Earliest Memories

Did I imagine some of the things that have happened in my life? Or did I not have the vision to recognize the true importance of some of these events?
Memory, some have said, is unreliable. But how else can one remember the past?
While scientists unlock the secrets of memories, I sometimes wander through those labyrinths. And am astonished at what I encountered.
For many years in my childhood, I remembered a certain day when I lay on my tummy on a bed in a grove of trees arranged in a circle. The bed had a white canvas webbing called 'neyar'. I remember my mother coming to pick me up and then the memory fades. It always seemed like an insignificant fact that just kind of lived in my mind- not one to really talk about. And indeed no one talked about it. But when I was about sixteen years old, I came across a photograph of that grove in my aunt's album. I stared at it for a long time, and seemed to have found this seemingly trivial photograph of such importance that my aunt asked me what had interested me so much.
Where was this place? I asked. She could not remember. My mother came by and looked.
Oh, she said, that was in our compound when we lived in Gorakhpur. The Bichhiya Road house, where you were born and Baba was a junior officer. There were hyenas in the field across the road. They carried several children off from the village outside the railway colony.
Did we sleep in the grove ? I asked.
She looked at me for a long while and said slowly, yes, in the summer.
Did we have a bed with a 'neyar' webbing out in that grove? I asked further.
She thought for a moment and said, yes- your Baba had one - it was his favourite. But it broke with one of our transfers a long time ago. He even got another one made later, but never liked it as much..Why, she asked, did it matter? You were just a baby when we left that house. And never went back to it, even though we had a further transfer to Gorakhpur when you were four years old.I was intrigued. How did I have such a perfectly clear memory of sprawling on that bed in that grove. A few calculations later we confirmed that I could not have been older than 8 months of age at that time, since that was the age at which we left that house.
Sometime after this conversation, my father had yet another transfer to Gorakhpur. I went to the Bichhiya Road house. We asked permission to look at the garden - permission readily granted because Baba was now a 'Barra Sahib'. The grove of litchi trees had been cut down. There was now a water tank standing where the bed had been placed on the summer nights.
So,that is the earliest clear memory I have. That was from when I was eight months old.
Posted by LinaS at 9:22 PM

1 comments:
shobha pandit said...
Reading your blog brought to my mind the lines of an A. E. Houseman poem:
"Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."
- A.E.Houseman
November 17, 2007 6:30 AM
Post a Comment

Distant Green Valleys



Played by the Silk Road Journeys Ensemble- Yo Yo Ma et al

Links to this post