I've been reading and writing (a bit) and wondering how memory works. As a child I had weird habits with words, one of them being writing all the new words I came across in one or two pages and then using the dictionary to put their meanings down right in front of them.. their was a similar exercise in English literature classes in school as well, so meanings of a few words just stayed with me. This was all till 2008.. when I left school. After that again I was reading terrible books bought off the shelves of really expensive bookstores in Lucknow.. books like chicken soup for the soul, conversations with god, contemporary Indian English writing... and the exercise followed suit. Words on the back pages of my law school notebooks, usually five subject spiral bound pages, and meanings across from them.
My then boyfriend gifted me a dictionary and I also plodded my mother into buying me one from a roadside makeshift stall in front of her office in Kanpur. I wrote my name in pencil in the back of both the dictionaries. Those words, meanings of whom were recorded in pen or pencil, basically written down, jotted to be inked on paper, not written off, ascribed to the alluded power of memory, are the words that are coming back to me. They keep coming back to me.
Words I use in everyday conversation, while not talking to people, while thinking in my head, while stringing sentences together in my mind, I think of words like "chided", "supernova" etc. I use them in my sentences, while replying to official correspondence, while writing emails to my mother, while SMSing, and while putting words together for nothing at all. I write those words and think of how memory has it's way of playing out. What happens to all these years of words and meanings I've acquired, will they come back to me almost magically in the next decade of my life?
What happens to the gliding sense in which words have worked for me so far--both sensorarily and in real life. Words, and a distant echo of their existence looming back into the present day life. I think of peculiar, to me.. otherwise utterly banal experiences that I've been acquiring for all these years... will they become the vocabulary of my writing life in the years to come?
To replace words with experiences, quite not possible and utterly self-indulgent, but will that be possible?
How will I, if at all I am able to, pen the experience of standing inside the wooden cabin of my father's boss and holding a conversation with him about Vedic maths and it's visceral importance in my life? Words and memories...
Sent from my iPhone
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