When I was a child amma gave me a notebook. She passed through the curtain that separates the drawing room from the bedroom and set a rice paper notebook in my hand.
“Your grandmother Kunju had one just like it. She used to write in it each day. They say it is a good discipline.”
Then amma shut her mouth so tight it made a mark on her forehead.
“Did you have a notebook?” I asked her. “Did you write in it?”
She shook her head hard.
My notebook was made of white rice paper, and on the front cover it had markings of the sun and the moon and the stars. On the back cover the artist had drawn rivers and bridges.
When I first got my notebook I kept it under my pillow, thinking I would write in it when the fancy took me. Sometimes I opened pages and to my surprise found them quite bare. Then I realised what had happened. I had written things down in my head for fear of putting them down in the notebook.
To help me get over the fear of things I could not write down, I had the idea of making a list of things I liked.
The idea for a list of things I liked was something I got from a book grandfather Kuruvilla read to me: The Emperor Babur’s Book About His Own Self.
Under the heading “Pleasant Things of Hindustan” he made his scribe write down: masses of gold and silver; rains that make houses damp and wash them away; aandhi, darkener of the sky, wind that blows bearing so much dust that people are blinded, entirely.
I had never seen the darkness of an aandhi. But in Khartoum, at the age of five, I saw the haboob. Black umbrellas bore down from the Sahara, covering up the thin grass on the lawn, the leaves of the date palm, even the white egrets that made throaty cries, flying in from the Nile to strut beside the oleander bush. I stared out at high noon into the blackened sky and saw the whole of the visible world—tree, rooftop, sky—vanish in the blink of an eyelid.
Somehow the fact of the haboob reconciled me to the loss of an earlier life, the evidence of the senses lifted by distance, death, traumatic forgetfulness.
Mémoire, mémoire, que me veux tu?
I had to learn those lines by heart when I was a child and went to school in Khartoum, on the other side of the Arabian Sea. From outside the white painted classroom came the sound of gunshots, the acrid scent of tear gas, the noise of civil strife. As I stood by the school gates, I saw men dragging a body away. A man killed by police bullets, a poor man in a white gelabiya.
The air was very hot and there was a woman selling dates out of a wicker basket, black dates from desert trees and the brown humped shapes of the dom fruit. A dull brown fruit shaped like a cut head.
A head stocked with memory fragments.
That night on the terrace, as the whole family slept on mattresses side by side, I saw the stars huge as eyes in the brilliant blackness of the desert sky. In the neem tree I heard the red bird cry. It sounded so like the bird in the mango tree in the garden of the Tiruvella house. I shut my ears and tried to see that house again.
Memory needs nothing from me. Not the black waves on the shore, not the clouds that rise into infinity. It is a language without beginning, a mirror without a back where all that is crowds in, sky, stones, even the holes in the churchyard where my grandmother Kunju and grandfather Kuruvilla are laid side by side.
Memory knits us together then tears us apart. It is the first blessing and the last curse. It makes the sky and water burn. It turns me back into a four year old who squats at the wellside, not far from a bamboo grove, counting out stones.
Inside me is a spring of forgetfulness. Indigo water in which I dip my pen and write. I need to cut figures for a map, mark the fate of a generation forced far afield, thrust from native soil, reckoning nothing as foreign as our own selves: gnawing at history, swallowing geography.