The summer of 1973

Sometimes it seems like the year is full of days dedicated to memory. And this is not necessarily a sad thing, because memory is like a soft scent that can make you smile inwardly and take you back on a trip in some parallel realm of experience, where the past and present mingle. Since this space is in a sense one of memory, I thought I should share this realm of experience with those of you who might remember the moments in and around a photograph that comes back to me often. I found it this morning--a small black and white print. Somehow, in my mind, the colours were bright blue, green and orange, and I remember the colours of all the clothes we were wearing. These blurred images are just an echo of what I remember!

It was a time when the family was together (I was going to say "whole" but then, wholeness is always there, it's just that its contours change with time). On my mother's side, all of us cousins were together...except the very eldest, Mohan, who was in the US (the only one there at the time) and the two youngest, Ashok and Anitha, were not yet born. In the photograph, several of us are up on the spreading branches of this lovely gulmohur tree, in Cubbon Park, I think, with the littlest ones held up on the lowest branches and the girls in saris are gracefully draped alongside the trunk. Koushik did not deign to come with us on such a frivolous jaunt as a trip to the park (he was the intellectual, you see) and Anand and Paddu Chitti arrived a bit later, if I remember correctly. We were all in Bangalore for the housewarming of Payya mama's new home on Promenade Road. It was a summer filled with movies, with card games, and laughter, and the monkeyish antics of the younger cousins--Koushik and Jee sliding down the trunk of the mulberry tree from the first floor of the house on Osborne Road and giving Kanthiamma the jitters, Shyam playing Beatles' songs on his tape recorder, Rajee and Geetha trying hard to make peace, Jayashree crying at the drop of a hat, Ramesh and Shekhar quietly slitting the seat cover of Payya mama's motorbike, Sudha and me getting into our famous fights...

We've lost several of those who were with us that year, and other connections have become tenuous and irregular, but when I travel back to the time captured in that picture, I experience a familiar warmth and realise that the space where affection resides is undiminished, to be tapped into whenever opportunity presents itself in meetings, however far apart they may be.

So to those of you whom I do not tap on the virtual shoulder to say hello now and then, please remember that there is a space where I remember, and think of you, wonder how you are, or know that you are well, and smile at the memories we have shared.