Damayanti Saha
My dearest friend P, who meets me once a year and lets me narrate to her every single feeling I have felt in the intervening period, said with conviction, “No, this is not it. This song has a darkness about it. In that song, Aishwarya Rai was a young girl. She was very playful, and she was in love.” I agreed with her immediately. A young Aishwarya Rai, playful and in love, was the faint shadow lingering in our shared memory. We had become desperate in our search for the tune I had been humming in the kitchen when I was caught unawares by P’s question, “Wait, which song is this?”
I only remembered a small riff, and in my imagination could transition to it from any other bar of music, in perfect continuance, as if it was an organic extension to any song in any Bollywood album. I repeatedly sabotaged our search, giving her false hope at the beginning of each song that would soon be lost by the chorus. We struggled to find a common language for the memory escaping us, trying to relieve the itch on our tongues. It was in equal parts maddening and incredible. How could we forget a song that we could both swear we knew so well? We grasped at the wisps—she was dancing, yes. It was outdoors. Or at least it was light. I could feel Aishwarya Rai’s smile on one note, an eyebrow raised, and excitedly but mistakenly remembered Dola Re. Shazam was of no help either. Our voices were no match for Shreya Ghoshal’s or Alka Yagnik’s and a giggle would escape every time we tried, disrupting the crawlers and the algorithm. We thought of some of our friends who could know which song we were thinking of, perhaps because of a real or imagined memory of having shared it with them. Didn’t we sing it together in her bedroom once, or hummed it in her kitchen? So much surrounded even a song of which we remembered no words—so many trails we could follow, so many strings of keywords we thought to put into the Google search—and yet, the memory of that song was completely unnameable, only a tune we could shyly sing to each other and had to repeat frequently lest it gets mixed up with something else. We waited for our friends’ replies, the oppressive presence of the lost song hanging over us.
During my first summer in Delhi, a harmless but very inconvenient medical condition I have had since childhood made it very difficult for me to fall asleep. I finally sought a diagnosis and was prescribed a medicine that I need to take every night around two hours before I want to sleep. Now an indispensable part of my life, this practice still evades the ease of becoming a habit. I often realise I have run out of my pills at the last minute. I forget them at places I go to. I pack them in one bag and then take the other bag with me by mistake. I absentmindedly snooze the alarm for hours, my nights out segmented into ten-minute intervals between alarms like an alternative Cinderella, who is very dependent on modern medicine. Most infuriating of all, I forget them just as I am about to reach the shelf where they are kept, suddenly remembering something else I had been thinking of doing and could have done at any other point in the day, like taking out the trash, or turning off the stove where the milk is burning. It is only thanks to the punishment of forgetting this medicine—the inability to sleep on time—that I have noticed how much my memory troubles me, and how much of my daily practice of life is a painstaking effort to remember. It’s an unpredictable malady. Strange memories stick where others get washed away. The chicken pakora in my middle school “canteen” (a dark corner under the staircase where the shopkeeper would flirt with the girls from high school) is an unshakeable image in my mind. But the journey between my bedroom and my kitchen is rife with distraction. Passing through one of those doors, I have already forgotten why I had left my dinner in my bedroom and why my phone was in the kitchen.
“What was that song you were listening to the entire day when you were unpacking?” (emphasis my own), my ex once asked me. Electric Love was the song that was playing, and I had forgotten what I was taking out from my suitcase, both for the thousandth time. For me, or maybe for the forgetful, or the distracted, there is a cruel forwardness in the routine procedures of thinking of something and then doing it. It is a strenuous uphill journey, and if there was at some point a boulder you were trying to carry to the top, it has now fizzled out into thin air. Alternatively, you have forgotten where you kept your boulder. Amidst all this trouble—it has been puzzling to find—is the unshakeable clasp of the memory of a song. If, god forbid, there is a line on my mind, an itch takes hold every time I get to the last word I remember, and propels me to begin again, without fracturing the melody, the first word of the same line. In other words, unfortunately for the people around me, the song does not have an ending. It takes hold of my memory and becomes a fierce animal, resisting every conversation, butting its head in during the silences, becoming louder over competing anxieties, and settling down amidst the graveyard of short-lived thoughts. And although I am still trying to understand what this means (am I just wilfully forgetting important things?), I take whatever remembering I can get.
It’s been difficult, with this troubled memory, to keep any song to myself. Like my long-distance best friend and my unknown-distance ex, people are always compelled to ask what song it is, or at least hum against their own will. Exhausted, after listening to the same song being screamed from the bathroom for weeks, my mother would ask, “Do young people never listen to any songs not about love?” My ex-flatmate, an incredible singer and a distracted cook, would start belting Medicine, Medicine! while making dinner for her situationship (bless her). Medicine, Medicine travelled far and wide with her to college house parties where the song I had actually been struggling to stop singing, Madison by Orla Gartland, would perhaps never have made it. Play medicine medicine, she would say, and I would happily oblige. I am thrown off guard every time something like this happens. A song I never asked anyone to listen to becomes a shared experience between another person and myself. A secret heartbreak becomes verse from my bedroom to chorus from another’s, only because we sang and cooked in the same kitchen; classmates in university say they find the song I am humming ‘overrated’, and I am able to stop pretending to know what the hell they are talking about and walk home alone, only because an ex had once said that it reminded him of me; a song praying to Allah for rain and clouds that my mother sang to me once, turns out to have the same tune as an old Bollywood love song that my friend kept hearing on the TV, only because we walked together to the grocery shop on a cloudy day, and that fierce animal of remembrance pounced with no warning.
I am tempted sometimes, to protect myself against these things. How can it be, that just like that, a tune, an inflection, an itch, a desperate bid against forgetfulness, becomes a breeze in which my most unnameable griefs, most private of heartbreaks and joys, float around in the air for public discussion? How can my sorrow from the night, the score to me trying to cry silently without waking anyone up, without my approval, become my mother’s anger about me taking too long to finish bathing? How can my bitterness about being ignored by a friend, without my permission, become their joy in remembering me the next time we meet? I worry about how permeable my inner world becomes to everyone within listening distance. I worry if they remember, or somehow know, what I thought of when I listened to the song, if they can tell what pain it soothed in me, what resentment it gave rhythm to. I worry because sometimes when someone plays an old song they have suddenly remembered, I remember something of that song myself, and feel as though I might have suddenly infringed on their private lives, felt a shared grief they did not allow me to feel. A classmate who came to university from the same city as me, once played a song about classmates leaving us behind. Or at least that’s what I thought it was about when I used to listen to it on melancholy evenings while struggling to prepare for my 12th board exams. “A year from now, we’ll all be gone, all our friends will move away,” I’d sing, again and again. I would ask my friends, then, to listen when they got the chance, to say perhaps that I am worried and I don’t know how to say it. I had forgotten about this song, Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart, until this time when R played it, and I wondered if there was a reason she was remembering it now, meeting people whom we would deeply intertwine our lives with for only a year or two, and then forget forever. Suddenly, I felt guilty at having possibly understood part of her without her permission. I imagined her as a 16-year-old, afraid of what was to come in the future, looking out of the window of her school bus, and my heart softened for her. It worried me to think that someone else might be able to understand me in that way every now and then.
A song whose grasp had felt so impossible to escape all those years ago, had quietly vanished and had been gathering dust in a corner of my mind, still afraid of the future, until R played it again. The whistled tune of Hemant Kumar’s Ei Raat Tomar Amar (This night is yours and mine) had vanished just as easily as it had devoured my days after a train ride spent sharing music back and forth with an ex during the heady days at the beginning of our relationship, still believing that the night belongs to our song. Agnee’s Shaam Tanha suddenly appeared on someone’s phone, making me feel as restless and impatient as it had faithfully accompanied me on evening walks on the terrace during the pandemic, still smoothening the rough edges of loneliness. Bringing one of these songs out from the archives of my memory is a sudden hiccup in my being. Having sung them in painful circles, I am suddenly aware of being remembered by someone in some corner of their mind, outside of my control—long after I have escaped that version of myself. Newer animals take hold of my memory, but perhaps in someone else’s mind, I am crying to the same song at night, living through the same heartbreaks, and there is a version of me kept with them.
P was leaving early the next day, but we felt uneasy going to sleep without remembering the song in which a young Aishwarya Rai was in love. The unease of that failure—carrying a bit of memory that could neither make image, nor draw tune, not even form a word with certainty—kept us restless. What use was this kind of memory? No matter how hard I try, I wouldn’t be able to find the words for that frustration, but the remembrance was close enough in its absence to be painful. We told our old friend, K, that it must be a song very similar to Shreya Ghoshal and AR Rahman’s Barso Re, one of the many songs we had thought the tune could be from, but without any luck.
I imagined K listening to our voice notes and repeating the tune to herself, hoping the next line of the song would take flight from there. Would she remember the same things we were thinking of? Would it get stuck in her mind? Would she curse us for planting this fragment of memory in her mind?
When I was thirteen years old, I did not know what I felt for my best friend. I memorised every song she told me about, hated every band she found beneath herself. I wished I could erase the version of myself that existed before I’d met her. Again, at sixteen, feeling my heart soften for a friend, I would download albums of every dead singer she liked, and listen to them, song by song, methodically, not knowing whether I liked them or hated them, but wanting them to settle in my mind. When I try to remember what I was like in those days, I find some versions of myself only full of love and nothing else. There were days on which I belonged completely to a song, when my memory was not mine at all. I wonder if anyone has had the heart to pretend in that way for me. Truth be told, I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of softness, that intentional remembrance, trying to learn someone through something that takes up so much of your mind. Instead of recommending a song, I keep singing in circles, hoping it embeds itself in someone’s memory more truthfully, faster than I am able to forget myself. And when it happens, when a small phrase sneaks its way into someone’s absentmindedness, I shine. Secretly, I indulge in the fantastic thought that just by allowing a song to get stuck in their head, they are habituating themselves to me, not being jarred by my memory, but instead allowing me to settle in their mind. I was shining in the other room once when my ex, while making breakfast, would listen to a song that had grasped at my frayed memory because it sounded like my mother hurrying me to tidy up—Aat ta Baaje Deri Korish Na (Don’t be late, it is eight) from a film called Hawa. I had listened to the song, frantically, on repeat, almost already afraid of forgetting it and losing the comfort it brought me. He did not understand the language. But his remembrance of it, I hoped, was only because of my annoying habit of singing it repeatedly, and not so much about him accidentally understanding the part of me that was starting to feel afraid of life in those days, that was at risk of forgetting how to go on without someone sternly hurrying me up.
Our old friend, K, messaged P and me, just after we finally gave up and went to sleep, that the song was Barso Re, after all. Listening to the song again, we found our problem tune in one of the parts we had actually skipped over in our desperate hurry to find it. The song had come so close to our memory, that we had panicked and wondered if we even remembered the tune we were looking for. We didn’t want to get mixed up. We sang the tune to each other once again to keep ourselves from losing the memory, and continued on our search.
Damayanti is a filmmaker and writer based in India. Her work has appeared in Incurato Mag, Blank Noise, Citizen Matters, Dalit Camera, Gauri Lankesh News, and Pune Mirror. Her documentary film, Munmun, about a pioneering female e-rickshaw driver of India, was awarded the Better India x LIC Womentaries award, and she is currently working on a film about bonded labour survivors as a One World Media fellow. X/Instagram: @dammitdamayanti
Featured photo: A still of Aishwarya Rai from Barso Re in the theatrical poster of Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007)
