- Mumbai, August 23rd, 2015.
He feared the flow of time. He feared that time would abduct his memories. Of his childhood, his adolescence, his teenage. All of it.
Each tiring day, he would climb up into his bed to escape time. To the promise of
a sleep, a carefree unrestrained slumber maybe, like his good old childhood days. It never happened. Random thoughts, anxieties, to-do lists and fear have substituted what was once his rabbit hole of euphoric visions, out of world voyages, chocolate worlds, aliens, classrooms, infatuations, mountains etc. Sleep was no longer a pleasure like his childhood. Flow of time had transformed it into another constrained must do activity in the adult world that promises optimal performance at work the next day. Just a healthy substitute for coffee.
Yet, whenever he is in bed, he would let his mind try and travel back in time. He couldn't afford the thought during the day; day times were being offered as sacrifices to the rapacious appetite of the industrialized world. But he stole the nights away from them and fed the haunting need in him. And in one of those nights, as his voyage into the past met the troubled sea of his memories, he wept.
He wept because he could no longer remember his past with clarity. Unused and unclaimed for, they had left the confines of his memory and sublimed into the galaxy of unknown. He could only manage distant blurs of emotions, locations and people making up certain memories. Only those ones that left a mark on his soul. The rest, the mundane ones vanished without a trace.
Yet he vowed to fight time and reclaim whatever little memories that lay dispersed over millions of his neurons.
After deliberate attempts he recounted his earliest memory. It was about a cat. About his first cat. He remembered how he had frantically searched his neighborhood one evening after the school when the neighborhood children informed him that they heard a cat squeal. He vividly remembered wailing terribly on a busy byroad, as he stood over the poor ball of fur, lying drenched in crimson red, gasping for its last breaths. He stood there, helpless, as the world simply turned its head and looked over, their eyes wide with empathy but their souls walking away hurriedly to their respective destiny.
On some other day, he reclaimed particular memories of his playful childhood. The adults where busy chattering away about money and job and politics and things about their lives that no one would want to know, while the unrestricted kids simply played their hearts out. Catch and catch, cricket, hide and seek, medas; the list was long. There was laughter, excitement, screaming, confusion, team spirit and what not. He remembered the sweet smell of sweat and mud clutching onto his cotton shirt, the freshness of cold water as it hit his warm skin and cleansed him, the simple yet sumptuous meal and the carefree afternoon naps.
Rejoiced at his minimal success, he fought harder every night and salvaged a particular memory about his high school days. A treasured memory that he had stored away for eternity. It was about a girl in his class. He remembered her kind eyes, her wide smile and her plump nose. She was the most amazing creature he had seen. She stole his little heart everyday as she walked into the class with her chest puffed up, in her navy blue skirt, white cotton shirt and a blue hair band over her double braided flourishing hair. As she walked past him, a waft of Cuticura talc and freshly oiled hair would hit him and carry him away into a distant wonderland. Being the extremely shy and self conscious kid that he was, he never gathered enough courage to speak to her. But he would make up for this by relentlessly stalking her after school; at her music class or during her sports practices. When the setting sun quietened the school premises, he would leave, unnoticed, brimming with infatuation for this strange wonder of the world.
Oh! What memories they were. What beautiful memories.
But they were simply that - memories. Not events that if wished, could be relived again and again. Time would not let him do that. This was his greatest resentment. He knew that the enemy was mighty and that he was living his life on the mercy of some cortex matter. A biological, degradable entity whose destiny he had no will upon.
But through his explorations, he realized that the only way to fight the flow of time and its slaughter on the memories is to travel back into these memories, over and over again, each time returning with tit-bits of his bygone days. He would then, patiently stitch together these salvaged bits into a fabric of a contiguous memory like a painter completing a picture from his blurred memory one stroke at a time.
He was slowly attempting to create something which every person on earth, at some point of their lives, wished for - timeless memories.
He feared the flow of time. He feared that time would abduct his memories. Of his childhood, his adolescence, his teenage. All of it.
Each tiring day, he would climb up into his bed to escape time. To the promise of
a sleep, a carefree unrestrained slumber maybe, like his good old childhood days. It never happened. Random thoughts, anxieties, to-do lists and fear have substituted what was once his rabbit hole of euphoric visions, out of world voyages, chocolate worlds, aliens, classrooms, infatuations, mountains etc. Sleep was no longer a pleasure like his childhood. Flow of time had transformed it into another constrained must do activity in the adult world that promises optimal performance at work the next day. Just a healthy substitute for coffee.
Yet, whenever he is in bed, he would let his mind try and travel back in time. He couldn't afford the thought during the day; day times were being offered as sacrifices to the rapacious appetite of the industrialized world. But he stole the nights away from them and fed the haunting need in him. And in one of those nights, as his voyage into the past met the troubled sea of his memories, he wept.
He wept because he could no longer remember his past with clarity. Unused and unclaimed for, they had left the confines of his memory and sublimed into the galaxy of unknown. He could only manage distant blurs of emotions, locations and people making up certain memories. Only those ones that left a mark on his soul. The rest, the mundane ones vanished without a trace.
Yet he vowed to fight time and reclaim whatever little memories that lay dispersed over millions of his neurons.
After deliberate attempts he recounted his earliest memory. It was about a cat. About his first cat. He remembered how he had frantically searched his neighborhood one evening after the school when the neighborhood children informed him that they heard a cat squeal. He vividly remembered wailing terribly on a busy byroad, as he stood over the poor ball of fur, lying drenched in crimson red, gasping for its last breaths. He stood there, helpless, as the world simply turned its head and looked over, their eyes wide with empathy but their souls walking away hurriedly to their respective destiny.
On some other day, he reclaimed particular memories of his playful childhood. The adults where busy chattering away about money and job and politics and things about their lives that no one would want to know, while the unrestricted kids simply played their hearts out. Catch and catch, cricket, hide and seek, medas; the list was long. There was laughter, excitement, screaming, confusion, team spirit and what not. He remembered the sweet smell of sweat and mud clutching onto his cotton shirt, the freshness of cold water as it hit his warm skin and cleansed him, the simple yet sumptuous meal and the carefree afternoon naps.
Rejoiced at his minimal success, he fought harder every night and salvaged a particular memory about his high school days. A treasured memory that he had stored away for eternity. It was about a girl in his class. He remembered her kind eyes, her wide smile and her plump nose. She was the most amazing creature he had seen. She stole his little heart everyday as she walked into the class with her chest puffed up, in her navy blue skirt, white cotton shirt and a blue hair band over her double braided flourishing hair. As she walked past him, a waft of Cuticura talc and freshly oiled hair would hit him and carry him away into a distant wonderland. Being the extremely shy and self conscious kid that he was, he never gathered enough courage to speak to her. But he would make up for this by relentlessly stalking her after school; at her music class or during her sports practices. When the setting sun quietened the school premises, he would leave, unnoticed, brimming with infatuation for this strange wonder of the world.
Oh! What memories they were. What beautiful memories.
But they were simply that - memories. Not events that if wished, could be relived again and again. Time would not let him do that. This was his greatest resentment. He knew that the enemy was mighty and that he was living his life on the mercy of some cortex matter. A biological, degradable entity whose destiny he had no will upon.
But through his explorations, he realized that the only way to fight the flow of time and its slaughter on the memories is to travel back into these memories, over and over again, each time returning with tit-bits of his bygone days. He would then, patiently stitch together these salvaged bits into a fabric of a contiguous memory like a painter completing a picture from his blurred memory one stroke at a time.
He was slowly attempting to create something which every person on earth, at some point of their lives, wished for - timeless memories.
