Every child in our son's school was given a memory chest in kindergarten which they filled with memorabilia through their 13-year journey. Looking back on those years through what our kids thought was significant enough to be stored away in the boxes revealed so much about their evolution from tots to teenagers. I remembered that time capsule this week as I opened a couple of dusty Air India 'attache cases' that had been lying under the bed for quite a while now. They belonged to my mother, who found their compact size the perfect receptacle for the bits and bobs that she wanted to store safely given the peripatetic nature of her life as a diplomat's wife/ mother / political worker. Going through it six years after she passed away, I connected almost each item inside with a memory, either lived or recounted; a few were a total surprise. And a couple even harked back to events in my own life that I had forgotten but Ma had preserved.Neatly stacked inside were knitting needles, recipes, stamps, a pair of faux leather gloves, photo negatives of amateur drama performances, letters from her sisters all living in different parts of India and the world, and hand-written boarding cards for Air India's legendary 747 flights between New Delhi and New York, via London. Also tucked away, a paediatrician's certificate saying I was too ill to travel.An entry passbook for East Berlin in 1955, yellow fever vaccination certificates for Africa and a handwritten invitation for an art exhibition in New York in 1974 reflected one side of her life. Another side was delineated through badges for various sessions of the Congress, a copy of Indira Gandhi's speech in Parliament outlining what became the infamous 42nd Constitution Amendment in 1976 and even Ma's expenses invoice (Rs 113 /-) for the 1977 election campaign. That a photo of my mother and other ladies presenting a cheque to Padmaja Naidu for Bangladesh made it to the front page of a Delhi newspaper on May 19, 1971 was revealing: helping our now-churlish neighbour was a national effort, clearly. But two other cuttings that Ma kept - an article on the disconnect of Indian authors living abroad, and the prospects of women entering or returning to the job market after marriage and kids - showed that some things never change! All these and more ephemera emerged from only one of the cases; the onrush of memories they triggered proved overwhelming, so the other one remains closed. Ma's mementos are what historians call 'material culture' - physical objects that define or are evocative of a period. Thus far, most human experiences and memories have been connected to 'materials' that can be stored and passed on - with stories attached - as personal histories. But for how much longer?Who writes or keeps letters anymore? Who develops photos to put in albums once they are posted in family groups or social media? Who has physical tickets and boarding passes? How many read actual newspapers, much less keep cuttings? So much of life is now lived via gadgets and stored in them. Once they become obsolete, like VCD/DVD players and cassette recorders have in a few decades, vast tranches of our lives will become inaccessible to future generations.This is not an exhortation to hoard; decluttering has become a conscious goal of many in our overtly materialistic times, after all. Rather, my mother's seemingly random yet evocative preservation of parts of her life made me think about what I consider the defining aspects of mine. We all need to introspect on this and form a virtual memory chest, one that may not occupy actual space but exists in our mindspace, to be passed down orally. We exist only as long as memory does.
- News Source Indiatimes (Click to view full news): CLICK HERE
0 Comments:
Leave a Reply