Amidst memories, I realise, to have even a marginal sense of home or mobility between two homes, is a luxury that we take for granted
It seems like such an inconsequential activity, this digging up of roots, this confronting of past selves... Pic/Thinkstock
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My sole me time has been my late-evening walks back to my friend’s place in Colaba from Ballard Estate. But walking is a very contested activity for me whenever I’m in this city. Especially in South Bombay. I look at a random wall and a memory flashes back at me, gripping me with its gnawing teeth. I try to evade it, try not to look, focus on the road ahead, on finding something resembling a footpath, then I see a railing, or a shop sign and once more I’m flooded by ghosts from the past. It’s been happening with such frequency, I can no longer tell whether it was self-impelled, or if this difficult nostalgia is the consequence of my recent reading of Suketu Mehta’s novella, What is Remembered, that I was lucky enough to receive as a ‘gift’ from a new app-based publishing company.
Mehta’s protagonist, Mahesh, struggles with trying to remember his mother’s name, a crisis that takes him to New York’s Jackson Heights in what turns out to be a comically surreal evening, with everything from chikki to a remote control serving as triggers of memory, with one monumental encounter with the Expert Liar who warns him about the dangers of remembering too much without necessarily filtering these memories. Mehta’s received a fair amount of flak for the story, with critics calling it post-dated immigrant fiction, but I’m not ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed reading the novella. Perhaps because I was reading it in Bombay as I was biting into an intriguingly concocted modak dosa at Thambi, one of the best udipi restaurants in Kurla. I realized, it wasn’t really just a story about an immigrant experience, it was about all the notions of home we carry with us that are suspended in air, that we can only gain entry into through the sensory world; the fifth dimension.
It seems like such an inconsequential activity, this digging up of roots, this confronting of past selves at random red lights or on the 12th step of the Town Hall, or seated at the centre table at Mondegar, or kneeling on a church pew; to see all these lived versions of myself as if they were now somehow separate from me, in an out-of-body kind of way, and to feel the hotness of either shame or desire or derision towards a specific one, or sometimes towards the collective. Inconsequential when the world is experiencing one of the most traumatic refugee crises in the last few decades. To have even a marginal sense of home or to have mobility between two homes is a luxury that we take for granted. My angst is inexcusable.
This morning in the shower, I thought of a poetic variation to the Descartian dictum, “I think therefore I am.” “I am because I was meant to be,” is what I found myself uttering, after I’d run through other permutations, the original being, “I am even though I wasn’t meant to be,” a reference to my mother having me in her early forties, despite being a high-risk pregnancy. To say I was meant to be is to believe my existence was somehow preordained. Maybe it was. But by whom? The universe?
Even the rain brings with it recollections of past monsoons; forcing me to consider whether I have become a prisoner of my memories, both the ones that have calcified and the ones that are vanishing. All of which makes walking in Mumbai akin to skirting around a minefield, wondering when I might be absolved of this weight, wondering when all these disparate selves might merge into a singular soul.
Until then, I realize I must go with the flow, wait for pauses to collect, then cross the road, skirt through tenuous footpaths and over familiar scents. I figure if I stalk my shed lives, they can’t then stalk me.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputed art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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