Life and Stories

Recalling to tell is an exercise in excerpting at two levels, one due to memory's limited ability to reveal details of the past voluntarily, and the other due to the limitations of language and the tendency to tell things in a manner that they sound linear and clear, almost like those stories we read in books, preferably presenting ourselves as heroes. This violence of excerpting leaves the recounting significantly removed from the 'reality'. Actually in life things don't happen in a story-like manner. Things and people come in and go out. It continues as time flows like a river that carries many moments, while drowning some. There are no beginnings. Time goes on without any specific pattern or reason, an interminable iteration. There are bends and falls, but at a deeper level, there is monotony (which gives a certain stability to being). In this flow, from time to time, we take stock, we say: I've been traveling and working for three years, I've been in Chennai for six months. Neither is there any end: you never leave a person or place in one go. They live, they persist in the minds. Even the dead live, coexisting with the living in the depths of our minds. This absence of neat separateness and linearity in life's ways creates differences between what was and what is remembered and told. Everything changes when we think and tell about life.

Trying to go back to the time and space that were, our memory reveals bits and pieces, with many elements and details left out due to time's constant effect on memory's resources, and some blocked out by the subconscious, perhaps due to some emotional links or other reasons. Our present perspectives also shape what we recall from the past, with an inherent value judgment. We all have occasions when we have looked back and things appeared different from how we perceived them originally. The recalled bits and pieces have to be narrated in words that are limited by our language and the practice of structuring the 'story', situated in the context of the present, and our current 'construction' of our self. The self that was is not the self that is. Even the self that recalls is not the self that tells, since recalling is a personal exercise, while telling is essentially extra-personal. Things happen in one way, we recall in another way, we tell them in another way. To illustrate, let me undertake such an exercise.

I am going back to a time my memory vaguely allows me to reconstruct, and a place that was nothing like this one. This is a big, grey city, a concrete congregation inhabited by humans on the move. That was a small, green town, and within it a large, sparsely populated settlement belonging to people who shared one common identity - the main bread winner (usually a male) working for a large enterprise. Mostly middle and upper middle class, the inhabitants of this place were kind of isolated from the world around. The place they were living in was like a reclusive monarch's expansive estate, but in this situation there were hundreds of kings, queens, princes and princesses enjoying the pleasure and privileges of the estate, and also the accompanying sense of non-belonging to the outside world. I was a child then, all of ten years old. I was the little prince, who in company of other princes, toured around his father's fort, in all the pride and glory, and fun. I had many friends, but three of them were my 'best' friends. We did everything together, and I mean everything.............

My recall has certain elements like 'isolation and detachment', 'friendship', 'fun and privileges of childhood'. Though important, were these the only key elements of that life and time? Perhaps, some of them might not have appeared important when I was in that reality. Also, memory has helped me construct a picture consisting of pieces that represent the time and space in a manner that is, to put it vaguely, 'romanticised', a tendency that often (but not always) accompanies a thought of the past. The entire 'good old times' construct has its roots here. The practice of language and structuring of the 'story' further affect the 'quality' of the picture. We can recall some elements, and of course the telling or the description is such that the 'other' can't smell it.

This is important because we look at our today in the light of our yesterday, and vice versa. Ours is a constant struggle for self-betterment and improvement over the past, to take 'care' of ourselves. So, it helps to know the nature of the link between the time now and the past, the quality of a weigh-scale we use. It influences our perspective of life, our view about change, our comfort with the present self. Also, in our social interactions, the way the past is discussed and described is important. There is perhaps a possibility of being deliberate with memory and language, but only to a limited extent. Then there are boundaries, at least those inherent in the language.