The
sharpest
memory
I have of a
book from my
childhood is one
entitled I Know What
I Like. I remember the
glossy, Dubble Bubble–pink
hardcover, borrowed from the
library at Rockford Public
School. I can recite the first page, no
doubt because of the symmetry, or
rather, more so because of the symmetry-breaking
of the title, the shift from the I to
the You: I know what I like. / Do you know
what you like? As a child of two colliding cultures,
I knew that I did not know what I liked. Yet, at that
very young age of perhaps six or seven, I realized that
the major goal in life, in my life, was to be able to find
the answer to that question. To find out what I liked, that
definition of identity, I believed would ensure my survival. It was indeed a paradox to me that like was harder to discover, harder to articulate even, than love. A few years later, at the age of twelve, I recall clearly relating this dilemma to my father, albeit in a slightly different way. One day I told him I was worried I had “no personality.” I do not remember how he replied, which suggests I was correct. In any case, I sought thereafter to find one.
I realized I could not do it while living under my parents’ roof where, among other things, I was not allowed to go to the movies with a boy because one thing could lead to another and I could get pregnant. Loving my English classes and my science classes equally, I had been offered admission to the coveted Arts and Science interdisciplinary undergraduate program at McMaster University. My friend, who had a grade-point average only half a per cent lower than mine, did not get in. But I turned it down, because Hamilton was too close to home. Instead, I went to Western for pure science. My parents drove me the two hours across Highway 401 with my belongings and home-cooked food piled in the trunk. As we approached London, Ontario, I started to notice white welcome sheets draped across the exit signs, spray-painted with purple text. I am sure my father and mother saw them too. One read “THANK YOU FATHERS FOR YOUR DAUGHTERS.” No one in the car said a word as we passed under it. But that was how it was for the entire ride anyway. We had all become accustomed in our own ways of disregarding the inevitable.
I left the university in 1997 with a degree in Ecology and Evolution, a Ph.D. in Theoretical Ecology, and a desire to fling myself even further. Maybe it was the same feeling that motivated my father, exactly three decades prior, to leave India. I secured fellowships that would see me do post-doctoral work in Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.S.A., before I finally returned to Canada to take up my first job. A few years after that I would discover a quote from Dorothy Parker: Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves, reminiscent of my lifelong goal to find out what I liked.
I am still mystified by that challenge (Do you know what you like?) presented to me in early childhood, so I order the book authored by Norma Simon from an online bookstore. The copy’s cover has the same hard texture I recall from childhood but this version is bright orange and yellow, not Dubble Bubble pink, forcing me to see it another way. I see that it was published in 1971, my birth year. I flip through the pages and the text and images of the characters come flooding back, like childhood friends, not strangers, not enemies. The little girl with her dog and the little boy in his jersey with the number twelve on it, getting a hot dog from a street vendor. I know them now. I like to touch treetops. I like to be first in line. I like to smell flowers. I like to see the stars. I like to see myself. I see them and I see me. Like a double-slit experiment showing that light can be both wave and particle. Both like and love. Both necessity and luxury. Both art and science. They look a bit like my own children.
A doctor, Sandeep Jauhar, writes in his nonfiction book entitled Heart: A History that there is a relationship between the physics of the heart and the emotions we attribute to it. In other words, it is possible to die of heartbreak. He believes that his own father died of a weak heart in the aftermath of Partition. Two disturbances: one large, one small. Heart is a word so fundamental to the Punjabi culture that the phrase dhil kubraat (sinking heart) is understood to express not just disappointment or love loss, but equally the physical illness and mental distress that accompany it. When my mother had a heart attack, we (her three children) hand-wrote her unofficial will, as she dictated it to us in the ICU at Trillium hospital. It was composed mostly of metal. Jewellery items, down to every single simple ring, every flimsy heart-shaped pendant. Then, after the two stents were put in and her heart was functioning again, we lost the note. Dictating it to us is something she will not do when she is not in the active process of dying, and us in the state of dhil kubraat. None of us can remember how it was all partitioned. We simply have to wait until she is on her deathbed again.
Researchers recently discovered that human memory of cultural objects follows the biexponential function, a curve represented by two summed exponential terms. It looks like a playground slide with two different sections. I was terrified of slides as a child. I did not believe that the section at the bottom that flattened out would stop me from flying off it. But there are indeed two distinct phases of memory loss. The first phase is a steep decline, which is linked to “communicative memory,” or things remembered through direct word-of-mouth transfer. Like my mother telling me the same stories of her youth over and over again. The second phase relies on cultural memory and some kind of physical recording of the memory. This phase of decline, less steep, is longer, the memories more enduring, like my mother dictating her will for us to write down. I make voice memos of my mother telling me her stories. But her heavy accent does not make it to the page. How to translate changes in volume? The cracking of a voice?
Not that long ago I stole a CD of ghazals from my father’s collection, because there is one song in particular he always sings. I listen to it closely, over and over again, but I cannot seem to get past the communicative phase of memory. Kaun Kaita Hai Muhubat Ki Zaban Hoti Hai (“Who Says Love Has a Tongue?”). The word ghazal is of Arabic origin and loosely translates to “talking to women.” The theory of memory loss put forward by scientists does not include intergenerational effects of a lost language or culture. The exponents on the biexponential function start to resemble one another, and then they are the same. Or, the double exponents continue to bifurcate into one hundred multicoloured exponents and then they explode, burning the theory to monotone ashes. Ask me to sing you that ghazal, “Who Says Love Has a Tongue?” and I will. I like it.