As promised in yesterday's post, here follows an excerpt from The Drumming, one of a the passages in the manuscript where my mother discusses why and how she used memory as a tool for survival.
Memory was my main survival tool. It was my armour against my mother and her continual attempts to discredit me. Early on, I decided my mission in life was to tell the real story, which meant that I needed to retain everything until I reached adulthood. Since I hadn’t been born with a photographic brain, to compensate I developed other abilities. I figured out that the only sure way to remember something was to think of it every day. So each night before I went to sleep, I went through the ritual of repeating my entire history to myself, going back to the moment of first memory, a time before I could talk. Because I didn’t know dates at first, I attached events to each other, so I would be able to say something happened three days after this or two days before that. With no calendar to consult, and no access to writing tools, I was still doing this at age six.
As well as retaining the facts, I learned to visualize past events, because without visualization there was far too much information to be stored in the memory. Had a window been open or closed? I might need to know, but ahead of time I couldn’t know I was going to need to know. In effect, I somehow taught myself how to move my head backward in time and walk through former events, seeing and hearing almost as if they were happening all over again. This allowed me to pull out odd bits of information I would never have made efforts to remember. It's a talent I still have, provided I can put myself into the exactly right moment in time.
By the time I turned six, my daily memory work had become automatic. With an eventual goal of telling everything, I had to notice everything; the tiny peripheral details too. Details like commodes in the gatehouse bedrooms, seen once briefly on a tour... a servants’ gate screened from white eyes, once sighted but never used... the scrubbing of a water storage tank in the roof, a concealed tank never seen at all... moreover, the job itself mere hearsay, because it had to be done during a month when I was no longer in India. I knew far more about my past than any child could possibly be expected to know.
Today, most memory tapes are back, with sufficient concentration. (Which is not to say that I remember everything.) Example: in recovery, I knew a certain place in Central India was a flag station on a rail line; I visited it once at age two. After several tries (vouched for by the correspondence of others) I was proven right — pitted against the two elderly Central India expatriates who had told me I must be wrong. A missionary who still lives in Ratlam (who also didn’t know the answer) finally asked an Indian with familiar with local geography. The tiny place was as my two-year-old insisted: a flag station.
Another startling example, once again with supporting correspondence: in 1995, early in memory return, while hunting in my mind for the name of Mrs. Powell, my teacher at age five, my brain produced the name “Miss Ellis’. I wrote to the Kodai school, a small school that in the thirties had a staff of ten or so. The former Miss Ellis, astonishingly, was alive. We talked by long distance. It turned out she had not been my teacher, but she had acted as a substitute teacher for Mrs Powell for two weeks in 1937, an absence I had already written about!
I had to ask myself: why on earth would anyone’s brain make the effort to remember a substitute teacher from age five, sixty years after the fact? This kind of question concerns me, so I had to root even deeper in the past. Eventually, I got back to the exact reason I had retained her name — a reason told [later in The Drumming,] in Chapter Four. Soon enough, I could remember Miss Ellis herself (pretty, curly dark hair, a whiz at math, in her twenties in 1937). Mrs. Powell was not truly forgotten — I easily picked her photo out of an ancient group picture taken in the 1920s. The only thing that couldn’t be seen was her crooked teeth. I cannot think of better examples to show that my memory — while not a hundred percent perfect — was highly developed.
Still deep within my mom's writings, I'd have to agree. Above are two small examples of many in the manuscript that illustrate the wonders of my mother's memory.