony is that we don't want to let go even the most painful memories, especially them. 

Comments

  1. DawnanddewJuly 17, 2021 at 10:55 AM

    This is the most beautiful blog ever written on memories. Very often your blogs give voice and shape to my latest accomplishments. Recently, I was telling my mother in law about my childhood- a nostalgia. After that long narrative, I had exactly the same feelings you have shared in your blog. Now I feel strongly about it - yes, I can script it to comfort me! I deserve it! Thank you for this marvelous piece. Glad to know that you treasure some of the sweet memories of Delhi. Hope those people in that memories are very much aware of it, Matheikal sir :))

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 17, 2021 at 11:17 AM

      I'm glad to know that my blog posts have some affinity with your heart :)

      You are also an integral part of my Delhi memories. Where else would I get such a companionable colleague? Sawan was a unique place. I always feel sorry they killed it so brutally.

      Delete
    2. DawnanddewJuly 17, 2021 at 11:33 AM

      You can only see me smiling with great joy now:))

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanJuly 17, 2021 at 12:49 PM

    Hari OM
    It is true that memory can be a fickle thing! It is why even from the age of seven, I journalled. Not to lose any quality of each day. Though, of course, journals too are written to try to sort out and explain what has happened and its effects upon one. I do know that those journals (and those of my mother) helped settle many a family disagreement of occurences! For it is true too that everyone involved at a place and time will experience it differently and save only that which makes them feel safe(r). It is great to have some memories that only warm the heart and still the mind! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 17, 2021 at 4:11 PM

      I too kept a journal for a couple of years and then discarded it on realising that my life wasn't all that important. Perhaps it would have made the past more vivid if i was more patient with myself.

      Delete
  3. DashyJuly 18, 2021 at 11:07 AM

    It is so true how we look at our past differently as we grow up. I often forget my thoughts associated with a certain memory and feel surprised when I go through my diary entries of those times. I love the thought of memories existing for our own consolation. Beautiful write up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2021 at 12:41 PM

      Sometimes our own writing will surprise us years later. That's another proof of how time has changed us, our reality.

      Delete
  4. SuchitaJuly 19, 2021 at 12:52 PM

    This was brilliant. It reminded me of one of the short stories from Exhalation [Ted Chiang] where the father insists a memory exists [because it shows him in a better light] while the daughter says it does not.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2021 at 1:37 PM

      That story seems to be an ideal illustration of my point!

      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

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

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...
8 comments
Read more