Dr. Tulasi Acharya

The other day my father sent me a picture that I had not seen for the last twenty years, and it was a picture of myself kneeling on one knee, my favourite childhood pose in front of the photographer. My uncle had taken that picture. It took me a while to feel myself in the picture.
A young boy of ten is trying to maintain a cool photogenic face, putting on a smile, looking perhaps at the camera. His smile is very innocent. Eyes are wide open. His hairstyle is of the day, well combed and swept to one side, the very popular style of his age group perhaps. He loved mimicry just for the sake of mimicry. His mood in the picture reminds me of how he thinks of himself as the centre of the universe.

A bright boy is relaxed and stress-free in the picture. He wears a full sleeve green dotted white shirt, which looks a way bigger than his bodily size, and black jeans pants, in vogue at his time, which his father had purchased after the boy’s long hue and cry that all the other boys had jeans like these. The old worn-out belt looks as if it is squeezing all his trousers of 30 inches breadth around to fit his twenty-inch waist. The poor boy in the picture thinks of himself as fashionable, more handsome, and a man of the moment.

I touch the boy in the picture that has become slightly faded now and feel with it the memories of twenty years back. Nostalgia fills in my memories. I lost that boy in me. The innocence of the smile, the joy of mimicry, the benefits of making a hue and cry, and the freedom of the carefree life! All have vanished. I have lost the streets I walked along and the friends and foes I made on my way through life.
Like the fallen leaves of a tree, I left some players and characters of my life unconditionally. The future the young boy dreamed of has quickly become the past, and the days of those smiles are left behind. The too big longed for clothes made the boy feel so proud that sunny days have vanished in the blink of an eye.

Living in America for a decade or so and looking into the past, I do not want to live the present life. I want to go back to the time when I could live a frolicking life. I could jump into the rivulets carefree and come out soaked and exhausted.
I could play with bleating goats, waddling ducks, and could watch chickens pecking on tiny bits of gravel in the courtyard. I could enjoy seeing the butterflies fluttering across my head, farmers tilling the earth and planting crops. I could pick marigolds and daffodils and smell their fragrance, I could enjoy the sound of rain on the corrugated iron roof and water leaking from the roof of my countryside house in the rainy season.
Driving a car in America doe s not please me now. Enjoying the skyscrapers makes me say “wow,” but does not emotionally appeal to me. The six to eight-lane highway in the US and the air-conditioned house give me physical comfort but never provide me with mental, emotional, and psychological tranquillity.

Childhood life is the most precious life we ever lived. Life of innocence is always precious and momentous, and we realise its importance after we lose that innocence. As most of us live a hectic life after we gain maturity, we have hardly time to think of those precious moments of life. Life of innocence is very rapturous and that gets wrapped up as we enter a life of experience.

If my father had not sent that picture, I would have never become aware of that part of life, the life of innocence. The emotional part of human life is very essential to feed human thoughts, feelings, and human sentiment, to boost them, to enliven them, to invigorate life. After we grow up, we all become the slaves of our own experience and we do not have enough time to think of the essential sentimental and emotional aspects of human life that we had left behind when we were very young. Emotional aspects of human life come through his/her innocence by which our past survives.

That is why the British poet William Blake writes both poems, one on a “Lamb” and the other one on a “Tyger” to reflect on the two psychological aspects of human beings, that of innocence and experience. The lamb /childlike side of a human being is always important to reawaken and cherish the tiger/adult side of human beings; thus, both play an important role in human lives.

The photograph my father emailed me brought back the lamb side of me and my life through memories that are always cherished. Cherishing memories we can live a better life. Our life is always incomplete as we are leaving something behind before we are fully able to utilize it. However, it has its pleasure as we enjoy it without knowing it. By the time we know and analyse, we will, again, have already left that behind.
The ten-year-old boy in the picture, who is no one but myself, has right now made me very emotional and made me go back to that time. Living in the US and looking at the picture, the memories drawn out of the picture have pulled the strings of my heart. At this moment, I cannot go back except for living through memories, enjoying the moments of the past and cherishing them.

I have seen that many immigrant writers have lived through memories. Jhumpa Lahiri aches for the past and the memories. Similarly, Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family” is about cherishing the memories of seeing his own identity in those memories. No matter where one lives or migrates, one’s heart is always for his root where he lived his past and childhood. That is why Salman Rushdie mentions in his book “Imaginary Homeland” something like this.
Oh, my shoes are Japanese,
Those trousers are English
Those hats are Russians
However, my heart is Indian.
Right now, my heart is very Nepali and more to the life of a boy in that picture in that photographic pose. We all live by memories!

Dr. Acharya is an author. “Mochan” is his recently released Nepali novel.