Memory has its own agency, says Peter Levine. Every time a memory is recalled it may change a line or two a word may change or its visuality. So, what are those memories we recall, are they truly accurate or made up by our own mind?
In 2022 I wrote an essay Beads in the Necklace of Time for a book titled – The Handbook of research on Autobiographical Memory and Photography. As a long time, documentary photographer I spent decades photographing the world looking outside of oneself in the essay I surmise that looking outside could be gazing inwards as well. As I completed 4 decades of photography my interest in memory started then.
If I was born and brought up in Mangalore. The ocean was a constant companion I couldn’t see it from our house, but I could see it from our school St. Aloysius which perched on a hilltop. The Western Ghats, namely the Kudremukh peak where a constant companions through the years.
I left Mangalore in 1987 it has been over 4 decades now. I grew up in a locality called Karangalapdy. That was a very different India then if you in a radius of a kilometer only a few homes had telephones one had to go to the local post office which was about a kilometer and a half away from home to make it phone call from the public phone there.
I did not go back to the locality till about 2012, a good 25 years after I left when I went back there for the first time one the first line of the 100 years of solitude came to my mind
Some things had changed of course but some homes were the same, a bit dilapidated. The land on which the other homes had stood had some tall green grasses, buildings presumably demolished over the decades.
Our neighborhood was rather porous. There weren’t any big compound walls, doors used to be always open. I used to run in and out of homes and through various compounds. No one objected but welcomed children to their homes to their backyards and front yards.
Since 2012I have visited the area a few times and as recently as a few months ago. I have been photographing as well. When I visit the locality and walk around, I recall all the people who were there, many of the seniors have passed on and my peers are in other places. But
I see all of them in my mind’s eye in places where they used to be – Sitting by the window, walking around the area, going to school, playing. I wonder if these memories are my own or rewritten a bit by own my own mind.
at this verandah.
