Postcards from a Memory

Family, memory, & the documentation of relative nothings

This edition is second in a five part series on ‘Delight’, but can be read without that context.

---

I am not going to lie. Keeping a series on ‘Delight’ going as the world stares at a war is not a good idea. I have whispered that to myself for a week now, but that’s not the only reason I haven’t written a word in a very long time. In February, I started a habit-tracker to add colour, dots, and bullets to my desire for a writing discipline, but have shied away from filling it all of March. On the positive side, the black dots under ‘running’ and ‘yoga’ in my March bullet journal have followed a more or less continuous trail. This is not the longest I have gone without writing, but it is the longest in a long time, and it is not a good feeling.

Regrets aside, let’s start by talking about the weather. At Khwaabghar, the pink bougainvillea flowers have sprouted to cover an entire grill, and we have also passed the days when it was cold in the shade. Lime and orange buds made an appearance last week, but the Jasmine is still shedding. Badi mumma is back inside the house and is avoiding the sun almost as much as me. However, her fan is running at 2, while mine rages on at a noisy 4. With the strengthened sun has come the internal wilting of a forgotten nerve as my migraines prepare for their comeback. Safe to say, we have transitioned into the territory of late evening, regulated sounds kind of meet-ups at Khwaabghar.

In this edition, we are onto the second in a five-part series on ‘Delight’. This time, we talk about family histories, memory, belonging, and the hoarding of family paraphernalia.

At the Risk of Forgetting

Do you remember those annoying children who kept making scrapbooks out of old art files? For whom every bit of paper, old tickets, photographs, and rotting leaf was an article worthy of FeviStick? I am that annoying child. I have tickets, boarding passes, maps, and notes from monuments, museums, important bus rides, and flights of the past many years. I have questioned my grandparents on the Partition, their childhood, our family, and their friends to the point where the details have become sharper in my mind than theirs. Pages and pages from my notebooks and diaries since primary school contain attempts at family trees, Partition stories, and even scraps of dresses, pagdis, and dupattas stapled to leftover pages of English, Maths, Science workbooks to hold a memory together. My obsession with constructing a fuller narrative of our lives has translated into many fictional accounts of my childhood house, lengthy descriptions of our days there, and a compulsive remembering of details- the Navratra paranthas at Pummy Aunty’s house, the ‘H’ shaped verandas with the tandoor in one corner, Indu Taai’s hair and her distinct voice, long summer afternoons of playing cricket with Anshul where the last step of the common staircase was a six, and hitting the ball outside the designated playing zone counted as ‘out’. There was a match where we lost the ball after hitting it, and Anshul ran 90+ runs for a century. To my own delight and peril, stories from my grandparents’ childhood in Pishore, (Peshawar in Pakistan) have constructed an alternative universe in my head, complete with their house, school, friends, and the evenings they spent eating neje (pine nuts). I also have vivid, borrowed visions of the displacement of Partition, the violence of the transition, and the assimilation to the present. These stories and descriptions live as words and visuals in my head, without the documentation of smells, tastes, or sounds to qualify.

In October 2021, I wrote a tribute for Kamla Bhasin, or Kamla di for many of us. As I read through everything that had been written and said about her since her passing, I was struck by the volume of memories she left behind. My timeline was flooded with pictures, video clips, messages, songs, and dances from her various public appearances over 40+ years of work. Even without tapping into my memories, she was right there for me to see and construct in her almost entirety. Her phone number sits on my screen for me to touch, her WhatsApp voice notes and chats are a record of how she spoke, who she was, and what she meant. A memory, concrete and whole, much more effective than a scrapbook.

This is not true for the tiny universes we carry inside of us from before digital cameras, WhatsApp voice notes, Facebook, and Instagram. In the absence of a concrete reality to build a life that was before me, the risk of colouring haunts my remembering, and merges with imagination. But, being a hoarder comes with its merits.

Delights of a Discovery

Last year, while clearing some old files to make space for the newest box of paraphernalia in my cupboard, I found an old notebook and an official looking file which I read for weeks to come. The notebook was from my school with a couple of pages of class notes, possibly abandoned mid year. In the pages after the notes was a minutely labelled index in Punjabi, followed by pages and pages full of text in my grandfather’s tiny, beautiful handwriting. They were handwritten notes on the meanings of text from The Guru Granth Sahib, our holy text. They were not copied or instructive, but were written as if to speak to himself. The index was functional , and the work of the meticulous hand of a self taught scholar keeping a record. Reading through that notebook is a task I still haven’t completed as reading Punjabi in miniature font is a skill I haven’t mastered. But a glance at the notebook brought back a memory- Daddy used to walk everywhere in his white kurta pajama, a black gaatra across his chest holding a silver kirpan. His walk was slightly bent forward with both his hands at the base of his spine. Walking alone, he used to talk to himself silently, undoing the knots of his hand to raise his right hand’s index finger as if in instruction, sometimes nodding in agreement to himself, smiling, sometimes speaking silently with the passion of a headmaster. My sister remembered the exact memory when she saw the notebook. I am convinced that he was talking to himself then just like he was in these notebooks.

My other discovery, an old file is a document I have spent much more time with. It is a record of correspondence spanning 2+ years, documenting the attempt to purchase the house we were born in. Complete with hand written letters from the court, signatures in Punjabi, spelling errors and corrections, and rent receipts of 150 rupees per quarter, the file carries letters from 1974-76, from a time when the permission to sell a house was required from the authorities.

---

It stirs something in me to think that Daddy was writing these letters during the Emergency, fighting a minor battle of misplaced affidavits, lost power of attorneys, and barsati construction of a one bedroom house as events of prominent history unfolded around him. It makes my memory of him fuller, and lends a personal significance to 1975 which the Emergency failed to help me with. It has brought me closer to a moment much after the Partition, and landed a distinct reality to a period I had accepted as uneventful and homogeneous. It also helps me retain multiple copies of his beautiful signature, a relic I had never thought to preserve.

There are other things I have lost in the inability of memory and repetition. There was a tongue in cheek (literally) sound that Daddy used to make when he was happy. None of us in the family have been able to repeat it, but we all remember it exactly. That’s something we have lost, but are able to laugh about in its amorphous-ness. Whatever we remember, and what we keep discovering has helped join our memories for a more concrete remembering of a life we shared, and I am grateful for this universe of shared memories.

Updates from Khwaabghar

Given my inability to manage multiple WhatsApp conversations, and my general aversion to WhatsApp groups, I am ending my year long hiatus from Instagram to share updates from the community, with the community. If you wish to follow, please look for @khwaabgharstories on Instagram.

We are also hosting open days throughout this weekend, so please get in touch with me on Instagram/WhatsApp if you’d like to drop by to browse through our collection or just a conversation!