The Memorable Animal

In the 19th and the 20th centuries, thinkers of various stripes were fond of coining their own definitions of homo sapiens; for some of them, Man was a political animal, for others, an economic animal, for a few, a religious animal, and for quite many of them, a symbolic animal. If I were to add my own to this list, it would go as : Man is a memorable animal. (How memorable this definition itself is must remain a matter on which only time can have the last word.) This is a condensed manner of saying that we human beings are a complex tapestry that is woven together out of the multi-coloured strands of what we remember about ourselves, of what we can recollect only with some effort, of what we have actually forgotten, and of what we have tried but failed to forget. The tapestry itself is constantly being woven and re-woven as we temporal beings move ahead through our lives, and in some dramatic cases it might be drastically unravelled which, in turn, may lead towards the formation of a new tapestry. Here are three types of tapestries.

Tapestry 1 : It is 4:20 in the afternoon on November 24, 1924. Augusta Philippa Slade sits at the window in her London apartment beside the Thames looking at the clandestine figures in the mist moving about under the yellow lamps. Suddenly, the boiling kettle whistles behind her in the kitchen, once, twice, and thrice. The sharp kettle-shrieks remind her of the steam train that would take her and her husband from the heat and the dust of Delhi to the cool climes of Shimla high up in the mountains when they were living in India in 1911. And now she remembers the gentle dusks in India. Her palatial mansion would be very silent at that time, and she would stand at the massive wooden door looking down into the rainy valley. The natives would be lighting their earthen lamps, and the valley would glitter with long rows of tiny lights like shining pearls on a necklace. Augusta would then feel ravaged by an excruciating loneliness, as if the silence of the empty dusk was slowly sinking into her body and was hollowing her out. She is suddenly shaken out of her reverie by her husband Lord Hilton, 'Augusta! Can I have my tea now, please? And for heaven's sake do something about that smelly dog of yours. It has been whining the whole afternoon.'

Tapestry 2 : Professor Joachim Weiszentrop goes to the British Museum to look up some old records for the next book that he is writing on how Londoners were affected by the German air-raids in 1945. He sits at one end of the South Room the entire morning, meticulously going through pile after pile of brown and brittle newspapers. And then he reads in the London Times for May 12, 1945 : 'Rosa Westerholm, aged 34, killed last night.' Professor Weiszentrop reads and re-reads those words for probably a hundred times. No, he keeps on saying to himself, it cannot be true. He is thinking of his wife Rosa Rosenbaum who died in Poland at the age of 34 before he was able to escape to England in 1942. He starts sobbing softly, and after a while, his whole body is shaken by violent convulsions. A library assistant runs up to him, 'Professor Weiszentrop, shall I call the ambulance?'

Tapestry 3 : The old archaelogist, Mr. Antoine Devereux, is in Turkey on probably the last field-trip of his life. On a glorious Spring morning when the sky is brilliantly blue and the wind is whispering in his ears, he is digging on an ancient site beside a river when he finds the desiccated skeleton of a dog three feet into the moist earth. He looks behind him and sees his beautiful black dog barking wildly and running madly after the butterflies on the bank of the river. Then he begins to think about himself. What if someday in the distant future some archaeologist finds his skeleton on some forgotten river bank?