I’m in Gangtok as I write this. The last time I was here was 40 years ago, as part of a school trip during the summer holidays. I almost missed it because of fever, but got better in time. My parents were concerned, yet keen that I travel. Darjeeling and Mirik were also on the itinerary. We travelled by train from Kolkata to Siliguri and then bussed it to Gangtok, passing through awe-inspiring mountains, gorges and forests.
Memory of the sightseeing during the stay in Gangtok is sketchy. I remember more than 200 students and a dozen or so teachers stayed at an ashram for two or three days. The boys slept in their sleeping bags on the ground floor hall and the girls were on the first floor. It was much colder then, though it was June or July. Everyone avoided bathing except for one daring classmate, who made me have at least a sponge bath with icy cold water. Accessing toilets at night meant going outside the hall as you negotiated angry dogs on a full bladder.
On the first evening, one of the students who’d chided me for being a slow eater, fell sick after adding too much Zeoline to the drinking water at a small eatery. There was some tension between the vegetarians and non-vegetarians, but everyone had a lot else on their minds. I almost had a wet dream on the first night. The most abiding memory though is of seeing Mount Kanchenjunga from the ashram window the next morning. How do I describe the golden white of the mountain top juxtaposed against the azure sky? How incredibly fortunate we were that the ashram was located high enough and the weather was crystal clear! The flora outside the bus window during the journey to Gangtok had animated the biology text book, and now the geography text book and painting lessons had come alive.
To add to the experience of a lifetime, I got to have the morning tea with our biology teacher, one of my favourites (because students are allowed to have favourites). He was happy that I was an early riser like him, and joked with me about the angry dogs the previous night. So, he had been keeping an eye out for the students. I felt warm and secure. Happy nostalgia this!
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Usha Dhall, the author’s deceased mother, during a trip to Sikkim in the early 1960s when she was in her 30s. Photograph accessed from the author’s family albums (photographer unknown)
Some remembrances affect me in a way nostalgia doesn’t. A few days before the trip to Sikkim, I was flipping through one of the numerous family photo albums maintained by my mother Usha Dhall, who left for the transcendent in June this year, when she was just around two and a half months shy of 92. I came across a photograph of my mother taken in Sikkim. She made this trip with my father, elder brother and other extended family members in the early 1960s.
There’s an expression in Hindi – huuk uthna – which I think can be translated as a surge of sadness for something gone or unobtainable that can tear through your chest like a glacial lake bursting through a concrete dam. When I saw the photograph, it seemed familiar in more ways than one. My mother was a great raconteur of stories past, including from her younger days. She would’ve shown me the photograph and talked about the trip at least a few times. So, granules of those stories may have stayed in my mind, but I felt something more than that. I felt as if I was there somewhere, invisible in the photograph, but there with my parents. And now I was missing a time when I wasn’t even born. Is this saudade?
The Internet is replete with explanations for the Portuguese term saudade, which some say is untranslatable. Saudade isn’t the same as nostalgia, which is a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or period, sometimes along with the people who were around then. What I’ve grasped about saudade so far is that it’s a more complex form of nostalgia, perhaps even nostalgia for nostalgia. One website describes saudade as a vague and constant desire for something that doesn’t and probably can’t exist, for something other than the present. It seems akin to the presence of an absence.
A recent home shift (within Kolkata), after 28 years of living in the same house, has led to many sad-sweet eddies of memory. When I go back to the locality where I lived for so long, for there are reasons to still do so, the heart hangs heavy. A couple of times, when I was walking past the old locality, engrossed in my thoughts, it seemed the most natural thing to take a particular turn and go back to my old home. In a flash, scenes related to the old home would pass through my mind – me pressing the calling bell or using my set of keys to enter the living room; my father watching TV; Lakhi Bibi, our cook busy preparing delicious food; my mother sleeping in her room and her attendants going about their duties; my room with its own trunk load of memories of friendships, gatherings, intimacies and despairs; the apartment complex with its ageing walls and vanishing greens; the lanes in the neighbourhood, weary witnesses to my many loves and lives. But these scenes, were they accurate representations of what’d happened? Though so vivid, weren’t they imaginations – of things absent but evidently present?
It would take a little effort to remind myself that home was elsewhere now, and then a wave of relief and gratitude would follow that I now had an opportunity to live in a new environment, perhaps with new possibilities.
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What is it about me that I often think, research and write about memories? Around two decades ago, in the first house that I lived in Kolkata (much before moving into the home I moved out of recently), I began yearning for the home in my birthplace, Hind Motor Colony in suburban Kolkata. Quite unaware of the sordid industrial realities of the place, I’d spent my first seven and a half years befriending mango, neem and peepul trees, fields of flowers, and butterflies galore. Hardly any of these were to be found in narrow Kolkata lanes. The nostalgia was overwhelming. I found some peace only when I drew a sketch of the house’s layout, which is still stored in my computer. The house is long gone. The last time I looked for it on Google Maps, it showed the area covered with vegetation growing wild. Now, I hear that major real estate developments are coming up in Hind Motor Colony, and it’s possible that all physical signs of my first home will be wiped out. The sketch I drew still gives me comfort that the times spent in that house wouldn’t all be lost.
This desire to persevere to preserve has also become a professional calling of sorts for me. As a queer activist, I’ve grown into also working as a queer archivist and encouraging others to do the same. However, my relationship with archiving and archival material (mainly related to Counsel Club, one of India’s earliest queer support groups that I co-founded in 1993) isn’t just about preserving a slice of Kolkata, Bengal and India’s recent queer histories. It’s also about holding on to a crucial part of my personal past that led to where I am today.
In holding on to our pasts, we’re often likely to encounter huuk or utter sadness. But as they say about saudade, deep sadness can also lead to a strong desire for comfort in the here and the now, for situations and people like the past but also new. As if they’re hyperlinks to the times that once were our building blocks, personal and political, but can still be accessed to draw strength from.
Editor’s note: This article under the Vartanama column was meant to appear in the October 2024 issue of Varta, but was delayed for a variety of reasons. Since August 2013, this is the first time Vartanama has remained unpublished in any month when the webzine was published – Editor.
About the main photo: A shimul tree beginning to put out new leaves in the spring of 2022 in the author’s earlier neighbourhood in Kolkata. Photo credit: Pawan Dhall
Our grandparents were accustomed to living in one place for generations. We, on the other hand, have got so used to moving from one place to another that we actually feel saudade more frequently but not with the same intensity.