“Find your own nostalgia.” I retrieved the vinyl from my daughter’s hands. “And before your mother says so, you should know no one is too young not to nurse a nostalgic memory.”
My daughter toddled towards the box we found in our almost-attic. She was between destroying things and making those her own.
If I could play the vinyl, it would croon, “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, Hey... I oughta leave young thing alone…”. I pound my chest to the beat, the way I would always do subconsciously—my fist went to the space wherefrom our memories send “Dear John” to the person time makes out of us.
I hummed to my daughter, “You know, I stumbled over the stacks of uncle’s pop records, and because those were kept away from me, because I was full of pimples, I imagined the most prohibited secrets dwelling in the vinyl. I dusted my uncle’s turntable and plugged it in.
The content surprised me. That was noontime. Alone in my uncle’s railway quarter in Dehri-on-Sone, I succumbed to ‘Ain’t no sunshine’.
I felt guilty of envisaging grey, when all those songs hid was bright summer pastels. We were spending vacation with my uncle. Everyone was somewhere else.
When my parents returned, I ran towards them, would have loved to hug them, but it was never possible for a teenager to do so. It would be impossible to express that I was weighed down by sunshine, and that heart did not belong to sadness or joy. Sunshine is a dry ground. A whitewashed building. The squirrels no one can capture.”
I turned to my daughter to witness her drop one heavy and round nostalgia made of glass. “Careful,” I shriek, “A piece of memory often makes one bleed.”
I sweep the shards and whisper, “Daughter, this is no meteorite and does not ferry the peace codes from the aliens. This is a paperweight. My father’s table hosted dozens of paperweights, the vibgyor solid glass spheres of eight balls of dreams.
The one you shattered is the lone survivor. Even I slayed a few so don’t feel bad.
If I lift one particular paperweight, memories will swirl in the air like confetti. Sometimes, we forget because we know the perils of the memory. Then smash an object, and the door it guarded opens. You see the empty plot within. Daughter, I am rambling. You need not understand all I say.
Old wooden cabinet, Korean Hunji papers
I remember lifting a paperweight. I used to love walking, using it as my kaleidoscope-eye. The world became full of innocent ‘Lucys in the sky with diamonds’.
Papers, unconfined, danced to the hum of a DC-current ceiling fan. Oh, that is one breezy memory!
The west-end wall clock chimed three in the afternoon. I roamed around with my paperweight pirate-eye. I must have heard some smothered voices, because next I remember standing in our backyard watching my parents argue.
My mother growled in a low voice to highlight some sentences, “I should leave you. Stay with your son.” I was young, dear daughter, incapable of understanding a conflict and why a person can leave her most beloved ones.
I dropped the paperweight. It produced sapphires and rubies and rolled out far and wide. My parents slowly turned. Their turning was the most synchronised movement they ever did. Leaving and living birth nostalgia.
The comic books are nostalgic; collecting each issue is; saving money for those definitely draws a U in anyone’s face. We had our Indrajaal and Amar Chitra Katha, our Phantom, Magician Mandrake and Rip Kirby, but the white ants were the first things that came to my mind.
I chronicled, “The white ants under a microscope is no sight for a weakling. They have a life made solely of hunger and they feed it wood, brick, sand, mortar and paper.”
I wonder if your nostalgias will be as summer-centric as mine are. One summer, bored, I read through all my novels and comics. I began sneaking into my uncle’s showcase of books. Not the uncle who worked with the Railways, baby, this one hangs from the string of my father’s DNA.
Anyway, I read his paperbacks and his political books. I had no friend, and although I hated travelling, I was keen to escape. I took the silk route of the words. My uncle caught me one afternoon. His voice startled me, “Bookworms love the taste of the glue Russians used in binding a book.”
I fumbled with the Vladimir Ilyich, and it fell apart on the floor.
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“Perhaps you should read books you could fathom more.” My uncle’s baritone was tobacco stained. It was an old book, mothball, paper dust, disintegrating brilliantly. “When was the last time you went upstairs? Have you ever tried to look into the locked room next to the coal storage unit?”
Now, that coal storage unit is another nostalgia. We have it in our vast flat roof. The kitchen was always smokey and it had walls of shoot. Food tasted better, but a little salty with the soul of the cook.
My uncle told me, “A linguist lived there. A professor. He arrived from the same village we originated in, and my father permitted him to stay and break bread with our family until he finished his book on the common threads in Indian languages which he never began, perhaps because he died in our attic—that room—his head in the cup of his oily pillow, his left index between two sepia pages of a volume of Shakespeare and his left thumb taut on the back cover of the book. We could not remove the book for awhile.
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Go upstairs. He had many books and for every age. Perhaps you will even encounter his spirit.”
Paper mesh, water colour and collected objects
I did not go that day or the next, but sure enough eventually I went. We ceased to climb on our roof since the days of coal burnt out. Sometimes I visited, but never found any interesting feature in that dingy room that might have triggered my dust allergy.
One day I took my uncle’s key, masked my nostrils in a handkerchief, opened the room and found the dry tunnels of the white ants everywhere. The insects ate the heart and the spleen of the room, everything wooden, the bundles of old clothes and most of the books therein. I discussed with my uncle who bought a pungent solution that I mixed with some kerosene and sprayed to kill any probable insect. After a few days I went again. One book was untouched by all the calamities. Dear daughter, it was the Volume I of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, printed 1898. It is still with us in your mother’s almirah.” We do not know the skulls we keep near us. The hourglasses. The appointment books showing wrong dates for visiting Samarkand.
“What is this?” My daughter had a dip pen in her hand.
“Do you know who a dhobi is?” Yes, so you do. They washed our clothes, dried them out, pressed and marked them with these dip pens. Even Camlin had a special ink for this. Then there were China inks. Dip the beak, scribble the secret code akin to that of a librarian’s.
Sergo was my childhood dhobi. No one, perhaps not even he himself, could recall his real name. My grandfather called him Sergeant because of his manner of walking. Sergo could not pronounce it properly, and we asked him to say his name just to hear his sweet mispronunciation and see his black teeth.
We used fountain pens at school. Doctor, Artex, Airmail and for the fortunate ones—Pilot or Parker. I chewed the ends of my pens until they bled and left with all the evidence of their murders on my hands and clothes, and sometimes on my tongue.
I had an eye for that dip pen, often hid it if I could find it in his bundles, only to return it when he complained to my mother.
When I passed high school, my father gifted me a Parker Sonnet, the latest arrival, bought through his friend, the frequent traveller.
Sergo came that Saturday and grinned, “Dadababu, this is my gift for you. Grow big. Be a collector.” I took this black and brown ebonite dip pen from his hand. It was calloused like his skin, immortal, sturdy and sharp enough to pierce one’s heart.”
Sun had passed the windows. Darkness stood holding the threshold. It helloed its worn out comrades.
I said, “If you so desire, we could do this next week. The second season of How I Met My Memories.” Now it was time to be merrily sad. Imagination would dodder down a lane nearby, a bundle of ironed apparels in his arms, scratchy jazz in the milieu contrasting his short kurta and dhoti, a kaput paperweight revolving psychedelic light from the backyard garden, the aroma of lullaby rising from someone’s kitchen.
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Kushal Poddar former editor of the Words Surfacing magazine, he has written eight books that have been translated into eleven languages.
