If I Forget Everything

A few weeks ago, I watched The Odyssey. There is a line in the film that has continued to return to me with an assertion I cannot delineate:

“…what you most want is what you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost.”

It is a startling inversion of one of literature’s oldest narratives. We have inherited The Odyssey as the archetypal story of homecoming: a man spends years crossing impossible seas, enduring war, temptation and exile, only to return to Ithaca. Yet beneath that familiar reading lies another, quieter one. Perhaps Odysseus’ greatest apprehension is not the uncertainty of the journey but the certainty that home, by the time one returns to it, has already ceased to exist in the form one has carried within oneself. Places survive. Memory preserves them. Time does not.

Nearly a month earlier, on the 12th of June, I had watched Main Wapas Aaunga. The two films belong to vastly different worlds, and yet they have remained strangely inseparable in my mind because they are animated by the same question: what becomes of home when time has rendered return impossible?

Kinu, the protagonist of Main Vaapas Aaunga, is in his nineties. Dementia has slowly dismantled the architecture of his memory. Faces lose their names, years collapse into indistinguishable fragments, relationships become unrecognisable. And yet, there remains one place to which his mind returns with astonishing fidelity: the home he left behind before Partition. It is not merely a geographical location. It is a world that history has irrevocably dismantled, a home that survives nowhere except within the stubborn persistence of memory.

There is something profoundly unsettling about this. We are accustomed to thinking of memory as fragile, susceptible to erosion, vulnerable to disease and age. Yet perhaps memory is not simply a passive archive but an active curator. Perhaps, when everything begins to disappear, it does not relinquish the past indiscriminately. It chooses.

Around the same time, I happened to hear Imtiaz Ali speak about his childhood home. He was not speaking about architecture or ownership. He was speaking about returning to a place that still stands and discovering that its physical continuity offers remarkably little consolation. The house remains, but the childhood that animated it has withdrawn beyond retrieval. One begins to realise that what one has been calling “home” all these years was never a building at all. It was a particular arrangement of time, people, smells, sounds, anxieties and affections that could only ever exist once.

Two years ago, on a trip to Mussoorie, I discovered that my favourite restaurant there – The Rice Bowl, had shut down. It was the place where I had eaten my first dumplings, my first spring rolls, and what not, where an entire unfamiliar world of taste had first been laid open to me as a child. I do not think I mourned the food itself. I think I mourned the version of myself who once sat there, discovering this new cuisine, and who would never get to sit there again.

I have often wondered whether that is why the idea of home has always unsettled me.

People are remembered for different things. Some possess extraordinary artistic gifts. Others have an ease with language, an instinct for leadership, a remarkable generosity, or an effortless capacity for friendship. If I am remembered for anything by the people who know me well, it is probably for my incurable nostalgia. They know that I have an almost embarrassing tendency to believe that yesterday possessed a quality that today somehow lacks. I have spent years wondering whether this habit of looking backwards is something I acquired or something with which I have always lived.

The earliest evidence suggests the latter.

I must have been five or six. Birthdays, in our family, were occasions of great celebration. There would be friends filling every room, games that invariably descended into cheerful chaos, gifts stacked in corners, balloons refusing to acknowledge that the evening had ended. That year, I remember receiving sketch pens and stationery that delighted me beyond measure. Winter vacations were approaching, and I had already imagined the afternoons I would spend on the terrace drawing, colouring and writing.

Late that night, after everyone had left, I stood by the window watching a wedding procession pass by. My aunt noticed that I seemed unusually quiet and asked me what was wrong.

“My birthday is over,” I told her.

“It will come again,” she replied.

“Yes,” I said, “but only after a year.”

I have returned to that memory repeatedly over the years because I continue to find the child’s sadness disproportionate to its cause. Nothing had been taken from her. The presents remained. The holidays lay ahead. The people she loved were still around her. And yet she was mourning something that could not be recovered, not because it had been destroyed, but because it had become irrevocably past.

For a long time I wondered whether this was nostalgia or something less flattering. Was I simply attached to moments in which I occupied the centre of attention? Was I mourning my own significance rather than the passing of time itself? The question has occurred to me often enough that I no longer dismiss it lightly. Yet the older I have grown, the less convincing that explanation appears. What I seem unable to relinquish is not admiration or importance but transience itself. I have always found endings disproportionately difficult to accept.

Friends sometimes ask, half in jest, what grief I carry that makes me so persistently melancholic. The truthful answer is that I do not know. I hesitate even to invoke the language of grief because it feels undeserved. And yet melancholy does not always announce itself through catastrophe. Sometimes it is less an event than a disposition; less a consequence than a way of inhabiting the world.

What fascinates me is the extraordinary selectivity of my own memory. I routinely forget what I ate the previous day. I often struggle to remember where I first encountered a line of writing that later became indispensable to me. Entire conversations dissolve with surprising ease.

Yet childhood remains almost unnervingly intact.

I remember the summer vacations of Class Two or Class Four with a clarity that astonishes me. I remember a thick notebook bought from Lajpat Nagar in which I practised English spellings and tenses. I remember Appu Ghar with an almost cartographic precision, not merely as an amusement park but as a complete emotional landscape. I remember Connaught Place before the Metro transformed the city. I remember Pragati Maidan before it acquired its present form. I remember waking before dawn on Republic Day to watch the parade on television and later driving to India Gate, where the greatest privilege a child could imagine was being allowed to climb inside the military tanks on display.

None of these memories is remarkable in itself. What perplexes me is that they have endured while so many ostensibly more important moments have quietly disappeared.

When I think about home now, I realise that I am not thinking about a postal address or even a particular house. I am thinking about an entire moral and emotional landscape assembled from experiences that can no longer be revisited except through memory. The people who inhabited those memories have changed; some are no longer alive, others have become strangers to their younger selves. The cities have expanded, buildings have disappeared, roads have been rerouted, institutions have been rebuilt. Even if I were to retrace every physical step of my childhood, I would discover only the geography of a place, never the geography of a life.

Perhaps that is why the notion of home has always seemed less spatial than temporal to me. Home is not where one lives. Home is the particular configuration of time within which one’s affections first acquired meaning. Once that time has passed, every return is necessarily partial.

This thought often leaves me with an uncomfortable sense of guilt. I worry that my attachment to the past might be mistaken for ingratitude towards the present, as though to cherish what has been is somehow to diminish what is. It is not. I know, with complete certainty, how fortunate I am to have the people who constitute my life today. Gratitude and longing are not mutually exclusive emotions. One can love the present deeply while continuing to mourn the irrevocability of the past.

Perhaps that is why both Odysseus and Kinu continue to occupy my thoughts. They remind us that memory is not simply the faculty by which we recall our lives; it is also the medium through which we construct the idea of home itself. One returns not merely to places but to the remembered versions of oneself, and it is that return which time ultimately renders impossible.

I sometimes find myself wondering about the peculiar mercy and cruelty of memory. If, like Kinu, I were to one day forget almost everything, what would remain? Which fragments would survive the slow erosion of identity? Would I remember my ambitions, my failures, the people I loved, the work to which I devoted my years? Or would memory, exercising a wisdom inaccessible to reason, quietly return to a child standing by a window after her birthday had ended, already grieving the transformation of the present into the past?

I do not know.

I have no answer to that question. Perhaps none exists. Perhaps it is okay.