The memory keeper

DEAR DIARY

There is a certain beauty to the way she looks when she’s not trying to look pretty. I cringe inwardly at the cliched thought even as I think it.

She is sitting on the floor, sorting through our clothes, deciding what to pack and what not to pack. I try to remember what she looked like when we got married. I’m ashamed to admit I have no idea. I have glimpses, of course, the glimpses I put away in jars of memory in the shelves of consciousness; I recall glittering earrings, I recall the heavy lidded eyes that looked at me from across the hall when I first watched her walk up towards the stage where I sat in a light brown sherwani, I remember the lips glistening with glittering gloss and happiness, but I cannot actually remember what she, as a bride, looked like. When I try to ransack my brain, hoping at least for a silhouette, the Memory Keeper frowns at me, telling me to bug off.

He’s been doing that a lot lately, I think with a pang of resentment.

The other day I was trying to remember what my eldest son’s younger daughter was nicknamed, and I could not remember anything. After a while, in fact, in my struggle to remember her nickname, I forgot her real one too.

I avoided calling the child by her name the whole day, pretending to not hear questions like “Dadu, aap mujhey naam sey bulao naa, bachi keh ke kyun bula rahey ho?”

It was in the evening when we sat down for tea with Ahad and his family that my wife leaned close to me, having finally gotten out of the kitchen after a whole day, and whispered, under the pretense of pouring me a cup of tea, “Her name is Shanzey. You call her Shaanu.”

“Of course I do.” I breathed, not knowing whether to flush with shame or laugh. I didn’t wonder how she’d figured out I’d forgotten my granddaughter’s name even though she’d been with the chef the whole day, inside the kitchen.

My wife does that, you know. She knows things. Sometimes, I think she’s omnipotent, breathing in the walls and lingering in the tiled floors of our home. Always there, always watching, always waiting for me to forget so she can assume human form to remind me of whatever it is that I’ve forgotten.

I watch as her hand trembles slightly under the weight of a big box she has just extracted from the little chest of drawers.

“What in the world is this, Haroon?” She frowns slightly at me, looking exactly like a school teacher who has only just discovered her favorite student has a hidden stash of lollipops in his desk.

“This?” I hold out my hand for the box; she doesn’t give it to me, instead opening it. “It’s photographs.” I vaguely remember putting them in the chest of drawers where I would see them every time I needed my cell phone charger and then conveniently forgetting all about them after my wife started putting my cell phone charger, glasses, car keys and nearly every other worldly possession on my bedside table where I could see them all the time and thus, not forget to use them.

“These, Haroon,” she shakes her head slightly. “These are photographs.” she picks up the first one in the pile of tattered photographs, rather greasy from years of being thumbed by me and her and then our children and now grandchildren, and holds it up to the light streaming in from the window. “Look at that. We were beautiful, weren’t we?”

I get up heavily from the bed and trudge across the room to peer over her shoulder at the colored photograph with the blurry edges.

I am in a blood-red sherwani, grinning from ear to ear, my head half-turned towards her as if I’d turned away from the camera at the last moment, she is looking straight at the camera, her best school-teacherly smile on her lips, holding my hand in a vice-like grip.

“That must’ve hurt.” She laughs, pressing her pinkie finger to the two hands grasped together in the picture.

“It must’ve.” The very sight of her grip on my hand in the photograph makes mine feel a phantom ache. “Your ring must’ve hurt, pressing into my hand. Gah.” I say, but I’m smiling. She doesn’t turn around but I know she can feel my smile. I can feel hers.

“Do you remember why I was holding your -” She pauses when I shake my head. I realize I didn’t let her complete her sentence, I shook my head at remember.

That’s because you don’t. The Memory Keeper says huffily.

“You kept turning to look at me.” She swallows before she says it, then laughs a little. “I was trying to warn you to not turn just then but I gripped so hard you thought something was wrong and you turned to look at me anyway.”

“Oh, I remember.” I lie. “I remember now.”

She replaces the picture and closes the box softly.

“We’ll only stay at the hospital a week or two, you know. Just until the doctors finish this new course of medicines.” she is saying. “I have told the servants they have to come back on Monday next to prepare the house for us.”

With great difficulty, I look away from the box of memories and at her. I want to ask her what but I don’t. I tell myself I should’ve listened closely.

Not that it would’ve helped. The Memory Keeper mutters snidely.

I frown. These days he’s turning into an enemy.

I sneak a look at my wife. She is looking at me, half-expectant, half-afraid. I realize she’s waiting for an answer. What did you say, I want to ask. I don’t want to ask.

“Hmm.” I say, as if I understood everything she said.

I move slowly towards the window, then turn around to look at her. She is sitting on the floor, clutching the box, her knuckles white. I can tell she is biting her lips. I catch a glimpse of something shiny roll down her cheek before she turns her face away to look at something inside the suitcase lying open in front of her.

There is a certain beauty to the way she looks when she’s not trying to look pretty. I cringe inwardly at the cliched thought even as I think it.