The Sundew Moments


My 'CubicleNeighbour' asked me to explain the story behind 'thesundew', the longstanding name of my email accounts(hotmail, yahoo, and now Gmail!). Though there isn't much of a story behind the name there are surely crystal moments.

Human memory is a mysterious instrument. It has its own laws, which rule what to remember and what to discard into the deeper recesses of our consciousness. Often it springs surprises by pulling up to the forefront, frozen pieces of our memory we thought have long vaporised. Hypnosis and various experiments on memory have shown that our memories are only fossilized, not vaporised. Field reports from Freudian psychoanalytic practice has also shown how intricately memory is linked with emotions. That which is painful we forget, hence the necessity for
techniques such as free association which can approach those sensitive zones tangentially.


But there are images that linger on, to recur and almost become leitmotifs. Some of these beautiful images I suspect are not moments in the sense they could have happened in a discrete time interval. Rather, I wonder if they are luminous aggregations like pearls are-layer after layer of related memories over a seed event.

There is a sepia-tinted image of my childhood in which I am walking down an avenue of tall Ashoka trees, my fingers tenuously linked to my mother's palms. It is dusk. The place is littered with seniors chatting, laughing and walking down the avenue in groups. My contention is that this moment probably never happened as I cherish it. Many such evenings would have been picked, chosen and pickled for an everlasing flavour; crystallised for an everlasting radiance.

Ofcourse most of these images do happen to be vivid, definite moments too. I consider them granted boons, by God if you like it that way. They can't be contrived. They can't be waited for. If you are lucky you catch these as they come by, like whiffs of a distant kitchen in the air.

Have you seen the American Beauty? The film has a name for these. It calls them 'the plastic bag moments'-the seemingly commonplace stuff of our lives which can parent extraordinary beauty, if only we want to. The final frames of the film are that of a discarded plastic bag sauntering in the breeze, rising and falling, dancing in slowmo-lovingly, if you may.

The elements of a Margazhi dawn in Chennai are faint mist, dew, and the sun. Alas the ascent of the sun rapidly kills the former two. So much so I could arrive at that magical slot of 6. 15 to 6. 30 when all of these coexisted after only weeks of determined observation. And why did I want them on the same stage? Because of thesundews! During one of my jogs I had chanced upon the dividing median a crop of grass crowned with glassy spheres: dewdrops charged with sunlight. With
a slight shift in my angle they disappeared. So there they had been, shining within the delicate, tremulous angle between me, the dewdrops and the sun. They hadn't existed in my earlier lap. They didn't in my next.

The magic of angles lies in the fact that it is a single parameter capturing the relationship between three entities. Let me give an other instance. While in the memory described previously two of the elements were on terra firma, in this two are right up there in the early morning sky's blue. Me, an early morning jet, and ofcourse our sun. For most of its observed passage it flew dully, silently. At the magical angle I caught its affair with sunlight. It shone like a broken shard of mirror in a placid sky.

During my 6. 00 O' clock fast train to ChurchGate, between Vile Parle and Santa Cruz, an aeroplane usually made its flight, towards the setting sun. The velocity of the train, factored by the huge distance, looked as if it was equal to that of the aeroplane. A kid would have shrieked in excitement about how a plane hung suspended, resolutely stationary, as if a supermechanic went about fixing its snags midair for many minutes!


Sometimes we end up observing each other like the multiple reflections of a mirror hall. Once, in office, our group of four made its way for a refreshing cuppa. Suddenly he broke away making his way towards her at her workstation and cajoled her flirtingly to join us. She, next to me, staring at them, stomached the sight of cooings. My eyes travelling from the pair to her was caught by him behind
me, who like an omniscient being oversaw all the flicks before him. He, had the last smile!


Once, in the terrace, over the same kind of cuppa that we had ambled towards in the previous paragraph, we made small talk and pointless laughter in a closed circle, each in different postures, all at obtuse angles to each other. A joke went around which I didn't quite understand as didn't Radhika next to me. The other three were emitting enthusiastic peals of laughter that I sought her eyes for some solace. But she was looking intently at them. 'Hmmm..!', I cast my sight downwards and immediately thereafter, it occurred to me that she just then suffered the same fate as I had a second before. So I again turned up to her but she was no longer looking at me and I thought I had been wrong and started to turn away. But right then she too must have felt, quicker than I had felt last time, that she had missed me in a snap and hence caught the tail of my turning away. Now she lingered on. I knew that she knew and I knew too she knew that I knew. With that unconscious knowledge hardly verbalized even to ourselves, we finally locked eyes. We erupted into a laughter as if the tension resolved was that of a joke.

Such is life I thought yesterday when I was catching the whirlwind generated between our 8 O Clock fast and another fast train on the adjacent track: In the twin strings of the call of duty and the search for love my life is a necklace of sundews.