It’s wonderful how the human brain stores memories, so many of them. Starting from the forced feeding of the entire text book content to the useful information like passwords of accounts, important dates, places where important things are kept safe. Other than all these logically important stuff stored knowingly, it also stores emotional moments. And what adds to the astonishment is that how exactly it is able to reproduce all those moments of various emotions with the slightest details, the images, sounds, fragrances etc as one always remembers them. With a flash of thought one can reach people, places, to the small pleasures of life, long lost and untouched.
Every time someone wants to turn back the pages and read again few lines, mind opens up ways to do so.
There are things that trigger this process of thought, like the smell of a perfume that caught my attention in the lift, reminds me of someone or a phase when I had used that perfume. I stay lost in thought so as to remember what exactly it reminds me of or of whom. Its fun to at last find out and pat away the dust deposited on an old file. I wonder if it only happens with me or only with people who like perfumes, who pay attention and relate an incidence with that particular smell.
And then there are colors, of various shades, a sad day will be very blue according to the intensity of pain. Bright yellow days when heart was excited, like when one found out his name in the list of people qualified for a job. Orange days, nervous with colorful butterflies in stomach, like the day when you conquered stage fright and heard a good applause. A smile appears unknowingly or sometimes a tear. With every passing day, a memory is stored and according to the importance either retained or replaced by another. Very simple logical process but still amazing and important.
I have traveled across
There is this strange thing that I found out recently. After growing up traveling so much, I always had an urge to visit all these places and lately I got an opportunity to do so. I went to Hyderabad, went to my old school and when I stepped inside , the walls were dull , the black board was not as black as I remember it, benches a pale brown , corridors not as long as I thought they were. I had mixed feelings when I got out of there, nostalgic for sure but a little disappointing too.
When my brother asked me later, I just told him what I felt. He had a very simple answer to it, “chill kid, memories are always brighter than the reality”. For few minutes I was lost thinking if what he said made sense to me.
Later when I went to my old school at Bhopal, I found it was so very true and eventually that my memories of these two old schools were not the same anymore. The incidents, people all were there but the place had changed.
I have stopped going back to my childhood places in reality, in thoughts I still do.
I wonder what happens when people come to an age when there is nothing much to add on to the deposit, may be that’s when this RAM is used the most. I remember my grandma talking about my childhood stories almost every time I visited her, as a kid I was very interested in listening to all of them. But later on when I was in my teens, I used to wonder why she keeps repeating the same tales. May be when all your kids have grown up and are away, all duties of life completed , and actually nothing special to do that’s when there are not much of additions to the tales you have stored. All you do is read them again and again. Some people are lucky enough to remember everything till the end. Till the last day they know what had happened, how it felt. Some of them forget everything on a fine day.
My Dad’s friend (“Vasu aetan” that’s what he called him) falls in the second half. His wife died when his kids were small. He never married again and after all these years of loneliness now his sons were not ready to let him stay with them. Dad says that it was one of their other friend’s daughter’s wedding, when it started, he suddenly started behaving odd. He kept looking for his wife, calling her name and not listening to anyone, not recognizing anyone. He was a changed man after this day. Doctors called it Alzheimer’s disease. Gradually he couldn't remember anything, anyone except his late wife.
I remember visiting him once, the home nurse complaining about his forgetfulness, that he forgets that he had his dinner already and asks for more, that he walks out of the bathroom without cloths. The list was very long and all this while he just kept staring at the ceiling, looked like he was searching for something. He cried when dad asked if he recognized him. He died after some years.
Even if he had his memory I think because of his children giving him a tough time, he anyways might not have enjoyed the last years of his life. So now should I rephrase my statement that some people are lucky enough to remember all of it till the end and few of them lucky enough to forget everything?
Its like one day the multipurpose, multitasking , highly efficient RAM changes into a slate , a black , blank slate.
