Essay: How We Lose Things To Time

Shaiq Ali shares a poignant essay about the curse of forgetting when the demon of Alzheimer’s strikes.

The nematkhana is an ordinary cupboard holding our deepest fascination. With a mesh on the sides and the front door and placed in a cool corner of an aangan, it would keep cut fruits, cooked curries, or rice from rotting. ‘How could it do so?’ We would ask our grandmother. Without electricity, without power. But it did. A mere cupboard. A quiet corner of magic, of oldness, of all that time could not touch. Of all that the race of comfort couldn’t offer. Sometimes, when I would visit my village from Muzaffarpur, where I lived and studied, it would also keep little silver gelatinous blobs of ice apples in its womb, a particular favorite of mine, a fruit that’s locally called taad ka phal. The sap from the tree is also used to prepare toddy or taadi, a local liquor, and not although without a stench from the booths and from those who drank it.