Bangles Always Remind me of Summer
Do you sometimes look at an old picture of yourself and try to remember who you were at that age?
I often do things like that. It’s been interesting because over the years my perspectives have shifted based on how much I remember about myself versus what I remember about the people around me at that age. Maybe that’s why the idea of ‘you’ is largely an illusion, they say. Because the idea of Cheryl I have in my head might differ from the one my mother holds, or my neighbour, or the lady with the black dog down the street. We are a composite of all these ideas and notions of who we are and who we feel we are and how the world perceives us at that moment.
I will tell you a secret — when I was younger, a good measure of how ‘old’ I considered myself depended on how much I remembered about who I was, say, ten or fifteen years back. So when I was twenty, I would try to recall incidents from when I was five or six and if I could remember things clearly I’d tell myself, “ah well, you’re not old at all.” When I was in my twenties and reminiscing childhood it invariably meant thinking about summer vacations to Kerala or memories of sausages and ham hungrily consumed on Christmas morning or random Sunday afternoons in winter spent eating hot samosas while watching a Malayalam movie on DD4. Realizing that I can remember an example of each instance I just recounted makes me feel young and happy on the inside. As I got older, it became tougher because the number of instances you have jam packed into each period end up being a lot more in quantity (even though the quality might have dipped a bit).
Memories tend to be richer and more vibrant when you’re a child versus when you grow up because there are too many things vying for your attention and, like silly adults usually do, we try to gather them all instead of sipping and savoring each little piece.
One memory that is etched in my mind from long ago are the trips to my nanny’s tiny house by the main road in Athirampuzha. It was a ‘kachcha ghar’ as they would call it in Hindi, and I use that term because my default language setting at the time was Hindi. Mercy chechi used to travel with us to Kerala every summer and she’d stay at her mother’s home for the duration of the trip while we stayed at my grandparents’ place. Every single time, she would insist on taking me to her house to meet her mother (I don’t know why, because she was a scary old lady, and I was petrified of her). But because I loved Mercy chechi I would go every time. She loved showing me off to her friends or nieces and nephews that would gather to see me every time. They found me interesting, I guess — silly little mini me with my two ponytails, scared eyes, and inability to string an entire sentence in Malayalam.
But Mercy chechi soon figured out a trick to get me interested — she would give me a set of plastic bangles every time I went home with her. How I loved those bangles! My mother insisted that I wear my gold earrings and bangles every time we went to Kerala and I hated them (still do) but these plastic ones — I couldn’t get enough of them. They came in every color, blue was my favorite, and each set came wrapped in an old Malayala Manorama newspaper. I still remember the plasticky smell of the bangles, the sound they made as they clinked against each other on my tiny wrist as we walked back home, and how pretty I felt wearing them. I remember it all.
My husband tells me that nostalgia is my primary emotion, and maybe he’s right. Most of my writing comes from nostalgia. It’s where my heart sings the loudest. Because on days like this when I count one too many extra greys in my hair, I’m just grateful for these simple little trips down memory lane that take me back to being six again.
And just like that I’m there, playing with my stack of blue plastic bangles. Because of a kind memory of a kind person from long ago who understood a simple trick to make summer vacations more fun for a little kid — as simple as a stack of plastic bangles.