My Earliest Memories

Is memory a sin, or is it a salvation? Does it torment, or does it teach? Does it augment or does it attenuate?

If humans are complex, memories are even more so. To live without a memory is impossible. The thought of future is not embedded in present but in the images of past. It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

And memories are a cascade, a cornucopia! Intermingled, interwoven, interspersed in time and space. They come in waves varying in intensity, some bright and some dull, some clear and some hazy, some soothing, others sickening!

My earliest memories are naturally of my childhood and they are not a point, they are a package. They are a collage, not one painting. And this collage is spaced over time, some making sense and many absurd.I can only note that the memories are beautiful because the emotions related to the events have expanded and intensified. The recollection is far more vivid and sharp than how one felt then. In that sense it is a perfection of an image created many years ago, but one that acquired a brilliance and comprehension not felt then. All memories expand later. The completeness of emotions are realized through memories , and not  while one was undergoing that experience.

My earliest memories pertain to the surroundings and the comfort of security, they are about absence of fear and care of days bright and blissful, of nights cosy and cool. Sitting in a high chair, and quietly observing my father going about his daily chore of receiving visitors and resolving disputes, of offering advice and admonition in a variety of ways, comes to my mind effortlessly. I could spend hours together just listening to the sounds and sights, the expressions and gesticulations. They were endlessly absorbing. I recall with particular delight intermittent attention to me as many would look in my direction and supposedly say words that must be pleasing to my father.   

And then I remember the house, the high ceiling, an ancient fan that whirred while swinging gently offering both comfort of coolness and the apprehension of a possibility of detaching itself from the ceiling and descending on my little frame. I remember the barred window opening out to an open space from where the swaying branches of a Hibiscus shrub embracing the bars from time to time, letting in a gentle breeze in daylight but a disturbing gust of wind in the night when sleep was a little distant from my eyes.

I recall the courtyard and the verandah, both places from where silently I could see the hues and hear the whispers of summer, spring and winter but most of all, the music of the drizzle and torrents of a monsoon rain that will in turn delight and scare depending on the time of the day or night.

But nothing pleased me more than to quietly listen to the animated conversations in the house, sometimes between father and mother, at other times between my father and his brothers, but most of time time  between my mother and other ladies of the house. Much of it I could not follow, but the excitement of the voice, the laughters and giggles, the remonstrations and the gesticulations fascinated me and kept me spell bound. 

Those memories beat inside me as a second heart. “I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” says F. Scott Fitzgerald in his ‘This Side of Paradise’. The innocence of those days must belong to then. That is where it belongs. But how much I miss losing it and how hopelessly I pine for losing that innocence again.

Memories are sensual often enlarged and embellished with cravings of the unconscious, but impossible to live without. The best tribute to them is then to celebrate them, as did Sara Teasdale in one of her poems, 

“Stephen kissed me in the spring,

Robin in the fall,

But Colin only looked at me

And never kissed at all.

Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,

Robin’s lost in play,

But the kiss in Colin’s eyes

Haunts me night and day.”