Letter from Boston
Memory Lane
On a lazy fall evening last week, the song "Bhalobashi, bhalobashi, ey shurey kachey durey.." came floating down while I was fiddling with my TV clicker and switched to a Bengali channel. A very familiar Tagore song for me, rendered over the ages by various artistes, Indrani, Bonnya, Sadi, you name it. What captured my attention this time were the last four lines of the lyrics:
Shey shurey shagor kooley badhon khuley
Atol rodon uthey duley,
Shey shurey baajey money okaroney
Bhuley-jawa gaaner bani, bhola diner kadon hashi
A literal translation of these lines would be, "Tears swell up as I hear that tune, and my heart resonates with words of long-lost songs and memories of days full of laughter and sorrow."
Unconsciously, my mind drifted away from the song, and I went into a trance. The tune, but mostly the words, had carried me away in time and space, and for a few moments transported me into a magical realm where everything is almost real, from one's past. Memories, ah, those beautiful memories…. As Tagore so beautifully articulated it, a tune or favorite lyrics bring up memories. For me, bitter-sweet feelings were stirred up by the verse "bhola diner kadon hashi"—happy moments and heartaches from days gone by, days buried in long-lost chapters from the past!
As happens often to me like many of us, a song, smell, food, or even the setting sun would set in motion flashbacks, and soon I would be deeply immersed in the dream world of memories. Needless to mention, the hard drive of my memories is almost full since I seem to save almost every bits and pieces from my past. I have been trying recently to off-load, or "download" in modern terminology, these memories to my laptop hard drive, in the form of essays and scanned photographed. However, memory happens to be of one my favorite sources when I sit down to write, and I also enjoy reading first-person accounts of politicians and listening to family and friends when they share their own war stories, unless they are exercises in self-glorification.
I often ask myself, why do I feel so nostalgic about my college and university days? Is it because I left the country many years ago? Or, is it because distance makes the heart grow fonder? I guess it is a combination of both, and also partially because as you grow older, everything from one's past looks so much full of glory. Whatever the reason, I say to myself, "I like it!" My friends, who have a more literary bent than I do, have confirmed to me that some of the best works in literature are memoirs and auto-biographies, or oeuvres informed by one's personal experiences.
A writer in this genre, Marcel Proust, the French philosopher-novelist, has been one of my favourite writers since my Dhaka University days where I heard of him from Aziz Mallam, my French teacher. Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" has been on my list of books that I promise to finish reading every year recently. Proust was confined to bed when he wrote it based on his recollections of younger years. But his is hardly a memoir-it is a philosophical reflection on life, and themes often intertwined with events from his past and triggered by memories. The richness of his prose and his personal experiences can be seen from the following passage:
"She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…"
While writing from memory has its plus points, it is not without some well-known pitfalls. Apart from questions of authenticity, and the minefield of selective memory (many of my readers will recall Hillary Clinton's infamous "I was there" utterance in relation to Bosnian crisis), many writers have been found to unwittingly laying claim to other peoples' thoughts and stories when their memory betrays them. Loss of memory can sometimes lead to serious trouble. Egregious memory lapse may even be labeled as "plagiarism". Modern political and literary history are full of instances where people have used the excuse "Oh, I forgot".
But, there is another aspect to writing from memory. As one of my favorite teachers once said, "If you read but don't remember, then you might find yourself reinventing the wheel." I hate to spend days elaborating on an idea which I thought was an original, only later to remember or discover that I've borrowed the idea from someone else. In graduate school, my advisor often would say, "I like your ideas, and these might well be your original ideas, but please check if someone has not already written about them already". I am glad I more often than not heeded his advice, and spent some time on mastering the art of "Literature Review", which, even in this post-Google era, is an important asset in a writer's toolbox.
Coming back to memory, my best times are when I get to chat about shared memories with my near and dear ones. Very often, I'll remember an incident from the past, and as soon as start recounting it to my wife. Before I can finish the story she might say, "Oh, I remember that one…" and we'd both have a laugh together. I read in one of Syed Mujtaba Ali's essays that when the world's humorists meet for their annual convention, they hardly tell a complete joke to each other. They just mention a number which identifies a particular joke and the whole room bursts into laughter. A typical conversation at these gatherings might go like, "yesterday, I came across an airline hostess who forgot to give me tea without milk. So I asked her for some milk and then..." Here the speaker might pause for a second and then continue "Do you remember, Joke Number 24?" and the whole audience would start to laugh.
My friend Mushtaque and I have developed an adapted version of the humorists' method. We have many shared experiences and when we talk on the phone, we hardly ever have a conversation without alluding to some incident from our past. So we have developed our own index card system. For example, a few days ago he called from Arkansas, and said, "dosto, I've been feeling a little down for the last few days. Don't feel like doing much in the afternoon."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, I have a recipe to get you out of this slump."
"Oh, really? What is it?"
"Well, do you remember Surjya Sen Hall in March 1974, where ….?"
I could not finish my sentence and Mushtaque would, amidst fits of laughter say, "Alright, alright, I got it. You don't have to spell it out, my wife is within earshot. But thanks for the tips. I'll consider following your prescription as soon as we are done with this conversation".
I hang up—may be I'll call him within a few days to check on him, and find out if my "medication" helped him.
Dr. Abdullah Shibli, is an economist and IT professional based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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