My Pensieve

Memories are a funny thing. They attack you when you least expect it, plague you when you'd rather forget and ofcourse act all pricey when you seek them. Memories make PMSing sound reasonable, understandable and forgettable. They make Paris Hilton sound intelligent and make a certain Mr. Reshammiya sound like Grammy worthy(although considering the recent couple of years it doesn't seem too outlandish). Considering the fact that I am technically supposed to be a quizzer, it seems like too much of a risk to possess a goldfish's memory. Yet, I go on-- undeterred by the distinct and imminent possibility of Alzheimer's...

The bizarre storehouse that calls itself my memory just forgets that I actually existed for the first five years of my life. Therefore, I must rely on Priyanka's who reminded me of a time long long ago of an embarrassing bathroom dance which I must admit I am happy to have forgotten. Apparently, it was on a bright sunny day in junior school when birthdays were days to celebrate. It consisted of wearing a bright frilly pink dress to school and giving off pricey "return gifts" to the other people in my class. Apparently it was a big prestige issue with most parents. You know the gifts just had to get bigger every year or something was surely wrong with your IT returns. So it was one of those days and apparently I was so caught up in the process of celebrating my birthday, I forgot to congratulate myself on my birthday. The class was obviously not the right place for such matters of national importance, in addition the ogre babies( huge, fat and almost green) in my class were too busy finishing off the cake,(Did I mention that cakes were part of the "return gift" package? Only Kookie Jar was impressive enough, or ofcourse, if you were Doogie Howser and could bake a perfectly edible chocolate cake at the age of five, then nothing like it) so I decided to use the school toilet. Little did I know my peaceful celebrations( consisting of picking up my overbearing pink dress and breaking into an impromptu butt dance) would be disturbed by none other than Priyanka. And thanks to the look of "Earth is being invaded by aliens right at this moment and nobody can stop the destruction", I have since not forgotten it.

Then there is the case of a recent memory, around two days ago, when my mother realised the medium called the computer could be used to correspond free of cost to other mortals of the world। So, she sat down at the keyboard to type an email to my mashi. Believe me, the moment was epiphany... it was like Early man rubbing the two stones together to create fire. As she pressed down, sceptically, the keys of the keyboard hoping they wouldn't retaliate, I realised that Priyanka is not the only victim of this incurable disease called technology.

At this juncture, my memory divulges a little more and reminds me of the impacts we used to "perform" on stage(read as euphemism for "making an ass of ourselves' and a polite way of saying we polluted Atmodaya Bhavan--thank you to the LMB ppl who were gracious enough to let us use their stage). For the first year since I was Anish, my roles consisted of either being Prince Charming's gay partner or playing an LMB student of Class XI. Then of course comes my memory. We were supposed to perform this play for this fest Syzygy which is basically the Computer Club fest.

So our impact team with our great ideas decided to make a computer come alive. So we had a Backspace key and and Alt key(a character with a split personality disorder), all come to life, and somewhere in the middle I came in( pretending to be an LMB student). Forever reliable, Shweta got really sick and turned up on the day of the Impact without a voice,quite literally. So I had to pick up Sign Language in a day and as was the ritual with our impact team, doom was inevitable.

Then somebody(yours truly) came up with the suggestion that Backspace(the character Shweta was playing) was such a pricey character that he wouldn't speak at all and instead communicate every emotion through some other character. So we got this girl, Priyanshi to read from the script(on the stage,mind you) and in the play she happened to be the virus in our computer.

So on stage the scene goes like this:

Priyanshi reads from the script Backspace's lines: "Are you a virus?" and then realises it's her line next so she looks into the script,reads my illegible handwriting, looks up, convincingly at the audience and says" Yes, I am a virus" in a matter of seconds. I swear if I could sink lower I would, but there wasn't a deeper pool close by to drown myself.

And then ofcourse we had the everenthusiastic people from the audience shouting that we were reading from the script, just making our eventful day better. I would have given anything to get off the stage right then. But not even half our play was over and through the relentless abuses we went on, undaunted.

And even after all that we had the courage to face the same stage a year later, this time albeit, me as Bappi Lahiri and Shweta as Mithun Da and my friend as Himesh Reshammiya and ofcourse Bappi had to have a lil boy crush on Himesh--just the icing on our cake. And THIS the audience had no difficulty understanding.

My memory is a strange thing. It acts in weird ways. It behaves independently and refuses to respect me. But at the end of the day, whatever little I remember makes me laugh hysterically, and makes this world a little more approachable and a little more understandable....no I correct that-- only more approachable, the world still baffles me to no end.