by Vani Viswanathan
I’m a nostalgia junkie. I love revisiting good times, and trips down the memory lane leave with me a warm, cosy happiness. And practically speaking, most of these walks of nostalgia happen when I’m cleaning, packing or unpacking. For the last 10 years, I’ve packed, vacated and unpacked at least once a year, so these trips come by fairly often. The tradition of revisiting memories accompanies change, which has, luckily so far, always been something to look forward to, so you could say that I quite like the little ritual.
I ‘collect’ memories in the form of the most mind-boggling range of items – and I’m sure every one of you have your idiosyncrasies. To give you a glimpse into my treasure trove, it has the obvious photographs from various stages in life, both print and digital. It has the emcee ‘script’ I made for a radio show in Class 9, the letter I wrote to my father who was working in Bombay while mother, sister and I lived in Chennai. It has the seed that my friend picked off the street in Bombay, claiming it signifies friendship. There are movie stubs, bus and train tickets from journeys I want to remember for a reason. It has newspaper cuttings, ‘Zo’ cards – free pick-up postcards in Singapore, flower petals pressed between papers, coasters from pubs I’ve visited. There’s a whole range of very interesting photos I used for a marketing assignment as a 20-year-old in college. It’s got boarding passes, ferry tickets, luggage tags, tourist information brochures, maps and metro ticket stubs from my overseas travels. It’s got my prefect badges, my name tags from being a journalist and editor for the college campus paper, and for being a presenter at some scholarship program. There are beer bottle caps, and a serviette on which I scribbled the name of every pub I visited with various friends before I left Singapore for good. It’s got the various notebooks in which I have written short stories, essays and other forms of writing I’ve yet to fit into a genre. There’s the fold-out-able cover of the Alaipayuthey music cassette cover, which I used to have pinned up on my soft-pin board in college. It has restaurant bills from trips, corny ‘poems’ written by friends, random post-its pasted by college mates during post grad. There are lengthy diary entries, scribbles that remind me of how blessed I am, and since I can’t doodle, little passages that are philosophical rants, expressions of anguish, amusement, plain anger. It’s got gift wrapping paper, and a box of paper clips, my first ever purchase in my college in Singapore, bought just because I was amused that I could get anything for under one unit of any currency – in this case, 25 cents. And then there are books which I purchased once I started earning, on each of which I have scribbled my name, the date, store in which I purchased, and a line that best described what I felt when I purchased the book. Recently, I’ve been getting addicted to making playlists that remind me of the specific points of time I listened to that set of songs over and over again – the period of intense dissertation writing during my M.A., my first semester exams in post grad college, the time I fell extremely sick, and the very hectic month at work.
And believe you me, these have travelled with me through these ten years, pretty much in entirety. And unfailingly, every time I pack, I lovingly browse through the array of items. Some are rusted, many are torn, held together by cellophane tape. A decade since I technically started lugging these things around, I wonder how much longer they will move with me, since I think I’m entering a period which will be defined more by stability than the fluidity that was the case so far.
I’m also amused by my attachment to these tiny, potent, meaning-filled little things. Why does looking through them make me so happy? I would willingly sit and explain the reason I’ve kept each and every one of those items to anyone willing to listen (and I’ve been lucky enough to have found at least two or three such people in my life, people who have similar hordes of their own!). At times, I wonder if I’m clinging on, in too silly a manner, to a life that is gone and will never come back, literally and metaphorically speaking. Life moves on to the next stage so quickly, and looking back on these things make me miss the stage gone past so much, in a way that I have to shake myself up and remind myself I’m being ridiculous.
But these seemingly minute things often, unconsciously, I believe, tell me that things are going to be good. When I read through diary entries of times of sadness, uncertainty, fury and disappointment, I’m being shown that I get through testing times just fine. When I look at the list of pubs I visited before leaving Singapore, I’m reminded of the anxiety I felt as I thought about how life back in India, and being a student again, would be. And then, looking at the movie stubs and Bombay local tickets I collected, I’m reminded of how ridiculously lucky I am for all the good times and people life still blessed me with. And as I stand on the cusp of another change in life, looking back at all these memories fills me with a sense of discomfort because of all the uncertainty in store, but only for a moment – the little scraps of paper tell me that the next stage of life will give me a whole lot of goodies to add to the treasure trove that I will look back on later with much fondness.
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. She is now a CSR communications consultant, and has been blogging at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com since 2005.
