THE MAGIC OF MEMORY

When a fragrance stirs a memory, when berries on trees against a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you walk down a path and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. I need the magic of memory to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you!

 Last week end, I attended the wedding of our friend’s son. We were old friends, we had known each other from the time we went to school, and we knew their parents and our brothers and sisters were friends too. Both our families have traveled far away from home since.  So we were eager to meet a lot of old acquaintances from our hometown; many of whom I had seen in school uniform.  Now we had   families of our own, including children and grand children!  
I welcomed the guests with flowers, in the traditional South Indian way and was shocked when I was introduced to them. I had been unable to put the name to the face and had failed to recognize my friends from back home. It gave me little consolation that they also had been unable to recognize me. But this hasn’t been the case always.
Walking down my street one evening, I was pleasantly surprised to spot long white tubular flowers under a tall flowering tree. I picked some of them and the fragrance took me back, decades ago. These were the same tree jasmine flowers which used to be strewn in the bus stand of my school. It was in an area, just outside the last gate, a place covered with the Indian Cork trees. The school buses waited there and when the bell rang, we would come running out and wait in lines to board the various buses which would take us home.  In High School, I used to cycle home and the cycle stand was at the opposite end, near the first gate. I used to come to the bus stand every afternoon, chat with my friends until their bus left school. Then I would run back, hop on to my cycle and join another group of friends to cycle home.  It is difficult for me now to name even one of those giggly girls, but the flowers and the fragrance are a reminder of those happy days.
 I also used to go to school by bus when I was in Primary School. A long red bus would come to pick us up every day. It would stop at the culvert under a huge wide Indian Beech tree behind my house. In spring, the whole area used to be covered with tiny white blossoms, some with a purple tinge. I used to be the first to reach the bus stand and sit on the culvert alone!  I felt like a snow princess and if I had a mobile then, that is one Selfie I would not have missed!
The most enduring ritual of my summer vacations spent in Calcutta, was the eating of Nungu or Taal fruits.  The seller would carry clusters of the Palmyra fruit tied to the two ends of a bamboo pole, balanced on his shoulder. Then he would sit down at a comfortable place at the entrance of our home and with his sickle and knife; carefully gorge out three juicy fleshy fruits from each nut. It came with a delicate white peel which we had to remove carefully and suck in the contents. If the fruit was too tender, it would ooze down your hands or neck, if you managed to get it that far! The fruit had to be gulped down and it was sooner done than peeling it. That was the post breakfast ritual, and we kids looked forward to it.
Decades later, when we were transferred to Chennai, I chanced to see these fruits which are a specialty of the coastal region. Every season, my husband  patiently gets a dozen or two, every day, and ensures that I have these fruits to my heart’s content. And what do I learn about these fruits when I open the magazine section of the newspaper yesterday! They are called Ice Apples in British English especially by the immigrants living in India.
Another fruit I discovered from my childhood is the gooseberry. One afternoon, from my balcony, I spied two young boys desperately trying to bring down small green berries from the tree behind the watchman’s shed. I was curious to know what they were. Strewn on the ground, under the tree, I found the small green berries, goose berries!
In school, when I was in class 4-5, we were given a handful of berries, every season. One of the various helpers would carry the berry basket, while another placed fistfuls of the sweet- sour berries for each one of us. I never saw the tree nor saw how the berries were collected. The next year, the tree in my compound was laden with berries and I gathered them with child like joy.  Only this time, they tasted so sour that I had to pickle them.
You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it.
 Robert Mc Cammon, Boy's Life