In the Spirit of Moving On by Saachi Gupta
Author’s Note: Some names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.
On my phone’s notes app, I keep a list of all the people I’ve ever kissed. It started in March, 2022, when I made out with my friend Neeharika in her bedroom, and Shivani hesitantly snapped a photo. It was my first kiss; it needed to be remembered. Since then, The List has grown to include thirty people. There’s Isa, the hook-up I lost my virginity to while insisting that virginity was a social construct. There’s Sharan, the boy I made out with for all of two seconds at a club, and Raj, who I kissed right after. There’s Martin, the white man from Mexico who could tell I was on antidepressants because my eyes were out of focus, and who never texted me back because I didn’t have sex with him.
Asfiyah constantly pokes fun at me for The List, insisting it’s a fuckboy thing to do, but I swear to her it’s not a hall of fame. Its purpose is not to brag about my sexual exploits or stroke my own ego. “I have this obsession with not forgetting things,” I explain, as we walk through the glistening lanes of Bandra. In the rain, my white ballet flats turn murky brown. We stop to take solo pictures of each other on an old digital camera I found in the drawer of my television unit a few days ago, a Nikon Coolpix from when I was thirteen, which I’ve been taking everywhere since. We pose together for a few, squealing when a rat races past us into a gutter. Then we snap a photo of our shoes in one frame, the toes of my white ballet flats pointing towards her grey Converse. Looking through the photos when I return home, I realize something: It’s not that I’m obsessed with remembering things. It’s that I have a fear of forgetting.
I must have been nineteen when I learned that memories warp a little each time we recall them. The notion terrified me. When I’m present in a moment, everything seems so clear, so easy to return to whenever I feel like it. The gentle drizzle of rain as Asfiyah and I pose for photos. The droplets on my eyelashes. The pavement, darkened by rainwater. Yet, when I look through the photos from that evening, the pavement is completely dry, as are our shoes. My ballet flats are pristine, shining white, unchanged by the puddles I remember having splashed through. Was it not raining, then? Is nothing I remember accurate? Will I never be able to recall this present moment, exactly as it is?
Will I never be able to recall this present moment, exactly as it is?
Invariably, every time I think about the fallibility of memory and how untrustworthy our brains are, I realize, in a rush, the little details around me that I’ve taken for granted all my life: the exact green of the couch we’ve had since I was a child, the floral patterns on my grandmother’s curtains. The smell of my mother’s rotis in the kitchen, the smooth texture of the bedroom tiles. I never bothered to memorize these details because I’ve always had access to them, because I’ve presumed I always will have access to them. But tomorrow, we could throw away the couch and curtains, change the tiles, move out of our flat. Tomorrow, my mother could decide she never wants to make rotis again. With the object gone, my memory of it undependable, will I be left with no way to preserve that piece of my childhood exactly as it was?
In Siân Hughes’ Pearl, the protagonist deals with a similar distortion of memory as she grapples with her mother’s disappearance years ago. She recalls her mother reading Charlotte’s Web to her when she caught chickenpox as a child, keeping her “scabby hands” away from her face—until she finds out that she only caught chickenpox after her mother’s disappearance. She remembers throwing her mother’s high-heeled shoes into the garden, then searching for them in the torchlight—but her father says her mother never owned any high-heeled shoes.
I wonder how many such things I’ve forgotten, mixed up. How much will I never remember again? At a friend’s house recently, her grandfather fondly referred to me as bete, child. The word made me straighten up; a sharp jolt in my chest. Since my Nanu had passed away, no one had called me bete. For twenty-two years, almost every day, he had called me bete gently, softly, in his velvet voice. In just one year without him, I had forgotten the word. What other things about him had I forgotten? What other details did I take for granted, presuming I would always have access to them, presuming he would always be around?
I’ve always been afraid of things slipping away. Since I was a child, the fear of my loved ones dying would keep me up at night. Before sleeping, I would ask god to protect every person I knew, then list each name, fearing that if I forgot someone, they would perish the next morning. One night, seeing my younger sister asleep, covered head to toe in a white sheet, I raced to my parents’ room, unable to breathe, convinced the sheet was a shroud. When I got my first phone at 12, I began to record family members: stories, phone calls, videos of them cutting their birthday cakes. Nothing could disappear. Upon my own death, I couldn’t disappear—so I started to write. It was the only way I knew to capture a moment in time and share it with the world. If cameras were cheaper, maybe I would’ve been a photographer for the same reason.
Samar is second on The List. By the time we met, I had already become frantic about documentation: Instagram stories, diary entries, photographs on Parnika’s digital camera, videos on my phone. For years, I had been secretly audio recording my grandparents every time they told a story. I liked remembering significant dates: last year this time Dadu was hospitalised, last year this time Amatulla told me she had feelings for me, last year this time I bought my first drink.
When we were first getting to know each other, Samar and I were both struggling with alcoholism. I was also on medication for depression and anxiety, and had to strain my brain to remember details from hours ago. If a classmate asked me if I’d had breakfast that morning, I wouldn’t have an answer. I’d forget details from an anecdote as I was narrating it. On mornings after drinking, I would listen in amusement as my friends told stories that seemed to be about someone who vaguely resembled me, someone who said and did things I never remembered saying or doing. I trusted my memory less and less.
When I was drunk, details, conversations, feelings escaped me far too quickly. The past fell away. Every moment felt like a reset, like I was being reborn again and again throughout the night. When I was drunk I was okay, for once, with forgetting; in fact, there was nothing I wanted more than to be a new person. The morning after, I fretted over everything that had slipped away. Hours of my life gone somewhere, never to be found again except in the details from my friends. After every party, I would text Parnika, demanding photographs, then dump them all on my Instagram: proof that it had happened, ticked off a checklist.
Despite all of this, I rarely took any photos of or with Samar—I felt embarrassed to ask. In romantic entanglements—especially an undefined one like ours—wanting to document our time together felt like an admission of being more interested in the other person than they were in me. Why else would I want to remember something? The explanation about my compulsive documentation felt like a silly excuse.
Once, driving around the city, Samar and I stopped the car in a dark alley to make out. We were near my grandparents’ house, something he made a joke about, before we kissed. In just a few seconds, we realized the alley wasn’t quite as dark as it had looked—we could feel eyes on us as people walked past. I suggested we look for another lane, and he nodded, before squeezing the car out of the parking spot. Years later, when Asfiyah and I went for a walk through the same lane, I pointed the spot out to her: “That was where we made out for a bit.” Then, a few seconds later: “Actually, I’m not sure if that was it. Maybe it was up ahead.” Then, a few minutes later: “Maybe it was the next lane, actually.” When we walked past the next lane, I sighed, “No, it was definitely that last lane.”
Recently, I’ve found that the more I focus on a memory, the blurrier it becomes. It’s like reaching for something and finding it scatter, disperse, spread everywhere until it’s so thin it barely exists. When I lose a silver bracelet, I know I have no hope of finding it because I remember wearing it last to a party but was I even wearing it at the party or did I decide my outfit looked better without a bracelet? If, say, I did wear it to the party, did I remember putting it in my bag after I took it off? Maybe I did take it off and put it in my bag but actually didn’t wear it to the party, and the last time I wore it was three months ago. And so it goes. The capricious memory sprints further and further away, jumping over obstacles, ducking into narrower, unknown lanes, until it’s slipped away. My silver bracelet, gone. An entire conversation, vanished. It’s why there is one man on The List whose name I do not remember. I have put him down as Twin Guy.
The more I focus on a memory, the blurrier it becomes.
What I do remember about Twin Guy:
- I met him at Bonobo. It was the 4th of August.
- He was studying in the UK.
- Neeharika’s schoolmate Sahiba was with him.
- He had a twin brother.
I remember the exact moment when, standing by the bar, I asked him his name. I’d already had six drinks by then and the moment he said it, the name slipped away, lost in the chaos of the night. I woke up the next day with blue lips and alcohol poisoning.
It has always bothered me that I don’t remember Twin Guy’s name. I’ve begged my friends to help me look for it, checked Bonobo’s Instagram stories, even googled the words “Indian twins in the UK.” His name feels like a missing puzzle piece, a Cinderella story; once I know it, that last night of revelry before I decided to be sober will appear before my eyes, complete again.
Some months later, I saw Sahiba at a cafe in Bandra. She was with her mother and had no reaction to seeing me. Awkwardly, right as she left, I called out her name. She turned around, confused. She did not remember me. “This will sound really weird,” I said, pulling her aside, “But last year at Bonobo, I hooked up with a friend of yours. And I just can’t remember his name.”
Together, we bent over her phone and scoured her photographs. I gave her all the information I had: the date, the UK, twin brother.
“I don’t know any twins.” She frowned. “Maybe he lied to you about having a twin brother?”
“No,” I insisted. “I met his twin, too.”
We reached August 4th, 2023 in her camera roll. She showed me all the photos and videos from the night, watching my face earnestly. Finally, in a video of a dancing crowd, I saw him, right in the front, pumping his fist.
“That’s him!” I said, relieved he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
Sahiba’s face fell. “But I don’t know him.”
“But he was with you, I remember,” I said, beginning to doubt my words even as they came out of my mouth. “You introduced me to him.”
“Maybe he’s my boyfriend’s friend,” she said, after a few seconds. “I’ll check with him.”
I knew, in that moment, that I’d never find out who he was.
My issue with remembering is really a philosophical one. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If something happened but no one remembers it happening, did it really happen? Do moments also die when the last person who remembers them forgets? Do things even happen if you don’t remember them?
What I don’t remember (what I never remember):
- What did she say when she touched me?
- Where did her hands go?
- How long did I freeze for?
In July 2021, Amatulla told me she had feelings for me. I felt like I was letting her down when I told her I didn’t feel the same. A month later, she touched me when I didn’t want her to. We were at a friend’s birthday party, surrounded by people playing a drinking game around the table, but no one saw her hand creep up my waist. I forget now if I had a drink in my hand. I forget where exactly she touched me, what she said as she did it. I didn’t know how to ask her to stop, so I pretended someone was calling my name. I stood up and left her sitting alone on the floor, presumably drunk and tearful. I didn’t look back.
In my bed that night, I resolved to forget it had happened at all. Forgetting meant I could remain friends with someone who was important to me. Yet even as I decided this, I dreaded waking up the next morning, doubting my memory. There was no evidence it had happened: no Instagram stories, no diary entries, no photographs on Parnika’s digital camera, no videos on my phone. No one had seen. Amatulla, hungover, didn’t remember anything the next morning.
Over the next few months, when the people around me questioned if I was telling the truth, I questioned it too. But even when I forgot the little details, I remembered the way my stomach hurt for days after. I remembered the fear of forgetting that pain.
Documentation was how I made sure no one ever had to fill in those gaps again. That everyone knew what really happened, that I didn’t make it up, that I’m not going crazy. Maybe I am obsessed with documentation because it’s the only way to make sure I am believed. It’s the only way I believe myself.
Maybe I am obsessed with documentation because it’s the only way to make sure I am believed.
When I was a child, my fear of death made me an expert at memorizing physical touch. Even four years after my Dadi and Dadu’s deaths, I can remember exactly how their hugs felt. I remember how Nanu’s hand felt in mine, so clearly that I don’t even have to close my eyes to return to another time in my life. The memory of touch is called a haptic memory; it falls under sensory memories. I do not remember what Amatulla’s hands on my body felt like.
In May 2024, I visited Samar in the mountains, where he had moved for a music course. In the week we spent together, I discovered he had forgotten—or mixed up—many significant moments of our relationship. He thought it had been five years since we met, not two. He remembered me meeting his family, but I never had. He had no memory of when, irritated by my brashness when I was drunk, he stopped speaking to me for seven months.
For the first time in my life, I felt envious of someone’s weak memory. Over years of deciding to not let anything disappear, so many difficult moments and residual feelings have not only stayed with me but are practically stuck to my skin, impossible to get rid of. I remember obscure, upsetting details from years-old interactions: the exact last words of a lengthy apology text from Amatulla (“in the spirit of moving on, i would really appreciate if this is the last interaction between us”), the time Samar stood me up after I’d spent an hour waiting for him at Prithvi Theatre, the time he forgot I’m a vegetarian, the screeching voice of my eighth grade Math teacher stopping me in the school corridors for wearing a cropped top.
I began to question what these memories were even adding to my life. Was it good to remember things, if those things ultimately held me back? Did I really need precise memories, or did I need to stop living in the past? After all, Samar was living in the present, and he seemed to be happier than I was.
Despite my fear of death, there is one thing about it that has always comforted me: scientists state that the brain is active for approximately seven minutes after a person dies. In this time, the “brain wave patterns… are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.” Scientists theorize that these seven minutes may be a replay of one’s life. The thought fills me with relief. At the end of my life, will I finally remember everything?
“Do you think the memories we see in the replay are objectively accurate?” I ask Asfiyah. “Or do you think they’re the same warped versions we carry with us throughout our lives?”
Our guesses do not matter. There’s only one way to find out.
If I know I cannot retain everything I want to, that my memories will fade despite my meticulous documentation, maybe the only thing to do is live in the present. Already, some of the names on The List evoke no memory; I cannot even put a face to them. Why waste time and energy preserving something that I know will eventually disappear anyway? Shouldn’t I be focusing, instead, on simply living in the moment, free of worries about taking photographs, recording audios, or trying to memorize the color of a couch?
Recently, as I read Anita Desai’s Rosarita, something remarkable happened. The story revolves around a young woman from India, studying in San Miguel, Mexico. I too had spent eleven months in Mexico as a student. When I left, I promised myself I wouldn’t forget my Spanish; I would practice, continue to listen to Latin music and watch Mexican shows on Netflix. For a while, I remained fluent in the language, nursing hopes of returning to Latin America in the near future, but six years on, I was slightly less hopeful and significantly less fluent. I struggled to string together a sentence and had to google translations for words like banana, left, and forgot. And then came Rosarita. The novella only had a few Spanish words, sparingly sprinkled across 94 pages. Chiclet, iglesias, ahora, mercado, tienda. Words that I had once used almost daily, and now that they were no longer crucial to my survival, forgotten. As these words appeared on the pages, though, their meanings came back to me instantly, naturally, as if they had never stopped being a part of my vocabulary.
The other day, as my friend and I sat on the floor of her house, looking through old photographs from school, the same thing happened. The names of my classmates—names that I once said or thought about nearly every day, names that had faded away since I left school—came back to me with no effort. “Lavesh Chib, Drishti Ahuja, Prerana Shetty,” I spouted automatically, sliding my finger across the class photograph.
Maybe we never completely forget anything. The things that have to come back to me, the things that are important, will return at the right time. It’s like swimming or riding a bike. Maybe the memories that return will be accurate; maybe they won’t. But is accuracy the point of a memory? Isn’t it enough to remember exactly how it felt? To have lived through something that deserves to be remembered? The protagonist in Siân Hughes’ Pearl agrees. “I claim all that I can rescue of the time before,” she declares, “Even if someone tells me the details are wrong, or in the wrong order. Because it is mine.”
