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 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...
17 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
7 comments
Read more