The Memory Box

After their fiftieth anniversary, it is the custom for couples with such longevity to move into their very own memory box.

They did, with the help of her daughter and the in-law. Sweaty handprints on cardboard boxes, the labored pilgrimage of a couch up the front steps, packing up a lifetime of possessions: knick knacks, dolls, colorful printed silks, decaying photographs. It seemed strange, that a lifetime could amount to so little.

After saris were folded in the drawers, spices were stocked in the pantry, and a shrine was displayed in the hallway closet, the exhausted daughter pushed curly hair out of her face and climbed into a turquoise Honda. "Good luck," she called through the window, "Call me if you have any problems." Alone again, the old woman walked to the front door of the memory-box, knowing what was necessary to begin the final stage of their lives. She brushed an overgrown ivy plant off the wooden doorframe to reveal, in place of a doorbell, the switch controlling their memory-box. She removed her necklace, a thin gold chain hung with multiple pendants and spare safety pins. She had been wearing it since it was given to her on the day of her child-marriage. After wrapping the necklace tightly around the switch, her soft, wrinkled finger pressed it to the on-position, and it glowed gently blue.

Life moved on, in the way typical to residents of a memory-box. At first, the wife was constantly dizzy and unsettled, wary of touching the objects inside. When she was cooking, her hand would brush the old wooden ladle, or the silver cooking pot, and a scene would flood her mind, complete with colors, scents, and even touch: the lingering sensation of her skin against her husband's, or her palm on the back of her first child's neck, the painful jolt of her first contraction, the cotton fibers of a dress she wore as a little girl. Every object invited a memory, and household tasks were submerged under waking dreams; the couple moved through their box as if sleeping-walking, their limbs dragging heavily against rich currents of sensory information.

After fighting against it for a while, struggling to stay afloat and awake, she surrendered herself to this dazed, dreamlike state. The social routine she had kept before the memory box, a schedule populated by religious functions and hosting dinners, was now punctuated by an obsessive reorganization of possessions. Her hands flitting from object to object -  she would drown in the memory for a moment, surface, and scrawl notes onto paper labels. She began to differentiate the objects - this dish towel harbored the memory of her first airplane ride, this lamp with the beige shade housed the image of her first sari, that wooden doll on the mantel contained the sensation of a tiny brush painting moist red henna up her arms on the night before her wedding. With absolute focus, she boxed objects, shuffled them, compartmentalized them. Some were shunted into the front window, displayed for the neighborhood to see, while others were laboriously carried down rickety stairs to occupy a musty corner of the basement. The nature of the objects was surprising; she was shocked to find that the birth of her first child, the memory of shooting pains, growing bloodstains, clumps of flesh, and then the tiny red face opening its toothless mouth, was localized within a single, rotting fragment of newspaper. Meanwhile, a petty memory, like her last trip to the grocery store, could be found in a porcelain vase.

While the old woman scoured and shuffled and cleaned, the man wilted quietly on the living room couch. He held books with long, complex titles: The Hypothetical Decolonization of the Indian Subcontinent, or Implementations of Ancient Eastern Mathematics under the Guise of Western Innovation, but his eyes blurred on the pages, and the deep brown irises were webbed with milky blue cataracts. His weekly visits to the senior center to play bridge, and win, slowly diminished.

Their box was spotless; the hallways heavy with intermingling clouds of incense and Febreze, the kitchen counter glittering, the strange series of objects on the mantle positioned as precisely as army-men. The daughter, when visiting, noticed that it wasn't nearly as cluttered as before, and that their count of possessions seemed to have shrank. She sat in an armchair across from her father and propelled questions toward him. "Nana, how has bridge been? Have you been to the doctor lately? What have you been reading?"

They fell on unhearing ears, as he blinked blankly at her and mumbled vaguely before directing his attention back to the tennis match on T.V. She confronted the old woman.

"I'm a little worried about Dad. He seems out of it. And he's going to be all alone next week when you go on your trip to visit Vani." "He's fine! Just tired from the move. Did you do something to your hair? It looked better the last time I saw you."

The old woman packed a suitcase of clothes, facing an onslaught of memory every time she picked up the items: a silk sari, a button-down shirt, a heavily crafted, and conservative bra. Her head aching from the weight of so many dreams, she rolled the old suitcase down the hallway.