Remember Remember…

The story of the East is one: Naivety. I’m not sure if this is in fact a fact and if I’m completely comfortable with it but this is what writers with eastern roots would have us believe. And I say this so unabashedly after reading 5 ½ such books:

The Bonesetter’s Daughter- Amy Tan
Circles of Silence- Preeti Singh
The God of Small Things- Arundhati Roy
One Hundred Shades of White- Preethi Nair
Colombo- Carl Muller
The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai

I suppose I can’t generalize but I will. It’s just the feeling I came away with after reading those books.

The last one I read, The Inheritance of Loss, was hardly a page-turner but Kiran Desai threw me a bone in the beginning. She asked me ‘Can fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?’ and I was gripped. Good question. So what’s her answer? You’d think she would try to answer a question so closely linked with the title of the book and you’d think wrong. I don’t think there was an answer from her end. Well not one that went ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

So I got thinking. Can it? Yes… if we let it and we hardly do. If you try very hard, and shut out the world you can let a happy memory sustain you but loss seems to be the more natural way to go. We could as kids…remember remember?... but somewhere along the way we lost that… fulfillment couldn’t fulfill. Or maybe it’s just me…

That reminds me… There’s a monologue from One Tree Hill that goes like this...

“Sometimes pain becomes such a huge part of your life that you expect it to always be there because you can’t remember a time in your life when it wasn’t. But then one day you feel something else, something that feels wrong only because it’s so unfamiliar. And in that moment you realize that you’re happy.”

So it's not just me…