Core Memory Unlocked

- memories, dusty alleys of past and everything in between

In Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust describes memory as– ‘I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.’ It is difficult to forget the essence of Proust’s words once you read them. Often, such days creep up on me when I revisit a memory, regret the past, and measure how much it has changed me. They make me ask myself– how far have I come, or have I? Perhaps I live in that untethered way. Perhaps we all do, at the periphery of which is a thing called the past and memory, slyly waiting to make a move. And when it does, I traverse in a fever dream, recalling, remembering, and reshaping.

In March of 2024, I met an old friend. It was the kind of meeting I had desired for quite some time: to be with someone who knew me from the past and understood the vulnerability I had been experiencing lately, no questions asked. Its arrival was a stroke of fortune and a mild surprise. Such are the rewards of a two-decade friendship. Even though it has wavered and encountered bumps along the way, it has always existed somewhere in life’s journey, like the books on your shelf, an accomplice that bears witness to the ongoing life from the sidelines. If I had to define our friendship– we aren’t the ‘joint at the hips’ kind of friends, but fall into the category of ‘I am always here if you want to talk’. I think there is something about ageing friendships. It needs no proof, no assurance. It is just there within your hand’s reach. So, I seized the chance to join her in solitude at her spacious, lovely home for a sleepover—an offer she made that I couldn’t resist. Give a mom a night without her kid and a bottle of wine, dare she say no! The evening flew by as conversations unfolded, and the wine was poured. We settled on the couch before gradually moving to the living room floor. Chatting with friends sprawled across the floor suggests intimacy: the informal atmosphere contributes to that old, shared bond. The television ran in the background on mute, perhaps as an excuse to spark a conversation if we ran out of topics. Occasionally glancing at the changing visuals, we would shift from one subject to another: children, mental health, social circles, life outside our home country, parents and our inherent childhood traumas—we spoke about them all. The conversations that night flowed effortlessly; we didn’t try too hard. There was a natural ease to it, likely because we were both meeting without our spouses and children for a good length of time after I had moved to the UK. Amidst laughter, leg pulling, and eating, glimpses of the past permeated our talk, first unconsciously and then in full consciousness. Our memories as Engineering graduates, our fights, and going over its details — how I banged the door of her room shut as I left with seething anger and how she later came to my dorm room– and how we sorted it out. We were buddies who walked to and sat in lectures together. While I dozed off on the back bench, she took notes, crushing over her favourite tutor. Recalling our older versions and the fanatics of our early twenties, sharing stories of the collective past, which we have in abundance, we shifted to our anecdotes. Taking turns, we became listeners as the television visuals still ran in the background. We filled each other in on life’s details as we emptied our wine bottles. It was like wandering those memory lanes together and seeing a single perspective. It was like returning to the college days of having tete-a-tete on the hostel terrace rooftops or between our study sessions. Everything then was surrounded by the bustling energy of youth, but also uncertainty and naivety. That night, as we spoke to each other, sitting on the living room carpet, nibbling on the garlic bread that had gone cold and forgotten between our talks, we were adults who had navigated some of life’s struggles and were more prepared for the ones to come. With time, this night will permeate the darkness of many others to follow. Much of it will be forgotten; the conversations, jibes, and jokes, but the essence of the moment shared so intimately through stories and continuous chatters— meaningful and meaningless— will be etched in memories. A past that is never absent from the present, like a memory one revisits until one can and wants to. It is my second nature to think over the happenstances once they have occurred. Maybe it is my overthinking, or maybe there lies something deeper which often tends to slip right past our eyes. I pondered whether human beings can be placed in the category of material memory.

Picture by Nupur Lakhe

I had finished reading Paul Auster’s latest— Baumgartner, a few weeks before I met my friend. I was so taken by Auster’s crystalline prose and the compelling storytelling that I came out of it enamoured. Its story revolves around Baumgartner, a man in his late seventies, who reminisces about his wife, whom he lost about a decade back, through his memories, channels of grief, love, loss, and a whole wide past open. As readers, we see their past lives through their letters, stories, essays, and other written materials alongside Baumgartner’s narrative voice. In the opening pages, which Auster writes with so much visual conviction, Baumgartner burns his fingers as he hurriedly and absently grabs a scalding pot on the stove, boiling eggs. Multiple pages later, seeing the pot lying on the floor and with a wincing pain in his fingers, he traverses a past life and memory of when he met Anna, his wife and how their story began. The pot embodies the concept of material memory: the mind recalls memories through objects from the past. Hereafter, every writing piece Baumgartner finds in his home opens memory gateways of remembering Anna, once again, a loss he survived but also lives with. As I spent days with him recalling his youth, love, and loss, reading it, I was right there— on a chair adjacent to his in his backyard listening, as he told them to me with his eyes closed against the direct sunlight— trying to recall the material things that make me revisit my past; willingly and unwillingly so.

Past lives, however, have various mediums to surface. A conversation, a familiar face, a situation, or an argument, a meeting with old friends and people who hold a story in our past life. However small, it exists. Certain incidents with my son remind me of my mother, and my childhood comes rushing to me, emphasising how different it is now– mothering, childhood, and this shared bond. Books, movies, and songs bring back the old days and memories entwined with them. These are powerful mediums for time-travel and exhibit past moments. That night, as we slipped under the sweet and comfortable intoxication of wine, delving deeper into our talks, we stumbled upon the memory of a friendship brawl that is difficult for me to talk about, but we both have been a part of. This scuffle involved misunderstandings, saying things behind the back, breaking trust, and gaslighting, with more people being party to it than just the two of us. I was guilty of a couple of things myself. It somehow becomes easy to express under the influence of alcohol, maybe because it comes from the heart or that numb space devoid of overthinking; the loose tongue makes its way into saying the unsaid things buried in the chest for almost a decade. Our dialogue took turns in confrontations and perspectives. She was a living embodiment of my past life, the carrier of a memory I permanently wanted to delete precisely because I imagined it showed my character misunderstood. She knew the version of me that I most despised. And for me, a burning ember of this past remained. Whenever I would meet her, a flicker of it would always flash before me, even though I would douse it, consciously reminding myself we are not the same people anymore, and the twenty years count for much more. We became mothers together; our children are just a few weeks apart. It is so rare and fortunate to find a friend traversing the new mom curve like yours. We were accomplices to each other’s breastfeeding tales, laments, and consolations. Our coinciding motherhood is what saved our friendship from breaking completely after that brawl. When I was back in India, we would chat or have video calls during the COVID pandemic that engulfed the whole world. We were distant but connected. Our friendship did not fall apart, but we made amends to renew it and keep it cordial. We probably like the quiet presence of this old friendship between us, so that if one of us reaches out, the other can provide a hand. Nothing changed at large when I came to the UK, except we were in closer proximity, with more chances of seeing each other physically more often. That night, with our honesty, I saw that ill memory melt like the wax of a burning candle. It was invigorating, letting go of a sliver of my troubled past and speaking in the unhinged way I wanted to for years. I always thought I would apologise in person sometime in the future for my behaviour and for the vitriolic aftermath of a bad fight that left a sour aftertaste. Because it is the only thing I can take responsibility for– myself and no one else, even though we all know a fight in friendship is never between two people, but a collection of factors that fuel it. In one such tiny moment between our heart-pouring session, sharing her daughter’s love for reading, I told her that reading helped me heal from the toxicity of a broken friendship then, and continues to be an antidote to life and what it throws at us. The books, if they open the wound with that one sentence, also become the salve for it; akin to a conversation that is uncomfortable but necessary. Ten years ago, it was Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love that healed me. A few days later, after I met with my friend, I started reading The Details by Ia Genberg. The book became a testament to everything I said I believed in.

In The Details by Ia Genberg, a woman in the fit of a fever wanders down the road of a past life. She recalls four people and their presence in her life and how they shaped it as her body temperature races. The first memory sprouts through an inscription in a book that she has the urge to read during this time— The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. As this woman narrated these four episodes, like four short stories, I was bewildered by their capacity to unravel the pressed sentiments within me. With her intricate sentences, the author, Ia Genberg, unfurled the incidents from my past and gave them another chance to appear fleetingly but with new meaning. It felt like a homecoming when she wrote about how people can change us and then leave us, but what is left are the remains of this adapted change burning like embers within us. She writes— ‘That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub against. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.’ It is perhaps the author’s writing and nuanced narration that potentially places the reader transiently in their past. These cursory moments emerge from the ordinary: a book that lies on your shelf unread but gifted years back, a friend who loved giving perfect presents and somehow made you feel guilty because you couldn’t do the same, a friendship that you knew had finished its term time and would one day dissolve, and a friend who has always had your back. Every such medium becomes a lens to view this woman’s memories, and for us to navigate ours. The mention of Paul Auster in the opening pages of The Details that describe his writing reminded me of my admiration for Baumgartner: ‘an open sky between every word’ is how Ia Genberg describes it, and I can’t disagree. As someone often found in the clutches of the past, revisiting it, questioning it, and waiting for its grippy tentacles to let her go, The Details is my pilgrimage.

Reading can be a serendipitous fate of events. The books picked during a particular phase and life events are testimonies to the existence of the psychology of fateful reading. This time, my books became attuned to the myriad ways of the past and how memories are propelled. If Baumgartner exhibited a life story told through material memory, The Details slowly unspooled the many sentiments of going down the memory tunnel like yarn, questioning the said definition of material memory. Both books demonstrate unique narrative voices. However, the common denominator between them is the narration of a backstory. If Baumgartner feels transitory— past and present— in its appearance, The Details rests solely in the past. Infused with them was my meeting with my old friend. I saw glimpses of our conversations in these books: one where we blamed our twenties for the incidents that transpired and how it would be so different now in our late thirties, the guilt we hold as mothers, our states of anxiety, and the cure to all of it. These events— my reading choices, the themes they covered, and meeting my friend— are mystically linked to each other. I will recall the night I spent at my friend’s house whenever I re-read The Details. Because there isn’t a better way to roam the dusty alleys of the past than sitting with these fictional characters and remembering on your own. And because it is fiction, there is the liberty to imagine dear old Baumgartner turning from his chair in his backyard, where you both are seated, taking in the sunlight and saying— It too shall pass, kid. The past percolates both these books in a myriad of ways. Objects and stories. One abides by the literal definition of material memory, while the other befits a metaphorical explanation.

Picture by Nupur Lakhe

It does pass: the pain, the recollections in visuals, the voices, the words. The visuals become hazy. The words are forgotten, and narratives tweaked, for every person carries a unique version of the past or a memory. What is left behind is a remnant of a memory in which we find shelter. It is perhaps why Proust’s perception and writing of the tea and madeleines memory episode from Swann’s Way feels so wholesome and convincing. Isn’t it exactly how a memory wave washes us? Mounting slowly, feeling echoic. Similarly, though, only a figment of the memory made that night with my friend will remain. The remnants will consist of tiny things, not even the conversations at large, but snippets of when she turned teary-eyed and seeing her, I controlled mine, or when I felt a lump in my throat during my confrontations, or when I had goosebumps from hearing one of her past life stories. But a memory nevertheless, that showed us both aged from our twenties when we first met, carrying no baggage and, on this night, just two women who spoke with their guard down and achieved a breakthrough.

Our memories are sanctums where time resides. We find ourselves in those spaces with or without choice. And yet we rest in it briefly because once upon a time, it was a part of us. As Ia Genberg writes in The Details– ‘In one way life begins anew each day and every second, but it’s also true that I keep returning to the same places in myself.’ What is material memory, then? An object, a person, a story? Not conforming to the literal, it is everything which sends us back in time and recall, with or without an object to house the memory in.