Mother’s sisters and brothers sat around the dining table on which were stacks of photographs that had been retrieved from their father’s house in Patna, before it was sold and handed over to its new owner. The aunts and uncles, and Mother too, were in these photographs, looking 40 to 60 years younger than now, in styles of clothes and hairdos not worn today. And we, of the third generation, gasped in disbelief as they were identified to us, and giggled at our own images as infants in the arms of a relative or astride a tricycle.

“Nehru. Jawaharlal Nehru,” Mother exclaimed, and as we glanced at her, she turned the photograph, yellowing at the edges, towards us. That she recognised Nehru shouldn’t have surprised us, for even though her memory has been fading away for some years, her experiences are being erased from present to past — the newer a happening, the quicker it gets effaced. Mother can’t make new memories. She forgets an outing in an hour or two.

Yet the memories from her childhood are preserved in fragments. Mother remembers the alphabets and can construct words, the list of which continuously shrinks, though. When she talks, it seems she is reading a text from which words and sentences have been haphazardly deleted. Her narration often lacks coherence, for she tends to conjoin two separate events belonging to two different time periods. Or, at times, she simply imagines them. She often wants to visit her mother, my grandmother, who has been dead for two decades. She recalls family events that none of her siblings can vouch for. And when told she’s mixing up her remembrances, she accepts it, for she knows she is losing her memory, that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.