Soliloquies.

“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”
~ Oliver Sacks.

Cheerful Monk can occasionally zap me with her suggestions. Here is a specimen. in my blog post What Is The Point?, she commented – “Don’t give up on the soliloquies, just spare your daughter-in-law and share them here in your blog. Some people will be interested and others can easily skip them if they choose. At any rate, you will be sharing yourself with your friends.”

She achieved two remarkable things with that one comment. She made a BFF out of me and more importantly out of my daughter in law Manjiree as well!

Here is another soliloquy to start off this series as suggested by CM. Please click on the image given below to get a larger resolution.

This photograph was taken circa 1948 when the fourth sibling had not been born. The three young lads in the front are, from left to right, my brothers Arvind and Barath with me at the right extreme. I am wearing my father’s favourite felt hat and Arvind my father’s elder brother’s solar topee, or pith helmet as it used to be known. The two adults in the picture are, just behind me, my fahter’s younger sister and behind Arvind, her husband Dr. Kumaraswamy. You can also see my father’s Ford V8 standing right at the back,

Arvind has got the largest collection of our family photographs having had my late mother living with him the longest and having hijacked my late father’s collection of photographs from my home when my father was spending his last days with me. He chose this photograph to share in our family group mail to remember Dr. Kumaraswamy’s connection to us. Dr. K, just short of a hundred years old passed away on the day before this photograph was shared by Arvind.

On seeing this photograph, Manjiree wanted to know if the three young lads were the famous three handsome musketeers of the family!  I suspect that she needs new prescription for her glasses.  They are more like three mosquitoes.  And her question again almost made me take off on a soliloquy about the characters in the photograph, the car there, the headwear, the house seen on the right of the picture and the reason for the solar topi and so on and so forth, but refrained from doing so, so that I could share it with Cheerful Monk and my other readers if they will be interested in such a soliloquy.

Should I?