Forget me knot

Strategies that are guaranteed to track down memories didn’t work

Growing old is not just a matter of a receding hairline, a protruding waistline, a sagging jawline, or a shortening credit line. It is also about a jagged memory line.

Recollecting where you are, what you are about, and, most importantly, what you should be about is one of the prime challenges of old age.

I discovered this early in my dotage when I caught myself opening the fridge door, then wondering what I had to retrieve, until an impatient question from the dining room peremptorily demanded how long it would take for me to fetch the butter knife.

Let us not forget (there I go again), the most important facet of life that women, especially my wife, care about are dates. No, not the consumable ones but the immutable ones, such as birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings.

Apparently, there are well-known strategies that are guaranteed to track down that part of one’s brain where said memories take up residence. Unfortunately, in my case, this lair seems to be an impregnable fortress on which all tricks fail ignominiously.

Like the time I tried the age-old trick of tying a knot in my handkerchief to remind me that the next morning I needed to collect the saris of the HOH, or Head of Household to the uninitiated, from the dry cleaner. She had pointedly informed me that the dry cleaner would be closed the day after.

Unfortunately, the next morning I selected another hankie from my clothes cupboard and went about blithely the whole day without a thought about the dry cleaner. I would like to draw a curtain over the ensuing tete-a-tete with the HOH that evening, considering that one of the saris had to be worn the next day for a favourite niece’s wedding.

Upon confessing to a well-wisher that it was getting difficult to tag names to faces, he advised me that the best technique is associating the name with an easily remembered object. That strategy became somewhat of a minefield when the associations were recalled more than the names, like when, on our second meeting, I addressed an important personality as Pailji when he was actually Baltiwala.

Old age, as a lot of greyheads know, is a time when one’s diet comprises an equal proportion of pills and food—or so it seems to many of us. The difficulty lies not in imbibing the libations but in ensuring that they are taken at the right time in the correct quantities.

To enable this, the HOH imposed a regime of putting the day’s dose in a small vial. Everything was gung-ho for a few days, but one day the inevitable happened. The HOH discovered me shuffling through the various items on the dining table. “What are you looking for?”

“My medicine vial. I took it out a while ago but had to attend a phone call and can’t remember where I put it.”

“Did you take the pills?”

“I am not sure. Can only tell if the vial is empty. For that, I have to find it first.”

“Oh God !” As I was saying, ageing is not just physiological.