the strange thing about memory

Dear reader,

I am endlessly amazed by how our brains work. I forget things all the time and I’m startled how a trigger tells me to I call someone, remember someone, act on something, etc.

Last week I went to meet Rehman bhai (S. Rehman), an artist who once painted film posters at the beautiful Art Deco theatre called Alfred Talkies.

(You should read about the theatre on Bombaywallah.) The theatre is in Kamathipura, an area that used to be lined with tiny kholis (rooms) where sex workers stood at their doors, soliciting clients. While I was there, I realised much of that stretch had gone into redevelopment. The kholis had made way for big buildings. I wondered where the women had disappeared. When I asked a journalist friend, she said many of them now solicit work over the phone. I still don’t know from where though.

An Art Deco restaurant opposite Alfred Talkies.

Between that conversation and washing dishes later, I was suddenly reminded of a sex worker I’d met nearly ten years ago while working on a project on HIV Aids. She was witty, funny and unforgettable. She told us she didn’t want a pimp running her business, so she’d get her clients’ numbers. If they didn’t show up for a while, she’d call them herself. I remembered how much she’d admired the salwar kameez I was wearing that day—and almost instantly I was reminded of something I had forgotten: to call someone from the same organisation because they wanted to see how we could collaborate.

So I called.

Thinking about memory kept pulling me back to Rehman bhai. He painted mostly film posters. Alfred Talkies is also where M. F. Husain began his career, painting film posters. He had worked with Rahman bhai’s father. Rehman bhai influenced by Hussain painted horses too. When I saw one old painting of horses, I immediately knew my sister would love it.

Later, at home, I thought of a school friend who has been telling me for years to paint horses for him, and I never did. I texted him about Rehman bhai’s horses. He sent me a chunk of money. I went back again and bought more of his work. I got this for myself.

Memory has its own strange way of working.

My middle sister, for instance, forgets a lot. She often sends me photographs of her classmates, asking if I know who they are because she doesn’t remember. Usually I do. Recently she told me about a visit we’d made years ago to her friend’s house—an event I had no recollection of. But as she spoke, an image surfaced in my mind: a terracotta floor lamp in the shape of a tortoise in that house, and how much I’d loved it and I wished to have it in my own.

Recently, when I visited my parents, my father excitedly pointed to a coconut palm and said, “I planted that twenty years ago. Look—it’s flowering.”

I couldn’t even see it clearly from the sixth floor but eventually went down to look at the source of my father’s excitement. Before I could say anything, he said he’d been thinking about a Changampuzha poem he studied as a child. Then, at eighty-three, he began to recite the poem Vazhakkula from memory.

Changampuzha Krishna Pillai

A Pulaya (Dalit) man plants a plantain by his hut.
Grows it with care, with hope, with children waiting.
When it finally bears fruit, the landlord (tamburan) claims it.
The father carries the bunch away,
leaving his children crying in the sun.
A world without mercy.
Dreams crushed before they could be tasted.

He said the poem had always made him unbearably sad. I was stunned. I wondered whether I remembered anything from primary school at all but I don’t think memory works on command, I don’t know in what situation, a smell, a sentence will help me recall something from primary school.

Like in Rehman bhai’s workshop, when we casually asks him about a painting, and a forgotten story spills out, he goes and rummages through his paintings and brings out a painting he’d forgotten.

Before I leave, like my father I am super excited that my chilli is flowering.

<3
Indu
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