“The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned. Contemporary nostalgia is not so much about the past as about vanishing the present.”
—Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
There was a white piano in a room with huge glass windows at a stranger’s house that night. There was a girl in a blue dress. There were others in the room that night, but the blue made the piano stand out even more. There must have been some conversation in the room that night. Nobody played the piano that night. I remember it was a birthday party. He says it wasn’t.
Many years later, the man whose house it was says there was no white piano either. The white piano in that room looked beautiful. I have decided to keep it that way.
A man had once sent me a photo of a window. I could see velvet curtains of a dark orange shade. There was snow outside. The bare arms of trees were adorned by flakes that looked like parallel lines drawn in white. Maybe the curtain was of a different shade. Rust, not orange. But the snow was there. I could have been there. In that photo. With him. The phone died one night. All the photos that we shared were lost.
But that loss of memory on the phone in an age where memory is aided by photos on handheld devices opened the possibility of being another person or persons. There’s always that person you could have been.
I am haunted by that. My nostalgia is that. Of all those people I could not be. Or could be. Of all those windows that I never opened. Of all the photos where I was absent. Of all the lives that I didn’t become a part of. I think about all the possible futures I could have had. I lived a part of those futures. The rest I made up. I could have been a lover, an artist, a teacher. I could have even been a mermaid. I have that nostalgia for magic realism.
Nostalgia has been around for ages and it was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, who in 1688, coined a compound derived from the Greek nostro, meaning “home,” and algos, meaning “pain”, and he used it to describe a medical condition that he had detected in Swiss mercenary soldiers who were homesick.
In a post-pandemic world, we have returned to the past more than ever. The past here is a world before the pandemic, a place of happiness perhaps, of love, of togetherness. We want a romanticised past to become our future.
These are snippets of my nostalgia. Of this and that.
#1 The peeling wall paint in an old man’s house (my grandfather), who recited a poem about loss of faith as he drank rum in a crumbling house in Arrah, Bihar, was green. The poem was Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. I kept three diaries of my grandfather when he died more than two decades ago. All this nostalgia about that house and that old man doesn’t follow the industrialised clockwork of time, but an interiority of a journey that must be undertaken in order to answer the question “Who am I?”
There are “unspeakable” memories in notebooks, diaries, photos. For so many years, I have resisted the task of writing only because I fear that I’d be emptied out of narratives.
#2 Once upon a time, a man gifted me two goldfish in a glass jar. He said I could learn how two beings could live together. The fish died one night. I fed them too much. I named them Hector and Athena after the Greek deities. I didn’t know goldfish have no memory of food. I still don’t know about that. That’s what they said. I want to believe the fish lived happily ever after and built a little house at the bottom of the jar. The house at the bottom of the jar had windows and doors. I want to imagine the fish flew away to some faraway place where seaweeds grew out of stars and the moon was a garden where mermaids hung out with fairies. And unicorns had golden manes.
#3 They say this film made lovers out of us. I was a teenager when Aashiqui was released on August 17, 1990. We used to have a Philips Powerhouse and, throughout the day, Aashiqui songs played at a high volume. Rahul Roy’s haircut became popular and many young men into Patna grew their hair to frame their face and “blunt cut” became the trend. The girls obviously went to the tailors to get frocks stitched with lace on collars. Love became fashionable in a small town then. We memorised the songs. We can sing them even now.
And the posters were all over the town. And that’s how we first encountered the trials of love. An angry young man, an orphaned girl, a best friend, a guitar and butterflies. We realised that for love to be true, one needs to fight against all odds. And for years, I was in love with Rahul Roy. Even now. Of all the people who projected love on screen, he did it best with his intense eyes and his very unusually beautiful face. I had the poster and, of course, the cassettes. I was in Class 5 at the time and knew all the songs by heart.
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It has been more than 30 years since the film hit the theatres. Back then, we watched it many times. We rented the tape from the local VCR-wallah and we never got bored of love. But it was then. And that’s what we chased through the years and never found. Those of us who loved the film and believed in it. And in Patna in those days, the film made us dream. And some of us held on to dreaming.
Vibha Galhotra is a delhi-based conceptual artist. These drawings from ‘space within the space’ were part of a larger body of work staged in santiniketan in 2000 and present the inception of the work in a visual diary.
#4 There was a thick book on the shelf gathering dust in my house. In that book, I once read about a man who collected the cigarette butts after his lover had smoked them. There were other things he collected, but those I have wilfully submitted to the altar of forgetfulness, though the whole point of the book was to immortalise the love he had felt through everyday things she discarded.
Orhan Pamuk built a museum where 4,213 cigarette butts with dates and little notes underneath them were etched on a wall. It is called the Museum of Innocence after his eponymous novel. It is a museum of memories. Fictional. But how does that matter?
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This is how you archive love. For so many years I have wondered about the love measured in cigarette butts. How many did she smoke in a day? For years, I have wanted to see this particular wall of more than 4,000 stories. Imagine all those cigarettes smoked fully or just stubbed prematurely!
I took out the book and held it for a long, long time. This is how we remember stories.
#5 I have become an underground person who is collecting and compiling stories to tell about the permanent siege. On some nights, I go through the conversations. I don’t know how to begin the story. It was in Kashmir where we met during the floods in 2014. On a boat.
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“There are no endings,” he once said. I said there are no doors either. He spoke about relapsing time. I said anything is possible. We are all time machines. He promised me a story once. He also promised me a thousand lilies. I dreamed of the thousand promised lilies that night. White lilies that fell from strange trees that didn’t birth them. They fell like gentle snowflakes.
I think I made you up in my head—a protestor, a son, a tall, lean man. That’s how I described you in my article for the newspaper then. Once upon a time in a cafe in a city, I wrote letters as aids to memory as bombs fell elsewhere in the country. People were killed in your country. And women beat their chests in despair. The killed, the maimed and the disappeared. The unmarked graves, the half-widows, the stone pelters. Hearts were squeezed out like lemons.
Did we run out of conversations? What are we? Secrets in a coffee cup, whispers in the glass of wine, a fragmented note in a coat pocket? I dream of a time when dervishes would dance among the pigeons on a moonlit night and snowflakes descend and ride on kites and break the notions of freedom and occupation.
He had said beauty is a curse. “A stone to a bullet,” he said. “You won’t understand.” There was no music at the shrines in his country. Only the sound of pigeons flapping their wings. And the wails of the women who beat their heads against the cold stones at the shrines. “Sab faani hai (everything is earthling),” he wrote to me. “Remember this when I am gone.”
Nostalgia is the keepsake of lonely hearts.
#6 When I first saw the Violin Man in the window of that crumbling old mansion, I remembered the morning I imagined my grandfather lying dead in his old four poster bed. That morning we had received a call that my grandfather had passed away in a town where he lived in his old house with peeling green paint on the walls.
That I had seen the Violin Man is true. That he existed is also true. But truth is always an unfinished business. Like longing, like love. He lives in an old mansion in Fontainhas in Goa.
The Violin Man had refused to talk to me then. It was a summer afternoon when I heard this music in the empty streets by the chapel. It was the repetition of that tune that made time inconsequential here. It reminded me of heartaches. It was a hurting tune and it reached a crescendo that made the streets look desolate. It was anarchic. It was like all these splinters lodged in someone’s body crying out. They say violin mimics the human sound. At the time, it felt like someone was crying. Did the person intend to release all this frequency of sadness onto the streets? It spread like light. It was like the defiant flutter of a shirt hung out to dry in a storm.
He had played violin for his caged bird for 32 years. Maybe one day we will become friends. Maybe he will let me in his crumbling mansion and show me his old family albums. Maybe he will play a note for me. Maybe he won’t. I don’t know why I kept returning to his house. I guess, we respond to sadness. All these rippling waves of sadness carried the moaning of the dispossessed, the fury of destruction, the insistence at redemption and grief. Both in equal measures.
I don’t remember it as pleasant. There were old, abandoned houses sticking it out on desolation row. There was also a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows. Mater Dolorosa. “The world will condemn you, the world will laugh at you, but you got to carry on,” he had said.
Like the writer said in this book called The Secret Lives of People in Love: “When it rains, even the most insignificant puddle is a map of the universe.” In the end, we are the children who wanted to grow up fast and grow old slowly. And we remain nostalgic about our lost selves.
(This appeared in the print edition as "My Other Lives")
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