At the moment of my waking, I knew two things. I wanted to lose my memory and I was scared of losing my life.

On the hospital bed with a blanket from home, one that I no longer remembered, I lay down with the blanket pulled over my head. This felt like a darkness I could control. At all times I wanted to sob like a child. Sometimes my mother would call me by name, it was overwhelming to know I even had one. I wondered if I could live up to the past. Why was I constantly seeking knowledge when I had already run away from memory? It shouldn’t have mattered who I was, I had to be satisfied knowing that I was a person everyone else in my life knew and that I would never know them. I wanted to believe there’s a reason I made this choice. I couldn’t dwell in the past, if only out of respect to myself. An absent past made a home within me, and I had to let that in to remember to live.

I felt it strange that people introduced themselves to me as my father, my mother, my sister or my brother. I can’t tell you if forgetting them was intentional or a consequence. They spoke in English to me; they assumed that English might be the only language I remembered. I understood somehow that my father and mother spoke different languages, I understood them and I could speak to myself if I tried. ‘Nzianne’  for when I felt something close to affection, ‘chiuwe’ for when my head hurt, ‘alai!’ for if I stubbed a finger or a toe. These languages had no dearth of meaning, only a dearth of words. There was something within me holding the languages of my mother and father in a very tight hold. I was ashamed to speak it, but I wanted to hear it and I liked to use it in my head. I had a sense that shame was the greatest reason I tried to lose my memory.  I had lost everything and gained nothing, I loathed myself and yet I grieved my life, my knowledge, my being.

No one cared to tell me how I ended up in the hospital. The doctor told my parents it wasn’t likely I’d get my memory back. My mother thought prayers would solve it; my father hadn’t even begun to understand what amnesia meant. My sister had to remind him twice that amnesia couldn’t be forced out of a patient. ‘Aiya papa’, I heard her say. She sighed more than my mother. I was scared he would really force it out of me, perhaps I took after him. It was nice to know that father and child could share fanciful notions on illness and recuperation. I learnt to take comfort in odd things. If you look long enough, anything can bear eyes and a mouth. If I poked my head slightly out of the bed, I could see a man wearing a hat on the floor patterns. It wasn’t long until my mother made me put my head back in. She was terrified I’d lose my balance and suffer another injury to the head. It’s scary to lose yourself once, if it happened twice, I’d probably make a habit of it. 

Sitting with my only surviving grandmother, who very clearly had alzheimers or dementia or something of the sort, she was content with my company. She wanted nothing more than the warmth of a being. A thin little cat sat on her lap and on her feet was my uncle’s loyal dog. I didn’t remember the dog, but she remembered me. She barked at every guest but graciously let me be, she bowed her head before me and whined, had I complied with this dog’s wishes? People saw the bright side of my grandmother’s illness. Every new guest asked her if she knew who they were. With the amount of people that asked her, I wasn’t sure if such remembrance was humanly possible. Everyone laughed at her answers, she was never right, but sometimes she was just at the point of grasping the right answer, leaving everyone stunned, but they laughed all the same. 

No one asked me that question. Everyone spoke to my mother, ‘How long was she ill?’ ‘Does she remember you at least?’ ‘Have you gone to that Godman down the road?’ What made my loss so grave and my grandmother’s so amusing? She had forgotten so much more than me. There were times she insisted she only had one child. My mother was her oldest, but she had three other siblings. Sometimes she lost her temper, ‘Must I remember everyone?’ But she was a mother too, wasn’t she? She had experienced that second life, that was different from my second life. Was regeneration meant to carry with it forgetfulness as a consequence? 

I gave it a try. ‘Do you know who I am?’ There’s no point in putting it in quotes really. I didn’t ask her this in English. She spoke it well enough, but the language was gathering dust in her mind. No one truly used it on this side of the world, not unless they wanted to prove a point. With no one else beside us, I felt free to ask her anything. Who am I was a sensitive question. I was a patient, so and so’s sick child, that poor person whose loss we couldn’t mourn. She said she didn’t remember me, but she laughed as she said it. ‘I don’t know anything anymore’. I saw a mouth full of artificial teeth being opened in a big smile and a laugh that sounded more like a croak. She accepted her lack of knowledge because the mirror told her she was old.  She seemed at liberty, the kind of freedom everyone pitied, but I found myself envying. 

I didn’t mind this part of the world. Tucked away in the hills, the town my mother grew up in. I liked the rain and how it meant I had no guests to entertain with my lack of knowledge. I wasn’t fond of the practiced propriety that everyone in this town had mastered. I could learn it too, if I tried hard enough. I refused to. It was not that I disliked them, but simply that I found no reason to speak to them. I was scared of boring away all of my mother’s guests but unwilling to speak as well. My mother brought me home because ‘We don’t know how long your grandmother has left’. Death brings with it that inconvenient reminder that life is unknowable, unpredictable and so devastatingly short.

 In Delhi, I met a dog outside my home every morning. I was scared of hurting her with the motion of the door.  Even in the bitter winter, she was stubborn, refusing to leave from the door of our house. I never fed her. I was scared her attachment might grow. She whined when our door was shut. I had no way to understand what drew her to my presence and our front door. Occasionally I worried for her life, if we weren’t feeding her, who was? Why was her middle so wide, was she pregnant?  Would we be responsible for her children if she chose to bear them on our front steps? When she was older, I worried she would die and we would have to deal with a corpse. I was cruel in the way I thought about her but I loved her, she was new to our home just as I was. I didn’t know if it was death or my own resistance towards it that forbade me to enjoy even the company of a dog.

How funny that I mourned Memory and not memories! I had to be careful this time. Not that I remembered the last time. It was important, grave even, that I was careful. I had no time to waste, I had a life to build. This life, devoid of infancy, of childhood, had more awaiting. To sit and wait for a youth that had already passed would be futile and yet I found myself, idle for hours, thinking of photos frayed around the edges, spotted with black from some unavoidable consequence of printing film, of a child who had to have been loved. The inscriptions beside the photos are evidence of an effort at remembrance. ‘First birthday’, ‘Annual day function’, ‘First day of school’. It is strange how the heart can swell and deflate. It was strange to realize that though I had lost everything I still retained a heart. I was not surrendering to fate, I simply could not remember. I was not made new, I was ill. I did not make this choice, I had to believe that I did.