Notes on reading Bijal Vachharajani's Savi and the Memory Keeper and reflecting on losing a parent

Savi and the Memory Keeper (Hachette, 2021), written by Bijal Vachharajani and illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, is an ecofeminist fiction, for in this narrative you have a ‘Talking Tree,’ a network of wasps that communicate, and tree-hugging children, who have to brave climate change deniers – entitled people who equate tree-cutting with economic development – besides dealing with their everyday problems. While there can be multiple standpoints from where this book can be interpreted, I found this highly engaging story to be a portrait of a grief-stricken family. Savitri – a teenager, who prefers to be called by her nickname ‘Savi’ – and her family have recently moved to the “city with the best climate in the world,” Shajarpur. It’s the place where her father, Abhay Kumar, grew up. After his death, they’re making a ‘fresh start,’ or so it seems, by relocating to this perfect city. Or probably the family wanted to be closer to the deceased in this manner. While it’s a place where everyone is “deliriously happy,” Savi is troubled, always thinking “How did this world exist, without Dad in it?” My heart skipped a beat when I read this. I reread this sentence, feeling the weight, the significance, and the association of each and every word in its construction. Surprisingly without crying, I read it again. But the beast that memory is, I couldn’t help but read it in conjunction with everything about my own loss and soon each and every scene started playing out in front of me as if it was yesterday when I was informed that my father had died in a car accident. In this book, Savi’s father dies of a heart attack. A little more than four minutes ago, he was alive, then he wasn’t. “Just like that” he was dead. What an unlikely yet profound this simplest sentence is: Just like that. It encapsulates within itself a reservoir of meanings: it can mean succumbing to fate or ignoring the real issue and carrying on with life, yet feeling helpless, almost begging the question: What to do now? I faced a similar situation almost fourteen years ago when the news of my father’s death was (indirectly) broken to me. My father had had many accidents. He survived all except the one on June 1, 2008. And just like that, he was dead. But this abruptness disrupts the natural flow of acceptance. Such a disappearance of someone whom you happen to see every day requires some sort of readjustment. But how can one make sense of losing someone? Can engaging yourself in any activity help? Like joining a club or something? Or by not talking about the dead/disappeared? A couple of years ago, I learnt that there are grief counsellors who specialise in helping you to come to terms with your loss. I find the mention of such counsellors in this book, too. But, I feel, these are short-term fixes. It’s inevitable to think about those who have disappeared from your life just like that. It’s perhaps why I like Vachharajani’s treatment of Savi’s character, who in the book, says: “Which is why every time I opened my mouth to speak, the words came out wrong. Like the steel that tore the earth apart in quarries and mines. My heart would start hammering, my mouth felt dry, and all the nice words I meant to say would just flop out of my brain. I was cold and hard to everyone.” Savi also makes a mental note to not go there: the corner of her brain where her father’s memories are stored. I remember this role-play activity in school. I and my friend decided (?) to play father and son. Two minutes into the enaction, I began to howl, tears flowing down my cheeks, ruining everything for both of us, while our teacher’s intelligent response was, “No emotional stories, please,” asking us to clear the stage. After that incident, I also made a mental note like Savi. I made it a point to store Papa in that “Don’t Go There” corner of my brain, too. Yet all efforts failed. Because that’s not how dealing with loss works. That’s not how your body functions. It’s this tussle that we fail to acknowledge. Our interior, private world and the unchanged exterior world do have porous boundaries, but everything that you manifest may not necessarily turn out to be true. We, for the most part of our lives, invest in planning as if the next minute things will turn out to be the way we want as if there’s an external machinery that’s ready to mimic our thoughts, follow our mental roadmap, letting everything fall into place. But if that would’ve happened, life wouldn’t be what it is. Would it be? ‘Life changes in the instant,’ wrote the master chronicler Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, Random House, 2005). It’s one of the most haunting sentences I’ve ever read. She wrote this after her husband of forty years, writer and screenwriter, John Gregory Dunne, had died of a heart attack. She decided not to write, like we grief-stricken children – the fictive Savi and the real me – decided not to think of our fathers, but she eventually turned to writing. The act of writing was a confrontation that Didion was thinking of avoiding. Perhaps most adults do the same thing, thinking they’re brave enough to push performing grief or to avoid crying in front of their children. But children see everything. They undergo more inner turmoil than adults can imagine. In one of the chapters, Savi says, “Shouldn’t she [her mother] be like a parent, fuss around us, look after us? But no, she was always BUSY. Work, paperwork, depression. Something was always more important than us.” I smirked reading this. A realisation dawned on me: losing one parent is like losing both. Why? After my father’s death, for several years, it felt as if my mother wasn’t living with us. There was some dead person loitering around. I distinctly remember that for the first few years none of us laughed at home. It was as if we’ll be punished if we did. That atmosphere created more gaps between us, perhaps some gaps have widened enough that they can’t be addressed or filled. We’ve lost that time. In the event of loss, each and every family member in our family, like Savi’s, created their own private bubbles to perform grief. Or kept themselves “busy” with one or the other thing, as if not looking at the photographs of the deceased in the family album or storing their clothes and things related to them in the remotest of corners of our home will eventually help erase them. As if their memories will stop bothering us. However, there’s a particular pain when you are faced with this question: what if you completely forget them? Like Savi, I also fear forgetting him. I don’t want to forget Papa. Losing his memories would be a greater loss than losing him. Which is why I write. Or so I think. Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist.

Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .