The Keeper Of A Half Memory

The Keeper Of A Half Memory

“Kallo! Come here, Kallo,” Qudsiya Begum howled at the top of her lungs when she saw one of her goats straying from the flock. “Come here, Kallo,” she clicked her tongue and ran after the goat. The afternoon sun had already climbed up, seated over the haze like an indifferent observer. Down below, as Qudsiya Begum ran after her goat, her sequined dupatta fell on her shoulders, and her eyes, squinting in the sunlight, welled up with sweat. Kulsum Bi was observing her from a distance, guarding her flock of goats from breaking away.

“Come here, Kallo, you bad girl,” Qudsiya Begum howled again.

“That one is not Kallo, Qudsiya Baaji,” Kulsum Bi yelled from behind, giggling. “Kallo is over there, look.” she said, pointing towards a different goat. “The one you are running after is Bhoori,” she added.

Qudsiya Begum nodded with blank eyes and howled Bhoori’s name, and ran after her. “Bhoori! Come here, girl.”

“Looks like Qudsiya Baaji forgot even Kallo today,” Kulsum Bi shouted, clapping her hands on her thighs.

“No…you are lying…I remember everything…I remember everything,” Qudsiya Begum shouted back, smiling faintly.

#

To Qudsiya Begum, they all looked the same. The same polished brown skin. The same set of uneven spots, and the same shrill bleating. Their faces too looked indistinguishable to her, with their dozen glossy eyes with slit shaped pupils, and a similar bush of tufted beards that looked like a poor country’s rabbi.

Earlier, she could easily tell one goat from another, an art she learnt from her Ammi, who learnt from hers. But now, everything had merged into one homogenous unit, a sort of singularity where not many differences mattered. And if they did matter, she could barely tell. Other people who noticed and chronicled differences took it upon themselves to remind her about the ways things differed. From one goat to another. From one spice to another. From one day to another.

#

This wasn’t the first time Qudsiya Begum forgot something. While the world around her was busy hoarding new memories, Qudsiya Begum had somehow flowed against the tide.  She had lost control over what was to be remembered, and what not.  Every day she forgot a little more than the previous one, as if her memory had been punctured with a hole the size of a pebble, and every second, a crumb of her memory petered out, collecting in dusty heaps in some unknown place she could not reach. Some people even claimed that Qudsiya Begum’s brain had shrunk, thinned over time like an eroded coastline. While most of her memories paled entirely, some stubbornly stayed back, although in uneven patches. Like a moth-eaten leaf. Like warmth left behind when the fire goes out.

Last week, a skullcap fell from the top shelf of her almirah, and she had no idea whose it was. She tried to haul an answer from her moth-eaten memory, but each answer came only in scattered segments, like tattered socks falling out from an old trousseau.

Two months ago, she forgot the number of salt spoons and pepper it took to prepare Karhai Paneer.

Last year, she forgot she had a husband.

“I had a husband?” she asked, astonished. “My husband?…Where is he now?”

#

Qudsiya Begum, people noticed, had also forgotten all the rules, rules that other people had vouched never to forget. Like the shape and shapelessness of gods, or which meat to eat and where. On some days, she would walk into a temple and prostrated before a different god, a god with a shape, a god she rarely knew, only to be told by the temple priest that she had reached a different place of worship. That the place she might be looking for was in the other part of the town.

“Whose God is it then?” she’d ask the temple priest, her eyes expectant for an answer. On other days when she’d forget to eat chicken or beef-curry, and instead went out looking for pork, people reminded her that eating pork was haram. Forbidden.

And on days when Qudsiya Begum forgot to cover her head, people sternly reminded her to act more womanly.

“It is like you’ve forgotten even how to be a woman,” people would tell her. “Forget all you want, but never forget how to be a woman, Qudsiya Begum. Never.”

“What is a woman?” she’d ask people with empty eyes. Everything she once knew had submerged deep in some secret secluded place, like water hidden behind a patch of dense algae. And with each new day, Qudsiya Begum turned a little more heretic than the previous one— of no god, of no religion or gender, and with no past in particular.

#

Qudsiya Begum, unlike everyone else, had also forgotten to dream fully. Each night, she only dreamt in halves, and on some nights, not even that. Perhaps it was easier that way, to dream in halves, to be insured against complicated and unexpected endings. But her half dreams were not part of some determined design or fear of bad endings. It was more an outcome of her half memories. Or a broken fate. Each night Qudsiya Begum dreamt of the same things, the same half dreams with no entry or exit doors. In each dream, she waited for a train. Night after night.

In each dream, there was a man on the station platform, asleep beside her feet, dressed in a crisp white kurta and a loose pyjama that billowed in the air each time a train passed by. In each dream, his sandals remained tucked under his head, like a makeshift leather pillow, and his white skullcap sat firmly beside him. Then, in each dream, the train got cancelled and the station went quiet; and then, in each dream, a group of men came and dragged the sleeping man, pulling him by his legs, taking him away like corpse carriers, mumbling. That is all. That is all. The man in Qudsiya Begum’s dreams never came back. In each dream, she wailed, and waited, and then fainted, and like a resurrected prophet, woke up the next morning.

But in a different world.

With a broken prophet.

Over the years, everything else other than her half-dream had faded away. Deliberately or accidentally, it didn’t matter, and each day it mattered a little less.

#

“Boonda who?” Qudsiya Begum asked Kulsum Bi, marvelling at a photo in an old album that Kulsum Bi had pulled out from her sandook. When Qudisya Begum glanced at the photos in the album, a dozen faces caught in a sepia-tinted light stared at her with paused breaths and alert eyes. Boonda Bhai in the photos looked particularly stunned. Like a dragonfly smashed against a glass window.

“Boonda Bhai,” Kulsum Bi exclaimed. “Remember him, Qudsiya Baaji?”

Qudsiya Begum looked at her with blank eyes. Kulsum Bi gently whispered in her ears, “Arey, your husband!”

“I don’t remember any husband,” she said coyly, waving her hand dismissively. Her bones creaked like a crumbling boat. “Where is he now?”

“He died Qudsiya Begum…two years ago…from Tuberculosis.”

Qudisya Begum fell quiet and then asked, “Why don’t I remember him?”

“Because you are forgetting things, Qudsiya Baaji.”

“No, you are lying…I remember everything…I remember everything,” Qudisya Begum said, hurling the album away.

#

When Kulsum Bi told her daughter Amina about Qudsiya Begum’s half-dreams, she was half-satisfied and half-dismayed. When Boonda Bhai died, Kulsum Bi took it upon herself to look after her goats by the day, and Qudsiya Begum by the night. This was her way to add to Allah’s bounty. To give back from the bare little she had. In her mind, she thought of herself as Allah’s tiny revolutionary in a tiny world. Each month, she apportioned the money she earned from the goat milk into three equal parts— one for herself, one for her daughter’s coaching for the army entrance exam, and one for Qudsiya Begum.

“Poor lady is lucky in a way…she doesn’t remember a single thing now,” Kulsum Bi mumbled, wiping off her tears.

“Is it good to forget things, Ammi?”

“It is, my moon. When the pain is too much, it is better if one can forget some of it…perhaps this is what Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala’ wants, to make Qudisya Begum remember nothing,” she told her daughter.

Kulsum Bi thought that some people were fortunate to forget pain, to not feel grief, because that way, even if someone died or left, there was no one to mourn, no pain to mull over, no grudges to hold. To her, those people were free, almost like heretics who owed nothing to the world.

“But sometimes I worry…what if she forgets to breathe?” Kulsum Bi said.

“Ammi, don’t be silly. No one forgets to breathe,” Amina replied, giggling. “We can, my moon,” Kulsum Bi expressed with a stern face.

“How?” Amina asked, confused.

“Allah decides every breath we take…if Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala can make us remember breathing, He can just as easily make us forget it.”

#

One evening when Qudsiya Begum was sewing the holes in an old mattress, the white skull cap fell from the top shelf, again. Like a shard of a cracked star. Like the other half of a half memory.

Kulsum Bi was sewing a sweater by the window, humming an old Urdu song. “This skullcap…whose is it?” Qudsiya Begum asked, stammering. Her eyes carefully observed the cap, her fingers running across its coarse fabric. She brought it closer to her nose and sniffed it. It smelled like old mustard oil and the way all things left behind smell, musty and damp, with a faint remnant of whoever held it last.

“Where did you find this cap?” Kulsum Bi enquired, nervously. Qudsiya Begum was sitting on the floor, swaying her body back and forth.

“Whose is it?” she asked again when Kulsum Bi did not reply. “It fell from there,” she added, pointing to the top shelf of the almirah.

Kulsum Bi looked up, her eyes flitting away in silence.

“Why aren’t you telling me?”

“Qudsiya Baaji…this is…this is Talib’s cap,” Kulsum Bi replied, in a cracked voice, eyes welling up like a leaky tap.

“Who Talib?”

“Talib…your son…do you remember him?”

“My son?”

“Your son. Yes. Talib. Our Talib.”

Qudsiya Begum brooded over the name, Talib, and the way her tongue gently touched her upper set of teeth and released itself with a sharp ‘Ta,’ and then swiftly struck the roof of her mouth with its pointed tip, letting out a soft pressed ‘li,’ before her lips parted feebly to release a soft airy ‘b.’

“Talib…Talib…Talib”

With each annunciation, Qudisya Begum tried a different intonation, tossing and twisting her tongue in new rhythms, but each time the name sounded more alien. And more absent. Like a phantom limb that was there, and now isn’t there.

“I remember everything, but I don’t remember a son,” she said, confidently. “I can tell you when God made the moon or when The Prophet split the moon in two halves. I can even tell you the year our God revealed Quran Sharif to The Prophet or when our ancestors celebrated Diwali just like Eid,” Qudsiya Begum said, her lips beaming with confidence.

Kulsum Bi wiped away tears with the end of her dupatta. “Baaji, you forgot to add May Peace Be Upon Him,” she said, changing the topic. She understood that Qudsiya Begum remembered nothing, and in some tiny nook of her mind, she was glad that she did not.  “May Peace Be Upon Him,” Qudsiya Begum muttered.

“Good.”

“Peace…Be…on whom?”

“Ok, Baaji. Leave it,” Kulsum Bi laughed. “Now tell me about the moon. Tell me, who made it?”

“Tell you what?”

“About the moon, you were telling me about the moon.”

“What moon?” she asked.

“The one that you know about…the one that God made…the one that The Prophet, May Peace Be Upon Him, split in two halves.”

“What God?…I don’t know what you’re going on about. Shut your mouth and tell me, what are you doing inside my house?”

“I am Kulsum Bi, Qudsiya Baaji.” Kulsum Bi laughed. “This is my house, looks like you’ve forgotten me too.”

“No…I remember everything…I remember everything.”