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The Last Keeper
Sadhika Pant
 May 21 2025 at 11:15 am
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Of late, there has been a feeling settling in my chest like dust in an empty room—soft, silent, and certain. It is the quiet realization that my memories are not permanent things. Not chiseled into stone or sealed up in iron-bound books, but written in pencil, the graphite growing faint with each passing season. I am aware, now more than ever, that what I remember will not be remembered for long. I think of my parents often. I remember my mother in her early sarees—floral, soft, like the curtains of a spring house. As the years passed, her colours dulled. Maybe they matched her age better, or maybe they just matched her mood. I see her now in my mind, young, barefoot and newly married, in a kitchen not yet hers, lifting a spoon to her mother’s lips and asking if the peas were soft enough. What was her scent like? Turmeric? Talcum powder? Or those white rajnigandha flowers she loved so much? I don’t remember. I think of my father and the way he used to hum when he shaved, a low tune without name or language. But he never hummed outside the bathroom. Strange, that. And as he grew older, he stopped humming altogether. And if he did, I did not hear it. He used to sit before the little temple shelf every morning before work, eyes closed like a man listening for something. That stopped too. He drank his tea from a steel glass, not a cup. Said it stayed hot longer that way. And he would stretch out the mornings for hours reading his newspaper. I remember my grandparents. My mother’s father, who sat shirtless in the backyard under the guava tree, reading his newspaper intently with a magnifying glass to make up for his failing eyes. He’d stagger about the house, sneaking sweets into his kurta pocket like a schoolboy, always bumping into furniture and blaming the chair for being in the way. And my grandmother—she cooked her paayesh without measuring a thing, and it tasted the same every single time. She never looked at a clock but always knew when it was time to light the lamp in the dining room. And the sound of her bangles as she moved, and how she always carried a safety pin or two on her person, convinced—as all grandmothers are— that safety pins could hold the world together if it were falling apart. These people are whole in my mind still—but I can feel them dimming, as though someone is turning down the wick. There is the house too, the one I grew up in, parts of which have a lean to them, like an old man who didn’t mind carrying his weight a little unevenly. I remember the flaming red gulmohar trees lining the streets in the neighbourhoods of Lucknow. I remember the amaltas trees in full bloom and how their yellow flowers carpeted the streets like spilled celebration. Oh yes, I remember the springs of my childhood very well. I would dig in the garden, not for roots but for treasure, after reading many an Enid Blyton book, sure that something long forgotten waited just beneath the surface. Anything that might prove the world had magic buried in it. That’s where I spent my childhood, among bricks warm from the sun and the smell of damp earth. A life as vivid as marigold garlands strung on festival mornings. But I know now—these things do not last. Not the bricks, not the pits of the mangoes I ate from the tree in my yard, and certainly not the memories. And I wonder now about the ones I never knew. My great-grandmother, for one. I do not know the timbre of her voice or the way she took her tea. I do not know what jokes she told or whether she feared the monsoon lightning. She is a name on the tongue, a sepia photograph someone kept in the bottom drawer of a teak cupboard. But she must have mattered once. To my grandmother and my mother, certainly. Perhaps her essence still lived on in the way my grandmother stirred tea or reprimanded a child. But who remembers her laugh? Her scent? Her griefs? She must have lit lamps too. She must have wept for her dead and told her children stories in the dark. She must have been real once, the way I am real now, and the way I, too, will become only faint stories told in the dark—if I am lucky. The truth is, I am the last keeper of many things small and mighty. And when I go, so will they. A whole generation of smells and songs and garden dirt, all folded neatly into the great quiet of forgetting. The next ones— my children, my nieces and nephews, the children of neighbours who call me “aunty” and do not know why—they will build their own mythologies, their own summers, their own kitchen smells. Already their toys lie scattered across the same floors where I once tiptoed in fear of waking the elders. That’s all right. That is the way of things. That memory is not a monument but a river. That it carries what it can and lets the rest fall away—softly, tenderly, and without cruelty. But still, tonight, I sit here with the weight of it pressing in. Perhaps the most we can hope for is not to be remembered forever, but to have mattered deeply while we were here. To have held someone close, cooked for them, made them laugh. To have filled a childhood with warmth and wonder, so that even when the names are gone, something of the feeling remains, like heat held in stone long after the sun has gone. And if that is all, then it is still everything.
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