In our Class V text book, we had the story of the Elephant and the Tailor, with lovely pictures. This Elephant was daily taken to the river for his body-wash and it was his practice to thrust his trunk into this Tailor's wayside shop and the Tailor would give him an orange or a banana without fail. One day the Tailor was angry with his wife and when the Elephant asked for his orange, he pricked the Elephant's trunk with the needle in his sulking hand. The Elephant said nothing but continued his walk and filled his trunk with water dirtied by his wash and on his way back emptied his trunk on the head of the brooding Tailor.
This story was supposed to illustrate the phrase: "elephantine memory"
By the way, elephant's anatomy is curiously disproportionate. His tail is too short to shoo away the fleas on his vast body, his ears have huge floppy lobes, and his eyes are too small. But I am told he can see even a needle on the ground from that height, pick it with his trunk and pass it up to his mahout...shows that size of the organ means nothing...
I thought for years that his trunk was his mouth. And his ivory tusks his teeth. When I saw with trepidation tall trees at KGP, near the Tech Market, with huge round fruit hanging high up in the air and asked what they are called, I was told: "Elephant's Balls"...rather a cute metaphor that.
If ever the dozen or more IITs are compared with the animals in the Alipore Zoo, I would like IIT KGP to be the Elephant...hereby I lay claim to the patent.
Anyway, all kids have fantastic memories and decade by decade it dwindles from 10 GB to 5 and 2 and finally nil. It is not that in old age you can't recall what you want to, but you can't do it when you want it; which is worse. When I met our front neighbor (samnewala bengali babu) in our new apartment complex last, he said he works in Hartford as I wrote earlier. He is back in Hartford and his wife is yet to join him there. She was on her first social call in our home this evening and since I was keen to show off my fading Bengali, I too joined the conversation. And I wanted to proudly tell another visiting gent that she will soon be joining her hubby in the beautiful city of Hartford. But for half an hour and more I was fishing my ROM for it but the name Hartford never turned up...till she left...and then my skull was abuzz with Hartford...Hartford...Hartford...like a weird mantra.
It was my good memory that won me a lifelong friendship. When I was staying in our Faculty Hostel in the 1960s, NP of ME, was my neighbor. And he was fed on the IIT mantra that an Associate Lecturer in Engg is equivalent to a Lecturer in Science, an Assistant Professor in Mech Engg is worth more than a Full Professor in Physics and so on. So he was decidedly condescending. One day he was visiting me and was browsing a pamphlet he brought with him. And on an impulse I asked him what it was about. He passed it on to me and I found it was a flyer for a newly launched version of the Ambassador Car listing its 14 novel features...all engg terminology like cylinders, pistons, crankshafts, bearings and stuff in which I was least interested. I passed it back to him and he looked at it and on an impulse asked me if I can repeat the 14 damn things. And, as I reeled them out one after another serially, it was a sight to see his face turn all colors one by one. Fuel was added to fire when next day he brought his COD and opened a page at random and asked me to tell the meaning of each word on that page word by word.
And that trick of memory and recall laid the foundation of a unique 50-year unwavering friendship between our two families...wives, kids and grandkids...first 40 years at KGP and the next 10 in Hyderabad...we joined together and retired together to live in the same spacetime tube.
That memory trait helped me no less in establishing a sort of reputation as a unique teacher in my early career...I made it a point to walk into my B Tech (QM) classes with just a few pieces of chalk and duster in one hand and the Attendance Register in the other. Somehow during those days no one else was doing it, but always carrying their khata to the class (not to read aloud or copy from on the blackboard but as a backup, just in case). So, I was like an electrician without chappals.
Reputations get established on such flimsy grounds.
Nowadays, as you know, I am turning out sentence after sentence everyday, logging maybe 3 or 4 lakh words in the last 3 years. So, hunting and getting the right word is sort of an achievement at my age...but the credit goes to Google and Webster always open on the side-windows.
Listen to Thurber on this topic of memory and recall, culled from Thurber Album gifted to me by Jogia:
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"...It was some six months after this that father went through a similar experience with me. He was at that time sleeping in the room next to mine. I had been trying all afternoon, in vain, to think of the name of Perth Amboy. It seems now a very simple name to recall and yet on the day in question I thought of every other town in the country, as well as such words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodely Head, Scumann-Heink, etc, without even coming close to Perth Amboy. I suppose terra cotta was the closest I came, although it was not very close.
Long after I had gone to bed, I was struggling with the problem. I began to indulge in the wildest fancies as I lay there in the dark, such as there was no such town, and even there was no such state as New Jersey. I fell to repeating the word "Jersey" over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and and hundreds of millions times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into. I got to thinking that there was nobody else in the world but me, and various other imaginings of that nature. Eventually, lying there thinking these outlandish thoughts, I grew slightly alarmed. I began to suspect that one might lose one's mind over such trivial mental tic as a futile search for terra firma Piggly Wiggly Gorgonzola Prester John Arc de Triomphe Holy Moses Lares and Penates. I began to feel the imperative necessity of human contact. This silly and alarming tangle of thought and fancy had gone far enough. I might get into some kind of mental aberrancy until I found out the name of that Jersey town and could go to sleep. Therefore, I got out of bed, walked into the room where father was sleeping and shook him. "Um?" he mumbled. I shook him more fiercely and he finally sat up, with a glaze of dream and apprehension in his eyes. "What's the matter?" he asked thickly. I must, indeed, have been rather wild of eye, and my hair, which is unruly, becomes monstrously tousled and snarled at night. "Wha's it?" said my father, sitting up, in readiness to spring out of bed at the far side. The thought must have been going through his mind that all his sons were crazy, or on the verge of going crazy. I see that now, but I didn't then, for I had forgotten the Buck incident and did not realize how similar my appearance must have been to Roy's the night he called father Buck and told him his time had come. "Listen," I said. "Name some towns in New Jersey quick!" It must have been around three in the morning. Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. "Don't bother about dressing," I said. "Just name some towns in New Jersey." While he hastily pulled on his clothes---I remember he left his socks off and put on his shoes on his bare feet---father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities. I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me. "Newark," he said, "Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Paterson---" "It has two names," I snapped. "Elizabeth and Paterson," he said. "No, no!" I told him, irritably. "This is one town with one name, but there are two words in it, like helter-skelter." "Helter-skelter," said my father, moving slowly toward the bedroom door and smiling in a faint, strained way which I understand now---but didn't then---was meant to humor me. When he was within a few paces of the door, he fairly leaped for it and ran out into the hall, his coat-tails and shoelaces flying. This exit stunned me. I had no notion that he thought I had gone out of my senses; I could only believe he had gone out of his or that, only partially awake, he was engaged in some form of running in his sleep. I ran after him and and caught him at the door of my mother's room and grabbed him, in order to reason with him. I shook him a little, thinking to wake him completely. "Mary! Roy! Herman!" he shouted. I too began to shout for my brothers and my mother. My mother opened her door instantly, and there we were at 3:30 in the morning grappling and shouting, father partially dressed, but without socks or shirt, and I in pajamas.
"Now, what?" demanded my mother, grimly, pulling us apart. She was capable, fortunately, of handling any two of us and she never in her life was alarmed by the words or actions of any one of us.
"Look out for Jamie!" said father. (He always called me Jamie when excited.) My mother looked at me.
"What's the matter with your father?" she demanded. I said I didn't know; I said he had got up suddenly and dressed and ran out of the room.
"Where did you think you were going?" mother asked him, coolly. He looked at me. We looked at each other, breathing hard, but somewhat calmer.
"He was babbling about New Jersey at this infernal hour of the night," said father. "He came to my room and asked me to name towns in New Jersey." Mother looked at me.
"I just asked him," I said. "I was trying to think of one and couldn't sleep."
"You see?" said father, triumphantly. Mother didn't look at him.
"Go to bed, both of you," she said. "I don't want to hear any more of you tonight. Dressing and tearing up and down the hall at this hour in the morning!" She went back into the room and shut her door. Father and I went back to bed. "Are you all right?" he called to me. "Are you?" I asked. "Well, good night," he said. "Good night,"I said.
Mother would not let the rest of us discuss the affair next morning at breakfast. Herman asked what the hell had been the matter. "We'll go on to something more elevating," said mother."
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gps: It has been my involuntary practice while reading a story or a novel to make a mental picture of its characters resembling people I have known. For instance, Jim Corbett (before I unfortunately saw his photo on the web) was always my Army Uncle, Subba Mama. Lord Emsworth was our woolly-headed Philosophy Professor at AU. Psmith was our lanky and handsome English Lecturer, Krishna Rao at AU. And Eve Halliday was that actress in Hitchcock's Birds,Tippi Hedren, Bertie my AU classmate Tathagata, and for the past one hour while keyboarding the above passage, Jamie was Aniket (sans his specs)...
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Lady on the High
My friend called me and said his mom-in-law was rushed to this corporate hospital where they at once put her on 'ventilator'.
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