Three of Us

nostalgia as memory making

This is scarcely a review. It’s just my way of remembering a film which has made its way into my blood.

I told a friend not to miss seeing Three of Us. She said “I won’t if it breaks my heart.” What could I tell her but that my eyes were damp from the first frames and didn’t dry till the end. I guess it was my heart breaking, but in slow motion.

Revisitations are not easy. To old haunts, to previous homes, to leftover loves, or buried memories. There’s always something which is unearthed. There’s always something subterranean which comes back to haunt and question or face up to. Time and again I am haunted by the question of how we leave things behind - because we really never do. We could be continuously falling-apart and carry it on our sleeves or we could let the detritus of life layer it in thin porous slices as the years go by. We let circumstances seep through and find niches and colour everything - till the truth of our memories bursts open, often untidily, often to be questioned - always to be confronted.

Shailaja had an internal universe which haunted her. Her shimmering eyes, her tentative smile, let life wash over her, as she asked of her husband Dipanker whether, because of her growing amnesia, she would eventually forget her son. She did  not ask too many questions, even as Dipanker and her old friend Pradip did. Why did she want to go to her old childhood village? Why hadn’t she ever mentioned Pradip to Dipanker? Was she ever as happy in Mumbai as she was in Vengurla?

In a marriage, you are allowed your personal happiness, but you do have to answer for it.

But when we look at nostalgia as discovery, then we don’t mind having co-travellers with us. To see the world with our old eyes, to gain perspectives about us, and for us to see how they fit into the old us. Thus visiting old haunts is as much about reviving the fading as it is about co-creating something which would last beyond us. As Shailaja’s past and present walk beside her, she could only hope that she would have two people to carry on with remembrances which would no longer be hers.

When we journey to seek, discover, or talk about our past, but find that we’ve neither grown out or unable to move away from what has haunted our beings, nostalgia is often a confrontation. It is our inability to process the fact that so much of us is nothing but a residue of what we always were.

Nary the lessons of growing up, nary wisdom of the years. We are as raw now as we were when we were children.

It’s a sobering thought. But which also gives its own comfort. Shorn of artifice, cleansed of the detritus of years, there is a purity which emerges. Who knows which part of our memory will sit with us in the sunset of our evenings? But what will never ever be taken away from us, is the truth which we can confront and proudly call our very own - the comfort of finally being one with ourselves.

We can then wait for dim-lit traces or complete forgetfulness with equal equanimity.

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If you loved Three of Us, you simply have to see Past Lives, which is an absolutely gorgeous piece of cinema. I wrote about it, a few weeks back.

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