Bridge #1 Assignment: Artifact and self
My Artifact:
The floor of my grandpa’s house
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The 10 questions:
- Can an object be a story or a collection of stories?
- Can an object be a character in a memory?
- How are memories generally viewed or defined? Are objects always prioritized?
- Is the role and importance of objects valued differently as parts of memories, in different cultures?
- Can a seemingly completely unrelated object come to symbolize a person or incident in a memory, even after all traces of the person or incident are lost to time?
- With a marked rise in consumerism and material culture during our lifetime, how will we be remembered? Will we live on in people’s minds as something we owned?
- How will an incomplete or broken object be different in the way it evokes memories?
- Why don’t children’s books have inanimate objects as characters, who are not given life or dialogue but lend to the story by means of their physical existence, and intention?
- How do children perceive objects, memory and memories based on objects, differently than adults? Is there a difference at all? Does it depend on the generation you are born into?
- How are objects from our memories treated differently, when compared to photographs? What is this difference and why does it exist?
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In fourth grade I felt a china marble floor sink beneath my feet.
I was standing in the basement of my school. Gym class was in progress. While other fourth graders ran wild around me, I stood transfixed amidst complete chaos, lost in thoughts. I was thinking about how I was one of the very few kids in class who couldn’t swim. I was convinced that what with global warming on the rise, there would soon me a massive flood and I would lose myself to a terrible, and dull death, and be lost to oblivion as a result of my inability to stay afloat. That is when it happened. I felt the ground shift and sink under my feet as though the marble tiles had been replaced by sand. Of course my eyes did not spot anything out of the ordinary when I looked down at my feet. Later, my mother told me that it is normal to imagine the floor sink when you are terrified beyond comprehension, and saw to it that I learnt to swim that month.
Of everything important I ever did, the floor in my grandfather’s house took note.
When I was small and vulnerable, the floor in my grandfather’s house was closer to me than the faces of my family and also more believable.
The floor almost always shown to perfection. I remember it having a vibrant white appearance like that of the moon in the night sky. Nearly luminous in its beauty. It was covered by square tiles, a little less than one meter square in area, and lined by a ten centimeter wide black border around the edges of a hall. I grew up thinking that the “living room” was a word rich people used for their hall, and so for all intents and purposes, in this written piece, I will be referring to the living room as ‘hall’.
We never had a dining table and so at lunch time, my cousins, our grandparents and the maid, would sit cross-legged in a circle on the floor, around a mini banquet of round bottom vessels filled with vegetables, gravy, fish, bhakri, chapatti, rice, and koshimbir. We still have our meals like that. Ours was a modern day Indian joint family; my cousins and I lived with our grandparents while our parents worked in other countries.
My cousins and I would lie on our tummies on the floor, as we played board games. The floor watched as we threw tantrums, as play wrestling games in the whole got way too rough sometimes for kids our age, as I learnt how to walk and tripped over my own feet a million times, and as my grandfather sang me the same lullaby every night.
The floor watched me run to welcome my parents, every time they got back from their trips, and watched as I stared passively, eyes wide, all my energy concentrated on not letting a single teardrop escape.
I know it is strange to think of the floor as having a character so much bigger than its purpose, but that is just how its always felt. I have always a thought of the floor of that house as an extension of my body. On a lazy and dull day I experienced everything the floor did. I would lie down on the floor, with my ear to it, listening to it talk to me. I heard the sound of my grandmothers pink rubber slippers gently slapping it to create “Fut-Fut” sounds, as a anklets chimed, and bangles clanged, and the movement moved through her body. I heard the vibration of the red plastic ball that my brother bounced against the floor angrily when there was no one outside to play with, and the sound of my sister’s feet tapping impatiently, and she waited for her friend on the phone, to get to the point of her long winded story.
The only time my cousins and I were not bickering as children, was when we were watching cartoon network and stuffing our faces, sitting on hat floor. I remember one time, my cousins and I thought it would be fun to wash the floor, and emerged thoroughly bathed in detergent water by the end of the experience. I remember how my grandmother would round us up and sister us down in a circle on the floor, so that we could help her cut fruits, clean vegetables or string flowers together in garlands, before festival days. And we would all sit there, stringing flowers and learning prayer songs by heart. We sang them so many times, and I wished so desperately for any of my gods to be watching that, I still remember all of them perfectly.
“ Maruti Stotra”, she said, “ Will protect you from all nightmares and evil spirits. And I was so haunted by nightmares, so terrified of my demons, that I sang it loud and clear with my cousins, every might, as we lay in bed. I sang clearly and firmly, almost as a defiant warning to the evil spirits of the night. The netted fabric of the ‘machardani’, enveloping my universe, before we let sleep claim us.
My grandfather taught me to count and write on that floor. And when it was time to learn fractions, he brought out a cutting board, an onion, a tomato, a few garlic pods, and apple and banana, and also taught me to use a kitchen knife in the process. When I was fiver years old, my grandfather and I coloured our way through four jumbo drawing books (1000 pages each, I think). I remember thinking that they would never run out. But they did eventually. I would give anything right this minute to have another hour of colouring with my grandfather. We would sit in the hall in near the wide windows, where sunlight would flood onto the floor, so it was both cool against our skin, ad war on hour backs. The floor almost felt soft, during these colouring sessions. Every Christmas, we would get out his stash of printing papers in a suitcase in his cupboard, which I never saw him replenish but somehow it would be just in time for Christmas morning. We would bring the papers out and he would draw a Christmas tree in the middle, a Santa Claus to the right and an angel to the left, on every sheet, the tremble in his fingers making everything look raggedy. And then we would sit and colour them with crayons working dexterously, while my grandma brought us lemon juice. Then we would lay them all out on the floor and critique each one. We never exchanged gifts, or ate anything special, but I loved Christmas.
There were two large chairs pushed against the wall with the window. He would sit on the left one and I would sit next to him. We would read Chinua Achebe’s short stories together. Our very favourite one, that we read the most number of times was ‘Marriage Is a Private Affair’. Its funny, I have been trying to remember that name for years, and I finally did, just now as I wrote the previous line. My grandmother always loved my cousins more than she ever loved me, a fact I tried to deny for years. When I was thirteen, I gave up competing for her affections. At least my grandfather was all my own.
My grandfather had a double degree in Aesthetic Marathi and Shakespeare Studies. His favourite play was Othello, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. When I had to study the Macbeth for my final 12th standard board examinations, we would reenact the play in our hall. He would be the the Lady Macbeth to my Glamis, the Macbeth to my Banquo, and the King Duncan to my Thane of Cawdor, as I conspired aloud to murder him in his sleep.
It was on the floor of the bedroom upstairs that I collapsed to my knees for the first time, body trembling with explicable grief, mouth stuffed with wads of bedsheet so that nobody would know. All my life, my grandmother had told me that misery was a sign of weakness. I was weak for missing my parents while they were away, and couldn’t I be mentally tough like my cousins?
I was depressed. I didn’t know it or understand it, and I did not expect anyone else to either. When I finally opened up to my mother about it, I cried for two days straight, silent tears streaming down my face, even as I managed to compose my face. My parents understood. Turns out, depression is genetic in my family. But I always seemed so happy, that they thought it would skip me.
I studied in that chair next to my grandfather. His presence next to me somehow calming the eternal frantic screaming in my head. He would place his soft warm hand on my shoulder and my pat my back, and tell me to read out loud, so that the sound of my voice could pull me out of my own head and back to reality, calming my hyperventilation. He would say “Hmm…” reassuringly as I made it to the end of every sentence. My voice shivering and vulnerable, my mind so close to falling apart. Best of all he would a pillow and a particularly scratchy beige blanket out of his cupboard. He would place the pillow in my knees and drape the blanket around my shoulders in a gesture that felt infinitely more comforting than anything have experienced before or after.
The floor stood witness.
It took me three years to climb out of the bottomless hole in my mind. Another year, to be free of the relapses, and another before I stopped fearing them.
The floor knew the secret of the oranges between my grandfather and me, too grave to be discussed aloud. My grandma refused to buy me oranges. “You eat them too fast”, she said. My grandfather would return home from his evening walk to the creek, stand quietly by the door that he had just opened, and slyly raise the polythene bag full of oranges. I would bound towards the door, my feet making loud echoing thumps against the floor, as I ran to take the bag from him and then to fetch him water.
The floor watched me come home every day, embarrassed, humiliated and filled with self-hate, after another day of being bullied in school, dragging myself across it to quietly sit down next to my grandfather.
It watched as I spun in circles, to watch my long colourful traditional skirt flair out around me, the beautiful pattern on the fabric surrounding me. It watched me sing Ed Sheeran’s A- Team, loving the sound of my own voice as it fluttered to the ceiling that was two stories high and echoed and chimed against it. The echoes making me feel pretty, like a version of me that I had aspired to be.
I was named Sanika, which mean flute, because my family wished that I would be involved in music when I grew up. I used to sing as a kid, mostly to myself. My sister told me that I was terrible. One year, I acquired second place in a western music singing competition in school, but nobody believed me before I showed them the certificate. Eventually the world, successfully convinced me that singing was not my thing, and that I had a most unpleasant voice. I only person I felt comfortable singing to was my grandfather. He called me his ‘Kokila’, which is a song bird. Years later, people started telling me I was good. I ran home to my mother and told her what they had said. She told me that she always knew. I was so angry at her, for never telling me. It was not her fault though. She never knew she had to.
When I was seventeen, I joined a band. I would write songs and sing them to my grandfather. He no longer went on walks. He had survived two heart surgeries, four bouts of cancer, and struggled everyday with Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, dementia and insomnia. His legs were swollen and it hurt him to stand or walk. But when I sang, he would drum his fingers against the black armrest of his chair by the window, and lend beats to the music.
He would say that he had entered the sixth stage of life, as explained in the soliloquy, All the World’s A Stage, from As You Like It.
Our roles began to reverse themselves one by one. I began to sing him lullabies instead of him singing them tot me. I began to coax him every evening to come out for a walk to the creek. His feet fell heavily and uncertainly on the helpless floor, as my grandpa struggled to hold his weight. I helped him into his shoes, and held his hand, like he would do for my sisters and m when we were kids.
When I got back after a year in college, he had gotten quieter, more distant, and far more miserable. As his organs began to fail him one by one, he lost faith in his body. And his memory wouldn’t let him trust anyone else. They told me that he said my cousins’ and my name in his sleep.
I met him a week before he left us. I told him that I loved him over and over again. And in spite of having his body being run entirely by hospital machinery, he opened his eyes a smidge, and nodded a whisper of a nod, a gesture that completely drained him for the rest of the evening
On the day of the funeral, before the men raised his body to their shoulders, I kissed his forehead one last time, repeating a action had performed a million times before. Yet, it felt entire different now, and completely wrong. There was no familiarity in the touch of the skin against my lips. I hadn’t kissed my grandfather. I had kissed a sack of skin, containing ice cubes. It was heartbreakingly unfortunate that the sack looked like him. The floor that day felt rough, grainy and set my teeth on the edge. That was the second time I felt it sink under my feet.
I thought I would meet him again on the day of the funeral but I didn’t. I met him after Several times I met him in my dreams, in the echoes of his voice calling my name,that still hung lingering in the sticky air, in his smell that still clung to the beige blankets. Every time I eat m food distractedly, I still hear him tell me, that all my food is going to escape my stomach an land in the donkey’s stomach. I see him in every teardrop that escapes my grandmother’s eyes, and in the stories, that friends and family swap, when they meet.
Now I see him not just as the man who was always as old and serene as the hills but as the impetuous teenager, who ran from home in his village, to acquire an education in the city. The teenager who slept on the streets and studied in the light of lamp posts, as he put himself through school and college. As the educator and school headmaster who fell hopelessly in love with my grandfather. I met him as the dramatist, who loved performing in Marathi plays, on stage, the man who wrote a book, and survived a life time of being wished happy birthday on the wrong day, because of a clerical error, his brother made in registering his birth, back in the village. I met him as a man who started a school for girls in his village, a fact I had never known. He never spoke about it.
Finally a month ago, I met him again. My father suddenly started telling me about how my grandfather almost never laughed out loud when he found something hilarious. If he found something amusing, he would flash a very quick impish smile. The grin escaped his mind and flit in and out of his expression so fast, you would miss it if you blinked. All that would be remain of it would be a brilliant sparkle in his eyes, like the glimmer over a dew drop on the flowers in his garden, at dawn, and a slight raise of the eyebrows.
It was so strange that in spite of having known him all my life, and recounting my memories of him countless times, I had missed out on mentioning this characteristic of his personality. That effervescent smile had been my ultimate validation, and yet, I hadn’t been the one telling that story. It was a painfully happy meeting. But I was so glad to see him again. My dad and I sat on the floor facing each other as he narrated his memory. We took little sips of the lemon juice that my grandma had brought us. I recalled how I had always been irritated by the texture of ‘jeera’ in my juice, but my grandpa loved it. There had been a time, when he couldn’t afford ‘jeera’ in anything, and he never stopped treating it like a luxury.
The floor savoured the taste of our voices, sniffing a the salty ocean air, that sprayed violently over the waves, that crashed against the walls of our minds. While we grappled with and endured a tremendous unseen tumult, once again coming to terms with his loss, the floor sighed heavily, soaking in the touch memories.
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Research question:
How does the treatment given to objects as memories, differ from that meted out to photographs. Why this difference exists and how our perception of the two containers of nostalgia, has changed in the last ten years.
