Do You Remember Your Mother’s Favourite Song?

Bengaluru will always and forever be more than its industries.

Fifty-year-old theatre practitioner Nimi Ravindran is “a proud child of the Nehruvian project” of the public sector undertakings (PSUs). Until her first year of college at Jyothi Nivas, she “lived and was looked after” within the staff colony of the Hindustan Aeronautical Limited (HAL), “which stretched from Murgeshpalya to all the way beyond Marathahalli.” Huddled into a corner on a much-loved leather sofa at her home, armed with homemade cups of hot ginger tea and fresh paneer parathas drenched in Amul butter, Nimi demonstrates a superlative power to remember the stray details from her life in this city. At first, they come across as personal, but quickly, private and public memory begin to bleed into each other.

Bytes of emotional data

Between snacking and sipping, she remembers the exact timings of the piercing sirens that rang through the city: “for those working on machinery at the factory, on weekdays, it was 6 am and then 3 pm.” She suddenly drops the name of the long-gone industrialist Walchand Hirachand and draws a link between his aircraft company and HAL. She recalls running to catch a glimpse of the train that would ferry employees between Majestic and the HAL campus. In a flash, she summons the colour of the PSU shuttle buses: “they were different shades of blue; our HAL bus was dark blue.” She sheepishly admits to having been benchmates with the kids of Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian to journey into space. (Sharma famously responded to Indira Gandhi’s question – “How does India look from up above in space?” with the unforgettable answer “Saare jahan se accha”.) She’s adamant that Bengaluru “remains green because of the large tracts of land owned by the PSUs and the Indian defence forces.”

Nimi’s To Forget is to Remember is to Forget is an exhibition–performance that conjures up many such sweet details from her childhood in Bengaluru: her mother’s beautiful singing voice, her love for sad songs, and her public sector job to her illness and memory loss. In the performance, the arrival of the family’s first full-length mirror becomes the key to unlocking her memory palace. This mirror came into their house because her mother had won first place at a singing competition on “Hindi Diwas” at her HAL job in the early 90s. With the cash prize, Nimi’s mother bought a knockoff Godrej steel almirah that featured a mirror on its door. Her narration of  this story doubles up how Nimi’s exhibition–performance works to parse the private, simultaneously speaking of her family and their place in the city and the nation. This deeply personal memory also mirrors a national shift from the quest for an egalitarian society, where people looked out for one another, “to one that’s individualistic, where everyone’s upwardly mobile.” Before they acquired this mirror, Nimi says in the performance, “We relied on each other; we checked with each other. My mother would just ask me or my brother if her bindi was off-centre.”

Memory training

Like Nimi, her mother too had a mind for information and little details. She could speak seven languages. She could remember the scores and love interests of her favourite cricketers. She would surprise them — Nimi and her brother — with the biographical details of South American dictators. She knew the colour of Salma Agha’s eyes (Agha is the Pakistani actress famous for singing the super-sad song “Dil ki armaan” from the 1982 hit film Nikaah). She would wait for her favourite sad songs to come on the radio and write down their lyrics in a notebook to sing them later, verifying their accuracy over several listens. Then suddenly, in her late fifties, Nimi’s mother began to forget things, forget words — eventually, they had to cover up all the mirrors in their house because their mother would be scared off by her own reflection.

For many years, Nimi was fascinated by the science around her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She would “read anything and everything,” even subscribing to medical journals to understand the changes that her mother underwent in her final years. She says she “never intended to make” To Forget is to Remember is to Forget; she was just furiously jotting down her findings in many notebooks. She taught herself to draw, and, she says, “would repeatedly draw the brain but put dry flowers in the medulla oblongata or write a phrase in the cerebellum.” Slowly, the visual and other elements of the exhibition began to come to her. She started with the drawings, paintings, soundscapes, film, and music to investigate a set of questions: “How do we forget? When do we forget? Why do we forget?” But in the process of building the exhibition in her head, “memories just kept coming up and coming up,” she shares.

At some point, she gave up on even realising this exhibition. “On a morning in 2023, I got a text from my brother: ‘Ten years. Can you believe it?’ And it hit me that it’s been a decade since my mother’s passing — but sometimes, it feels like it was a lifetime ago. At other times, it feels like it just happened,” she confesses. In a phase of purging, she decided to get rid of all of the notebooks with her research and notes towards the exhibition: “I just tore, tore, tore and put it all in the dustbin.” She’d decided to forget about doing it.

A year ago, after a workshop for playwrights, “her creative juices flowing,” she decided to give it one last chance. She packed her bags and went to Kamshet in Maharashtra, where her friends run a theatre residency, to see if her idea still had legs. “I sat down to write. I was distracted and looked around. I saw a mirror in the room,” says Nimi. Suddenly, she began writing down the memory of their first full-length mirror. “On finishing writing this bit, I was very happy with it.” And so she continued.

Nimi’s mother’s favourite song is from the Sivaji Ganesan-starrer Paar Magaley Paar (1963). At a recent show in Chennai, “an older lady pointed out that the movie’s name translates to ‘Listen, daughter, listen’, says Nimi, admitting that she’d missed out on this serendipitous connection.

Which one is her mother’s favourite song? You’ll have to watch To Forget is to Remember is to Forget to find out.

The details: Sunday August 24th, 5.30pm at Sabha, 262, Kamaraj Road, Shivaji Nagar. Tickets here.