You are your memories. Without them, you would be little more than animals reacting to immediate stimuli, more creepy crawlies than musing mammals. But it's amazing how often this memory of yours fails, and at the most awkward times, like the first debate you enrolled into back in the seventh grade. With so many eyes on you, your legs had started shaking; clammy with nerves, you couldn't utter a word. It was then that you realized that the human brain, as American comic George Jessel once put it, "starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public."
But those are bad memories. Why wouldn't you recall all the good ones then, especially those giddy delights while welcoming the New Year, every year, without fail, with as much enthusiasm you could muster? It's strange because you find this loss of memory is rather selective. You remember much of the non-fiction you read. You also remember faces (but not names). You remember the Indian Ocean crashing onto the Madras shore, an endless expanse of sand and an elaborately decorated horse, from when you were only three. And you remember, clear as day, the red car gifted to you on your seventh birthday.
It's the actual celebration part of these supposedly special occasions, including your birthdays, that you have trouble recalling. At these times your memory seems to work "in leaps, loops and flashes," as Hilary Mantel would say.
A couple of weeks ago you were walking to your office, head down, minding your own business, when you came across a middle-aged, nearly completely bald man. You know you have seen this face before. You also recall thinking, sometime in the vague past, that this person always looks a little too old for his age. Also that this gentleman, now in a tattered jacket and faded blue jeans, was someone you used to meet regularly. But the bulb simply refuses to light up. Try as you might, you can't identify him or the circumstances that had once brought you two together. It's like your mind is playing a devious game, teasing you by giving out subtle hints, challenging you to make a connection.
You give up. You get to office and forget all about the incident. But later, you are returning home via the same route, you are suddenly juddered awake by the realization that the bald man you had seen today was once a bald boy, your senior in college you met every single day for two years.
You feel angry, confused, shaken: this intermediary feeling between branding yourself, with red hot iron, a complete failure and wanting to laugh out loud at your stupid brain and its crazy ways.
Your memory, experience tells you, is very unreliable, for it fails you at the most difficult times. You can't keep track of more than a couple of telephone numbers, unlike someone you know who never forgets a number she hears—never! Then there are other folks you also know who can write, extempore, from their memory alone. Now in their dotage, they can recall in minute detail what they did 30 or 40 years ago, and if challenged, can produce, you are sure, a first-rate memoir on the spot. What did they eat growing up, you wonder, elephant brain?
Yes, elephants do indeed remember a lot more than humans. But perhaps having a light-weight memory is no bad thing, you try to console yourself. There are a few friends of yours who, to this day, refuse to go to the upper stories of their otherwise perfectly-preserved homes: they just can't shake off the disturbing memories of that wretched April day. Do they only recall these harrowing incidents in their lives, you ask yourself, or do they retain everything in their puny heads, ecstatic baby showers and long deaths of loved ones alike?
But why would you care. For you have long made peace with your flailing memory, if only you could stop meeting these damned sods with their photographic memory—here, there, everywhere.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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