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V Gangadhar

Memory Mantra

Last week, our house was in a mess. But it was a happy mess. Two of my elder sisters and one brother-in-law stayed with us. We ate at odd hours, slept late and spent most of the time talking about our childhood days and gossiping. Mind you, it was harmless gossip, what we refer to in Tamil as mandai urrutal. Roughly translated, the phrase meant, 'rolling the heads'.

On two successive nights, we watched movies on the video. No, they were not the recent Hollywood blockbusters or the latest Madhuri Dixit starrers. We had watched these films when we were very young. As we grew up, there had been no second association with such films and, for several years, we had not watched any Tamil films.

Both Vedala Ulagam (Demon Land) and Vazhkai (Life), Tamil productions from the AVM studios in Madras, were gifted to me by Saravanan, the present boss at AVM. Made during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the first film was a fantasy, the second, a social comedy.

They were full of songs, mostly based on classical, Carnatic music ragas and were massive hits in their time. We had hummed them in our childhood. Even though we saw them again after a long time, my two sisters remembered all those melodious songs and sang along with the characters in the films. The reaction was spontaneous. Not a word was missed and not once did they deviate from the tunes.

How did you remember the words, I asked them. They had no ready answer. In fact, Vedala Ulgam and Vazhkai had, for all practical purposes, been erased from their memories. But somehow, in their subconscious minds, the melody of the film songs had remained and burst out when they appeared on the screen, even after a lapse of nearly 50 years.

Human memory is something wonderful. And mysterious. What happened to my sisters often happened to me too. I can, for instance, quote verbatim the details of the score cards of the England vs Australia test series of 1948, 1951, 1953 and so on. I remember every single detail of how the English fast bowler, Alec Bedser, set a successful leg trap for Don Bradman and got him out four times in the series. I remember how Australian opener, Arthur Morris, became a 'bunny' to Alec Bedser, both in the 1948 and 1953 series.

So it went. Details of the fabulous South Africa vs Australia series in 1952 when unbelievable fielding and miraculous catches by the unfancied springboks enabled them to draw the series against the reigning world champions. Why, the visits of the first West Indian cricket team to India in 1948 and the subsequent tours by the Commonwealth teams are still fresh in my memory.

I had not forgotten the goal-scoring magic of the Indian hockey forwards at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, of how Stanley Matthews, the British soccer star, wove a web of magic during the closing moments of a key English league match against Bolton Wanderers, enabling his team, Blackpool, to win by four goals to three.

Forget sports. We had Julius Caesar and As You Like It as the Shakespeare texts for our intermediate year in college. Today, nearly 40 years later, I can still quote from memory, most of the passages from these classics. As for films, I can still hum the Talat Mahmood songs of the 1950s and those catchy numbers turned in by music directors C R Ramchandra and Shanker-Jaikishen. No special effort were needed for these.

But today, I am introduced to someone in the morning and yet cannot recall his name in the evening. I have to refer to my clippings to remember the names of politicians, sportsmen and other newsmakers who had figured in the newspapers only a couple of days ago. Even the lyrics of some of the film songs which blare away endlessly do not make an impact on my memory. The modern movies fail to have any appeal for me. In fact, my frequent failures to distinguish between Kajol, Karisma and Mamta Kulkarni drive my wife to despair.

I am intrigued by these developments. Granted, that today's films and film songs do not hold the same appeal to me as those of the 1950s. But why am I not able to retain these names in my memory? I dearly love to quote poetry. Yet, it is always lines from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Ode to a Grecian Urn, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Tamburlaine which come easily to me. Often, I have been upset that I could not quote from memory the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas or Swinburne.

When I checked these facts with my sisters, I was happy to discover that they too had similar problems! The childhood memories remained fresh, not those of later years. Perhaps, this is a blessing in disguise. I am happier humming Talat Mahmood's Aei meri dil kahin aur chal or quoting Dr Faustus' immortal tributes to Helen of Troy and recollecting Cleopatra's grand entrance on a barge, burnished with gold and whatnot! Why should it worry me that I am unable to remember lines from the more recent film songs -- Tu hain Coca Cola, mein hoon Pepsi Cola, being a prime example -- or the obscene words from the alleged modern poetry?

Illustration: Dominic Xavier