A Meditation on Memories and Moving

Why is moving from permanence never easy?

Time sifts away. Tried and tested. Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Time flies.

Seconds evaporate.

Minutes disintegrate.

Hours dissolve.

Days . . .

Okay, I’m just dragging this. But I honestly don’t know a better way to frame this sentiment. It’s gnawing at me from within. It’s structurally seeding chaos in my heart to disrupt the order my brain wants to seek.

Perhaps time will tell?

But time did fly, you see. It’s funny how a date that looms in the distant future suddenly materialises as an apparition you’ve been trying to avoid every Christmas. It confronts you with more gumption and more weight than the ethereal ghosts that rapped at Ebenezer’s door. The time (heh) is nigh! Do your packing, or you shall suffer the consequences of unpreparedness.

Such an adult thing to warn of. No matter how much you prepare, plan, pack, percolate, profuse, or presume, time always comes. It chimes on your calendars. It sends an audible notification through the DND mode of your smartphone. It catches you by the shoulders to give a shakedown. It cold calls your parents in the middle of the night, fixing your marriage to fate, but does not send an invite to destiny.

That’s how time catches up with you. The ghost of its warnings looms in wispy smokes. The real thing, even with full disclosure, is far more threatening.

And so, I found myself one morning with an uneasy pit in the duodenum, right after my stomach had struggled to digest said pit.

I’ll be less dramatic here: I’m talking about the shift. The relocation. The transition from one city to another. The metamorphosis of a family from belonging to inhabiting. And it came with all the bronze bells and white whistles of everything I hate.

But hate was not the emotion I found that morning. Hate had, I later found, signed off its vacation with a stamp of Hawaii and disappeared from my repertoire of expressions.

Joy? It was tired right after we’d celebrated my daughter’s first birthday.

Anger? There it was! But tepid, like a hot brew of tea kept waiting too long, a thin film of fat stretched like skin over its surface. I tried to ping anger’s cousins, you know, apart from hate. Frustration refused to answer my call. And fear was frozen.

But Anxiety was there. Hand in hand with sadness. A melancholic cocktail you always try to avoid.

I honestly tried my best. These two, however, got the better of me.

Sadness was the first to get hold of me. You would expect it to confront my cold senses in a pashmina of nostalgia that connects a woolly thread to my city, Udaipur. You’d, perhaps, recognise it as an old face on a mural of human footprints walking through the roads, a sharp focus of recall among blurs of existence. You might even, although this one is a stretch, feel its haunting shade in the memory lanes of lives bygone, a familiar expansion of warmth in the cold winters of the halfway north.

But Sadness, as was her promise, came in a poncho of silk woven from its daughter: tears. It held me in shackles of wanting, but at a distance. I was moving. I was the detachment. I was the deserter. My city, my childhood, my memories, would all be frozen in a temporal frieze. Visible only to me and to inhabitants of distant worlds on whom Earth’s reflected light reaches light-years later.

In these fading lights, I see a boy here.

He’s seven. At the turn of the millennium. Roaming about in a red coloured T whose print evades memory. The bedroom is small. Not too small. Less space, because the custom king-sized bed takes up all the room. There is a battered old semiautomatic washing machine. Glossy black with creamy yellow interiors. The boy is busy on its closed top, stapling a bunch of cutouts for the calendar edition that came in celebration of the coming millennium year. The dates do not interest him, though. It’s the planets and their information. Cosmos that the boy dreams of. Cosmos that the boy imagines on the underside of a cotton-filled quilt, the gaps remapped as galaxies and stars.

Time shifts. The boy is fourteen. Short, but sprouting. A moppy crop of needle hair, and no clue how to carry himself. He sits in a small room, a room he calls his own, even though it isn’t. The room has a desktop in a furniture cavity, the top shelves of which house his motley collection of books, new and old—Fifteen Poets, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, a photocopy of a big hardback titled “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stars” taken with permission from his school’s library. He boots up the computer, however, to get lost in a visual world. A soundbite, Windows XP’s operatic startup. The boy waits for the CPU to thrum from its cold inactivity. Five seconds later, he double-clicks on the icon of “Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles.”

Time shifts. The boy is twenty-three. It’s early morning. The apartment’s terrace shows signs of waterlogged wear and tear, a signature of the monsoon. Still, he moves about with his mother in the hazy light. A bulbul appears out of nowhere, on the corner of the A block’s terrace. Red-vented, a plumage of brown upper, white undersides, and void black head with a signature crest. He spots it. He comes close. The bulbul shimmies on the ledge, but doesn’t fly away. He moves in closer. There’s a sparkle in the bulbul’s eyes. A sparkle reflected in his eyes. A sparkle of wonder at Dinosaur’s successors. He knows what his new passion will be.

Time, now on the wings of literary works, soars high into space. Sadness pulls me back.

There was warmth here, however. A promise of something that was. Something that will never be. Something that will have gone cold like the tea I forgot to touch. I grew up. I got busy. I got away. But the city? It’s physical. My ghosts streaking through its twisting lanes and winding pathways? They’re metaphysical.

That’s the only warmth I felt . . . of tears streaking my cheeks in the lukewarm December Sun.

Sadness had had enough of me, and I of her. I was leaving. But she promised her return. I did not want to linger on that word.

Turn I did and found myself haunted by Anxiety. She was always there. Always. I knew her presence. But just as your mind ignores the constant pinging of tinnitus after a while, I had learnt to ignore the shadow of Anxiety’s doubts.

I am no good with confrontations. I always want to flee. The resolutions I seek are anomalies, only to find pockets of relief.

But Anxiety is here. Time has frozen. I don’t know what will come. What will be. What never was, and what never will be. Time does not shift here. It preys. Preys on my fears, who failed to show up in the emotional round-up. Fears that want to consume my future. Devour the possibilities. From familiarity, I am to find myself in new tides.

Will I sink?

Anxiety has no answers. She wasn’t there to foretell. So, she packs her raven wings and flies back. Back inside.

Two ghosts. Preparations sketched. Plans etched. Baggage packed. Sticks out like a sore thumb, but so do I. It’s time to fly.

On air to Hyderabad, as my daughter giggled her way on my wife’s lap and my arms, I stole a look outside. There, above the clouds, I saw a few strands of pale light catch some stray dreams. But I did not have time to train my attention. My daughter called for it.

It was only days after we arrived at the new residence and found our stuff delivered by movers did it hit me. I saw the third ghost on those clouds. My dreams. Lost. Losing. Far from reach.

Sadness hit me. Anxiety bit me. But the third ghost was benevolent.

It knew I only had one future.

The future that continues to steal my attention to this day.

Time will continue to catch new gales of passion and fascination, to contour its beautiful wings and distort our ugly realities in seemingly unseen futures.

And I—the ever non-conformist, non-confrontational being—will sadly, anxiously, dreamily, keep on hitching the rides ahead.