On forgetting while travelling…

Sir,

Reading KBG’s Abracadabra (SOM dated Apr. 19 and 20) on how he lost the passports and got it back while on a trip to Chennai to get visas to UK and US revived in me a host of memories of thirty-five-years ago.

I too recall an incident that took place in 1982. My husband had to leave for the US just ten days after our marriage, to join the Master’s Programme in Architecture at Ohio State University. As soon as he landed at JFK Airport in New York, he stood before the Immigration only to find that the statement certifying he had enough funds to live in the US was missing. The Immigration Officer, a kind man said, “Sir, please sit down calmly and take your time and search.”

In despair, he prayed to Lord Venkateshwara as he could not find it anywhere. His jet lag memory stirred and he quickly took out the little plastic wallet with photos of Lord Balaji and Padmavati that his granny had given him before leaving. There tucked into the back of the picture of Lord Balaji was the document he was searching for !

In fiction there is a classic, in fact one of the best stories ever written by that master-craftsman of plot and precision P.G. Wodehouse. It is about a phrase that the main character forgets, being an extremely vague and woolly-headed man, losing it from his memory creates any amount of trouble for him.

This reminds me of another incident when my husband and I were in Paris on a holiday. As it was time to leave, we took the airport shuttle bus from the centre of the town to reach Charles De Gaulle Airport. We unloaded the luggage and were moving towards the airport when we remembered that we had one small suitcase loaded onto the roof of the bus. The husband, to my utter surprise, with his presence of mind, darted round the track, at least 400 metres, shouting and waving all the while as I stood looking at him in awe. The bus driver, hearing him, stopped and we were able to recover our suitcase. Of course, if he tries such stunts today, even though he was a 100 metres record holder in college, I doubt he would reach even 10 metres.

Indeed, memory in humans is all important. However, these days as age advances, I find myself recognising faces and forgetting names, opening the fridge and standing there like a dummy, forgetting what I wanted.