Author: Nisha Patel
My grandmother used to say that forgetting is not the opposite of remembering. It’s the gentler form of it. She began to forget in slow motion, one item at a time. At first, it was her keys, then the names of her neighbors, then mine.
I wanted to believe I could anchor her memory with stories. Every afternoon, I’d sit with her and tell her about her own life. How she’d crossed an ocean with two suitcases and a dream, how she’d raised three children on the scent of cardamom and hard work. She’d smile politely, as if I were reading a fable.
But memory, I learned, isn’t something you can rebuild for someone else. It’s a private country with its own borders and weather.
The last time I saw her, she was sitting by the window humming an unfamiliar tune. “Do you know this song?” I asked.
She turned, eyes bright, and said, “I think you used to sing it to me.”
She hadn’t gotten it backward. In that moment, she wasn’t the one forgetting. I was remembering her differently, through the haze of her fading, through the melody of loss.
It’s been five years since she passed, and sometimes I forget her voice entirely. But then, I’ll smell cardamom in the market or hear a tune in an old movie, and it will come back — not sharply, but softly, as if memory itself has learned how to breathe.
Forgetting, I think, is just memory putting on its winter coat.