“Echoes of Spring”

Image Courtesy: Anton Darius, Unsplash

Forgetting, like memory, is an act of habit. Just like growing up is. Life folds itself repeatedly in igneous layers inside our minds, and certain sparks burst and remain stuck with us, outside space and time, cooling suddenly—dense in parts, crumbling in others. Memory works somewhat like that for you. A few days strike out marvelously, rainbow-hued, or grey, sensorial, almost all of them from travels, ever since you were a little girl. But for you, most of life has been a dense mass of crystalline sediment that is relegated somewhere in the realm of forgetfulness. Makes life a little easier to live, for you are a girl, cursed with affective memory, who remembers the most irrelevant details—the wrinkles on clothes, the smell—good or bad, body temperatures, the food you had together, birdcalls, sunlit patterns on the skin, days that made you feel exceedingly light-headed, the way they bent into evenings whenever you were with someone new, if that someone made his way into the calendar, people for whom you sent out silent prayers into the universe. You remember people by the months they come to you, by the way. And so far, you have covered only half a calendar year. There can never be too many soulmates who scratch your consciousness and leave a mark. You have half your life left for the rest. Notice how you still call yourself a girl. You turned forty three months ago. People say birthdays are milestones, that each new year adds on to some of the wisdom that life throws at you, and while you eat cakes and lemon tarts with gusto, you have never felt the customary wisdom creep up on you, except a few grey hair this time, and you now wait for the crow’s feet to make an appearance. And because you aren’t necessarily wise, you are quiet—lonely in parts but not alone. In fact, whenever you think of yourself in a memory, you always picture yourself as an adolescent, with the clothes you used to wear back in 2000—loose, faded, white tee-shirts and shorts. That is still your go-to on really hot summer days in the city. You suppose a part of your spirit is stuck in limbo at no particular age, just floating outside time and space under the infinite starlit sky—noiselessly, peacefully. That’s how you see yourself on most days, and the very thought of it suffuses your being with smiles.

Coming back to when you were a child, being an older sibling, all you can really remember from that part of your life is your earnest desire to grow up. Your family is like any other Bengali middle-class family. You had your special days, and plentiful ordinary days. But being a nuclear set-up and your father having a transferable job, you felt the need to grow up all that much faster. Your darling, angry mother was so beautiful, so frustrated, so lonely. She was a tyrant with you in that house of silences and you loved her loneliness more than you did her. You couldn’t wait to fly away. You had a brother to look after, school timings to maintain, grades to chase, people to avoid while travelling alone in crowded local trains. Responsibility was an abstraction that was tattooed into your being from an early age, and as much as you tried, you could not get it all off, and you hated it. For you, growing up meant earning your own money, putting tick marks on a giant to-do list. After all, that is what life has been for most of us—a bucket list with things to cross off, things to look forward to. Without it, wouldn’t a few of us have stopped running altogether? I digress. So, after your fortieth birthday at the end of last year, in the month of February this year, you had an opportunity to meet the child you thought was forgotten. And the meeting has been tender, to say the least.

You don’t know about others, but February has always been your favourite month of the year. It is so full of possibilities, isn’t it? New shoots popping up everywhere in your garden, the skies redolent of pink sadness at dusk. The days are even, the nights cool. The shortest month of the year almost hurtles towards its end and don’t we all adore the things we know will die out sooner than the rest? But this February came with an additional day, and anything in life, which comes with something in bonus, has always made you suspicious. You met him at the Book Fair this year over a book you both liked and were the reading the blurb of. You exchanged phone numbers and a few words that struck a chord somewhere. He was a complete stranger and yet you found yourself telling him about how your tyrannous mother had gone all soft after her angioplasty, how it had somewhat shaken you and he nodded— “Same, my father.” He gave you a keen knowing look and it made you feel like you were transparent, like he was somehow looking through you to the other side. You came back home a little stirred, almost confused and soon forgot all about it and went on a vacation. On the last day of a really fulfilling trip, your phone buzzed with a WhatsApp text— “You seem entirely gone”. It irritated you. But most of your life you have been extremely cautious to avoid unwarranted rudeness and the trap that is forever lying in wait, mostly birthed in vanity, that you would like to be remembered by people even if you conversed momentarily. So, you replied politely, albeit distantly, but said more than you normally would. Overcompensation? Who knows, perhaps. And you thought that would be that but the messages kept coming—funny, comical, witty, endearing, deep, disarmingly honest and soon you were hooked. It became a habit, a rush, something to look forward to during the entire day. You knew what blushes meant, had easy smiles for everybody, saw vivid, mystical dreams in whatever voids sleep filled when the night almost crawled into the morning. It was exhilarating. You exchanged songs, books, poems and secrets. You raced each other to ends of books you started together. All the songs made sense. He quoted lines from your favourite movies. Which man remembers Notting Hill and Eric Segal by heart? You made plans, oh endless plans, of traveling together. You said that too much of the city made you feel trapped and that every three months you wanted to fly away. He said that love for him was an eight-letter word—your city. Life was technicolour.

The two of you kept saying it was too perfect and talked about how all things came with expiry dates. You met two weeks later, it was almost the middle of February, unusually cool for this city, windy, charming—who wouldn’t be in love? You still question if it was that. You noticed how tall he was when he bent down, almost breathlessly, at the table you sat. He had beautiful eyes behind his spectacles that were at odds with the rest of him. His eyes were the only thing honest about him you noticed—vacant, sleepy, dreamy, exhausted, ambitious, kind, mischievous. The rest of him—his tall, lanky figure,— was showing nascent signs of middle age. He was a year older than you. Even the way he spoke attempted a semblance of maturity. Everything seemed to be in a rush to keep up with his eyes. He asked you if he should keep the beard that he was too lazy to shave. You found yourself smiling widely. It didn’t take very long for the two of you to explore each other fully. It wasn’t what you had made it up to be in your mind but it was pure, very comfortable. “Surreal, but nice”—he had said. You smiled. Notting Hill again. You didn’t ascribe any adjective to it. Not everything needs a descriptor. He talked of birthday gifts and other things. You couldn’t explain that those were unnecessary. You had so much to say, you said so little. Sometimes words crowded you, other times you were at a loss.

The month hurtled on, and so did you, wilfully, foolishly, into this thing that bound you to him, however loosely. He was warm one day, caustic the next, available on Tuesday, extremely busy on Wednesday, clamouring for you by Saturday, and you waited, spinning a million parallel daydreams. You spoke of being together in some parallel universe because he felt that in this one, you were just too different. You didn’t think that was true. You knew you were attracted to similarities, not differences, but you kept that to yourself. He warned that the heat would surely kill this thing. But your body had gone green in places and words oozed from cracks where it was least expected. You met frequently. He told you that you were better in person than on texts. You laughed at the movies and shared Maggi from little red bowls. He picked and gave you all the mushrooms because you loved them so much and couldn’t have them at home. The final day, towards the end of the month, that you exchanged a text was when he wrote that you were too present, so much so, that air didn’t reach his brain and lungs, and he felt asphyxiated by it all. The only image you had in your mind, while you read his words and heard his voice speaking them in his funny way, was of you in a red pinafore, a big yellow hairband and yellow shoes, hurtling with scrapes and all, fearlessly. For that is what children are, aren’t they? Brave, trusting, so gentle, so endearingly naive. You are both writers but you didn’t edit your words when they spilled out of you to him. You let them come sans trepidation, meandering as your thoughts did. You would have been cautious with anyone else but him. He was, after all, your favourite person.

You would now like to think that you were brave in all your hurry to grow up, that you were able to mask your pain or sudden, unpleasant surprises, and be ready for anything at all, that you didn’t lose your zeal as you let the years cover you with grime. Your soul, you would like to think fondly, had never gathered too much soot. You bid him goodbye. You respected his decision. You didn’t feel it necessary to weep and be angry. You had this child to protect. He messaged you two days later saying you shouldn’t ruin the friendship. The leap day. The something extra. The friendship. You didn’t really mind how he stayed back in your head. You had a rich inner life now, thanks to him. This proposed friendship came with the promise of longevity. So, you took it and bid February goodbye as well. You know you won’t text him that much. You know you would meet him at times. But the month in its kaleidoscopic memories and fiery palash blooms is that dense mass of igneous that will flash like shooting stars in hyaline skies at specific moments in your consciousness. And each time you read something he penned, flip through one of his books, the little girl in the red pinafore with big, brown, clear eyes would be back, holding his hand, looking at him with a knowing smile, leaning onto him, his musty smell. You will grow up again, live your life as happily as you always do. Happiness doesn’t take much to come by anyway. You will soon forget most of this February as life pushes ahead at its own pace.  You are just glad that the child you thought was gone met you again and had a little space to breath. You are not saying the experience wasn’t important. It was. Significantly. What is key, however, is the realisation that it is alright to not grow up and plant yourself steadfastly in the adult world, to sometimes let the child out of its aging cage, to get it maimed, broken, ricocheting between wakefulness and sleep. After all, as children we are the most alive.

Pena Literary Magazine, May 1, 2024,