Papa-Mumma at Taj Mahal, India
The year is 2019. In the warm blanket of family relationships, winters are spent telling stories in the sun. My father gets elated when he talks of school days, just as a child would do in his school days talking about a prank. Takes the excitement further remembering the first time he got to wear slippers, in 6th std. 'Oh, the joy!', he says, 'it was incomparable'. 'And what before that?', I question. 'Nothing. Barefoot', his voice now filled with a sense of pride. A particular scene from my grandfather's village house flashes in my mind. A big mud house with freezing insides sits beside the river with numerous mango, lychee and mulberry trees on it's banks. A huge well in front of the white mandir nearby. The year is 2001. Summer afternoons are spent on the cold marble of the mandir, hearing the cuckoo coo.
With nothing but each other's company, Papa tells me about his surgery. The year is 1975. His first visit to Bombay and the relatives who sent dabbas to the hospital throughout his stay. 'I would never forget the food, it was tasteless yet delicious'. The year is 2020. I imagine the hospital bed; small and dull comforting my father in pain, try to map the faces of those relatives I never met but will always have a gratitude for. I imagine a young boy with a moustache that my mother would later fall for, roaming on the streets of Bombay having no idea he'll be back after 3 years and then not for another 42.
The year is 1997. My mother keeps ill, often. Stories tell, papa took charge of things, and shuffled between office and home. The year is 2021. Patriarchy and gender equality are far from achieved. But inside our home, we wish papa on mother's day for instinctively, and naturally, breaking stereotypes of a patriarchal society.
Living in the digital age, where our social media feeds are structured in a way that the most recent things float to the top and everything is in reverse chronology which conditions us to believe, rather falsely, that the most recent is the most important or that the older matters less or just exists less. We are compelled to believe that things that are not on Google or on the news channels never happened or never existed or just don't matter, whereas, I think probably 99% of the record of human evolution is off the internet. It suggests, what is urgent right now always holds much more value than what is important in the grand scheme of things. But do historical events lose sentimental value with time? Will my father's first slippers and last visit to Bombay ever mean any less to me when I turn 62? Will the details of the first house my parents moved into after marriage ever fade in my imagination? I fear this sort of time bias.
My forgetfulness scares me. In the time of screenshots and archived posts, I fear to lose the bits of details my parents hold so close to. I have this urge to claim history, of my mother's wonderful college life and my father's shoe-less childhood, of the places they inhabited in their early days, of the moments of love fabricated with time that I can only feel now, like when I hold the photograph which my father made; mumma getting dressed up in front of the mirror, not knowing of being the subject of his frame. I can only play those simpler times in my head by never really being a part of it and trying to leech onto it for some belonging.The idea of presentism is calming yet a little scary. To say that things once never existed or would not do eternally, is to say we would one day lose our existence to nothing, that the universe would go back to where it once began, a mere speck of dust.
mumma by papa
