Yesterdays

Have you noticed how flimsy our memories are? What we remember is not what really happened. Our memories twist the reality according to our psychological needs. We apply soothing balms on painful memories. We exaggerate the sweet memories. As times passes, the reality and its memory may become totally different.

My yesterdays are largely a continuum of pain of different tinctures and decibels. A childhood of horrors conjured up by the adults in my life and an adulthood haunted by the ghosts of my childhood. Is it all nothing more than my memory? Is my memory a true chronicle of what actually happened?

One of my favourite Malayalam poets, O N V Kurup, composed a touching song about memories and nostalgia. The poet persona longs to return to the courtyard of his childhood where sweet memories amble. He would love to sway the gooseberry tree there once again. The berry’s bitterness and sourness and eventual sweetness effervesce in his memories. He longs to sit on the bank of the old river and return the call of the koel. There’s a lot of longing in that song. Sweet desires. Sweet memories. Lucky man, I feel envy.

I didn’t have a fraction of such luck. Never mind. There are a lot of people who didn’t have happy pasts and yet went on to break even or triumph too. Our yesterdays need not determine our todays and tomorrows. History is not where we live. History is what we make up as we get on with life.

We can even remove a few centuries from our history if we are not comfortable with it as our present government has done with the Mughal history in the school textbooks. After all, how much of all that history we studied is quite true? They taught us about the victors. What about the losers? What about the marginalised? Did history belong to them at all? Whose is history?

Is history a collection of the lies of the victors? And the self-delusions of the vanquished? A merger of imperfect memories and inadequate documentation?

Our yesterdays are more evanescent than our todays. Hazier than our tomorrows.

The heroes back there had feet of clay but we alchemised clay into gold. The idols were as feeble as ourselves but we reshaped them in tungsten. We still keep transmuting our gods.

Our yesterday goes back beyond Jesus and Krishna. Beyond Dwapara yuga and Treta yuga. Back to a Big Bang. That was the time when we were all one. Science calls it Singularity.

If I were O N V Kurup, I’d probably write a song about returning to that Singularity to answer the call of the first koel, the primordial music of the cosmos.

PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

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Coming up tomorrow [the last post in this series]: Z of life